Danielle Speller is the 2024 winner of the Joseph A Johnson award for her research on neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter research, and for mentoring the next generation of aspiring physicists. Jessica Esquivel receives an Honorable Mention her work at Fermilab and for fostering equity, education, and community through the #BlackInPhysics social movement and Oyanova Enterprises.

Scientists have found a trigger for social learning in wild animals. An experiment on great tits has pinpointed a single factor—immigration—that can cause birds to pay close attention to others, leading them to rapidly adopt useful behaviors. The study is the first to provide experimental support of a long-held assumption that immigrants should strategically use social learning. The study, conducted by scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) and the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz in Germany, is published November 14 in PLOS Biology.

Adults exhibit a general tendency to make better decisions than adolescents, and this improvement drives an increase in specific and more sophisticated choice behaviors, according to a study published November 14^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Vanessa Scholz and Lorenz Deserno from the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues.