Nature magazine's award-winning 2025 research photos
Researchers face insurmountable odds against corporate polluters, global warming deniers and corrupt political and corporate grifters, liars and traitors. But at least the out-gunned, out-manned and out-spent good guys are going down fighting for us and our environment to the bitter end. Here is some evidence of their last stands in their desperate defense of all of us:
This photo is from a northern Norwegian fjord. The researcher's little boat is illuminated mostly by the yellow glow of a nearby fishing trawler with a swarm of sea gulls waiting for the nets of fish to come up. This dawn shot is of biologist Audun Rikardsen, taken by his PhD student Emma Vogel in November 2020. This is this 2025’s overall Scientist at Work photo competition winner.
The photographer is Emma Vogel, an animal movement researcher and spatial ecologist who completed her PhD at the University of Tromsø — The Arctic University of Norway — in 2023.
Emma Vogel
This is Ryan Wagner’s second winning Scientist at Work image. Wagner is a PhD student at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). He photographed Kate Belleville in the lush surrounds of northern California’s Lassen National Forest with precious frogs.
The frogs’ tiny size means they cannot be tagged like Vogel’s whales. Biologists at WSUV inject the little critters with a series of colored elastomer dyes. Those dies make a unique identification code. They glow under ultraviolet light.
In the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard, Dagmara Wojtanowicz — a freelance research technician — took this photo of an ice core being drilled by geobiologist James Bradley and microbiologist Catherine Larose.
That photo was taken during the daytime in December 2020 in Svalbard where the sun stays at least 6 ° beneath the horizon between mid-November and late January. The ice cores being drilled in the photo were part of a project conducted by Bradley and Larose to investigate how microbes and other life forms in the ice survive and adapt to the dark and cold of the polar night.
This photo is of Lionel Favre and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), hauling a balloon to the summit of a mountain. Their research atop Mount Helmos in Greece forms part of a pan-European initiative. CleanCloud, funded by Horizon Europe — the European Union’s research and innovation funding program. That research effor is to better understand cloud formation across the European continent.
At the end of a day conducting fieldwork in eastern Siberia, Hao-Cheng Yu, an economic geologist at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing; CUGB), returns to his cabin. Jiayi Wang, who took the photo, works with Yu to develop geological profiles for areas that are located near to gold deposits, to aid mining prospectors. Occasionally, the sky is this clear on the eastern coast of Siberia, where fault lines and geology have conspired to forge pockets of gold. It’s also very cold. Yu is lit by a roaring fire in the cabin. The tip of the fire is reaching up to the sky through a chimney just behind the doorway.
This image is of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole station. It was taken six months into Aman Chokshi’s 14-month stay at the US-run Antarctic research station. It’s too cold there to be out in the open for long. Every day Chokshi and his colleague Allen Foster, then a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the other ‘winterover’ scientist at the station who was focused on the SPT, made the one-kilometer walk, at temperatures of −50 °C to −70 °C, to clear the dish of snow. Every few weeks, they’d also grease the SPT’s gears to enable it to continue measuring cosmic microwave background radiation from the early Universe.
The photographer is Emma Vogel, an animal movement researcher and spatial ecologist who completed her PhD at the University of Tromsø — The Arctic University of Norway — in 2023.
Emma Vogel
This is Ryan Wagner’s second winning Scientist at Work image. Wagner is a PhD student at Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV). He photographed Kate Belleville in the lush surrounds of northern California’s Lassen National Forest with precious frogs.
The frogs’ tiny size means they cannot be tagged like Vogel’s whales. Biologists at WSUV inject the little critters with a series of colored elastomer dyes. Those dies make a unique identification code. They glow under ultraviolet light.
That photo was taken during the daytime in December 2020 in Svalbard where the sun stays at least 6 ° beneath the horizon between mid-November and late January. The ice cores being drilled in the photo were part of a project conducted by Bradley and Larose to investigate how microbes and other life forms in the ice survive and adapt to the dark and cold of the polar night.
This photo is of Lionel Favre and his colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), hauling a balloon to the summit of a mountain. Their research atop Mount Helmos in Greece forms part of a pan-European initiative. CleanCloud, funded by Horizon Europe — the European Union’s research and innovation funding program. That research effor is to better understand cloud formation across the European continent.
At the end of a day conducting fieldwork in eastern Siberia, Hao-Cheng Yu, an economic geologist at the China University of Geosciences (Beijing; CUGB), returns to his cabin. Jiayi Wang, who took the photo, works with Yu to develop geological profiles for areas that are located near to gold deposits, to aid mining prospectors. Occasionally, the sky is this clear on the eastern coast of Siberia, where fault lines and geology have conspired to forge pockets of gold. It’s also very cold. Yu is lit by a roaring fire in the cabin. The tip of the fire is reaching up to the sky through a chimney just behind the doorway.
Note the science dweebs,
slightly center-left in the telescope
This image is of the South Pole Telescope (SPT), situated at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole station. It was taken six months into Aman Chokshi’s 14-month stay at the US-run Antarctic research station. It’s too cold there to be out in the open for long. Every day Chokshi and his colleague Allen Foster, then a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and the other ‘winterover’ scientist at the station who was focused on the SPT, made the one-kilometer walk, at temperatures of −50 °C to −70 °C, to clear the dish of snow. Every few weeks, they’d also grease the SPT’s gears to enable it to continue measuring cosmic microwave background radiation from the early Universe.
How much does djt, MAGA and ruthless, lying polluters like ExxonMobil care about any of this? None. Actually, a lot less less than none. They hate, hate, hate this kind of research. Why? Because it makes them look like the cynically lying monsters they actually are.
So, there we have it, defense of the human species and environment fans. 2025's winner photos.
By Germaine: Very pissed off defender of facts and truths from lying liars, crackpots and traitors
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