Ari Daniel
Ari Daniel is a reporter for NPR's Science desk where he covers global health and development.
Ari has always been drawn to science and the natural world. As a graduate student, Ari trained gray seal pups (Halichoerus grypus) for his Master's degree in animal behavior at the University of St. Andrews, and helped tag wild Norwegian killer whales (Orcinus orca) for his Ph.D. in biological oceanography at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. For more than a decade, as a science reporter and multimedia producer, Ari has interviewed a species he's better equipped to understand – Homo sapiens.
Over the years, Ari has reported across five continents on science topics ranging from astronomy to zooxanthellae. His radio pieces have aired on NPR, The World, Radiolab, Here & Now, and Living on Earth. Ari formerly worked as the Senior Digital Producer at NOVA where he helped oversee the production of the show's digital video content. He is a co-recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award for his stories on glaciers and climate change in Greenland and Iceland.
In the fifth grade, Ari won the "Most Contagious Smile" award.
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Birds descended from the dinosaurs, but researchers have known relatively little about how the bird's brain took shape over millions of years. A new fossil sheds light on that mystery. -
There's an area in China that's home to a huge trove of dinosaur fossils. It used to be thought it was formed through a Pompeii-like volcanic eruption, stopping dinosaurs in their tracks. But new evidence has come to light about how it likely came to be. -
Parrots are unique among birds in how they produce the pigmentation that makes their vibrant feathering. It turns out a single enzyme calibrates the reds and yellows of a parrot’s brilliance. -
An old Norse story tells of a king's man being tossed down a well in 1197. An archeologist teamed up with an evolutionary genomicist to study DNA of a skeleton found in that well. -
“I kept on guessing and just taking risks,” says farmer Stephen Nzioka of Kenya. A weekly text message has been a game changer as he copes with a changing climate. -
A bump in the elephant brain stem pointed scientists to the wrinkles on their trunks and the role those folds play in the animal’s life. -
Research into some areas of the world that have a lot of centenarians shows that some of those people are no longer alive. Sometimes the fault is bad record-keeping and sometimes it’s outright fraud. -
Researchers found that two individuals of a type of comb jelly can fuse and become one with a shared nervous system and digestive system — which has implications for animal regeneration and immune systems. -
New technology is making it easier to find the origins of trafficked wildlife so they can be released back to the habitat they came from, instead of languishing for decades as sometimes happens. -
When octopuses and fish hunt in groups in the Red Sea, the leadership roles are more dynamic than researchers knew — as are some ways the animals enforce cooperation.
