Finalists for 2020 Young Adult Science Book Award Announced

AAAS and Subaru are proud to announce the finalists for the 2020 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books in the Young Adult Science Book category. The Prize celebrates outstanding science writing and illustration for children and young adults and is meant to encourage the writing and publishing of high-quality science books for all ages. Longlists for all four categories were announced in September.

The 2020 winner will be selected from among the following finalists.

• How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls: Animal Movement and the Robots of the Future, by David L. Hu. Princeton University Press, 2018.

  Insects walk on water, snakes slither, and fish swim. Animals move with astounding grace, speed, and versatility: how do they do it, and what can we learn from them? In How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls, David Hu takes readers on an accessible, wondrous journey into the world of animal motion.

• The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future, by Jon Gertner. Random House, 2019.

  A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change. In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory.

• Never Home Alone: From Microbes to Millipedes, Camel Crickets, and Honeybees, the Natural History of Where We Live, by Rob Dunn. Basic Books, 2018.

  Even when the floors are sparkling clean and the house seems silent, our domestic domain is wild beyond imagination. In Never Home Alone, biologist Rob Dunn introduces us to the nearly 200,000 species living with us in our own homes, from the Egyptian meal moths in our cupboards and camel crickets in our basements to the lactobacillus lounging on our kitchen counters.

• Superheavy: Making and Breaking the Periodic Table, by Kit Chapman. Bloomsbury Sigma, 2019.

  The science of element discovery is a truly fascinating field, and is constantly rewriting the laws of chemistry and physics as we know them. Superheavy is the first book to take an in-depth look at how synthetic elements are discovered, why they matter and where they will take us.

AAAS will provide resources based the 2020 finalists, and once again the books will be offered to schools across the country as part of the Subaru Loves Learning initiative. Through this partnership between AAAS and Subaru, more than 91,000 books were donated in 2019.

Winners will be announced in January and awarded at the 2020 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, W.A., February 13-16, 2020.

The finalists for the Children’s Science Picture Book, Middle Grades Science Book, and Hands-On Science Book categories were announced earlier in the week.