PHILIP BALL: A Compassionate Substance
REBECCA BOYLE: The Search for Alien Life Begins in Earth’s Oldest Desert
PETER BRANNEN: Glimpses of a Mass Extinction in Modern-Day Western New York
CHRIS COLIN: This Sand Is Your Sand
DOUGLAS FOX: The Brain, Reimagined
CONNOR GEARIN: Little Golden Flower-Room: On Wild Places and Intimacy
BEN GOLDFARB: The Endling: Watching a Species Vanish in Real Time
GARY GREENBERG: What If the Placebo Effect Is Not a Trick?
JEREMY HANCE: The Great Rhino U-Turn
HOLLY HAWORTH: The Fading Stars: A Constellation
EVA HOLLAND: Saving Baby Boy Green
APRICOT IRVING: The Fire at Eagle Creek
ROWAN JACOBSEN: Deleting a Species
BROOKE JARVIS: The Insect Apocalypse Is Here
KEVIN KRAJICK: The Scientific Detectives Probing the Secrets of Ancient Oracles
J. B. MACKINNON: You Really Don’t Want to Know What It’s Like to Be a Right Whale These Days
BILL MCKIBBEN: How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking the Planet
REBECCA MEAD: The Story of a Face
MOLLY OSBERG: How to Not Die in America
JOSHUA ROTHMAN: Why Paper Jams Persist
JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH: The Professor of Horrible Deeds
SHANNON STIRONE: Welcome to the Center of the Universe
ED YONG: When the Next Plague Hits
ILANA YURKIEWICZ: Paper Trails: Living and Dying with Fragmented Medical Records
Other Notable Science and Nature Writing of 2018