Best in Science in Social Media - Shorty Awards

13th Annual Shorty Awards Categories

The Shorty Awards honor the talented agencies, brands, and industry leaders behind the best and most innovative work on social media and digital channels, campaigns, websites and applications.

From the 8th Annual Shorty Awards Best in Science

Here’s to the visionaries, proving the facts of the universe like the earth revolving around the sun, the process of evolution, and if the sky is really falling. Through tweets, Facebook posts, videos, blogs, and Instagram photos, these people have gained fame through their scientific discoveries. What’s more, they’re using social media to spread their intellectual wealth to the masses.

Winner

I Fucking Love Science

British blogger and science communicator Elise Andrew created I Fucking Love Science as an outlet to showcase interesting science facts and photos she came across. A mix of biology, zoology, earth science, and engineering, the Facebook page has more than 22 million followers. In 2013, fans realized a woman ran IFLS, and Elise pondered online why p…

Finalists

AsapSCIENCE attempts to answer the world’s weird questions with science. Created by Mitchell Moffit and Gregory Brown, the YouTube channel’s most-watched video came in 2015 when the team answered the internet’s burning question with, “What Colour Is This Dress? (SOLVED with SCIENCE)." Using time-lapsed whiteboard drawings, AsapSCIENCE has also col…

In a Nutshell – Kurzgesagt

The YouTube channel In a Nutshell – Kurzgesagt (German for “said short") prizes quality over quantity, putting out roughly one video a month, with well-researched—and animated—answers to great science questions, like “What Is Life? Is Death Real?" Their science reports run between 2–7 minutes and are speedy, beautiful, and informative, tackling th…

The family of SciShow YouTube channels (that include SciShow, SciShow Kids, and SciShow Space), helmed by Vlogbrothers Hank and John Green, grew from a side project in 2012 to a full-fledged, nationally advertised YouTube superchannel in 2014. Four days a week, they crank out videos answering complex and far-reaching science questions to an audien…

Scott Kelly is probably the world’s only space Instagrammer. In late October 2015, the commander of the International Space Station—whose Instagram account hosts his images—broke the world record for the longest continuous spaceflight, part of a yearlong mission covered in the TIME series A Year in Space. Personally encouraged by President Obama t…

Vsauce operates much like many of the question-and-answer style YouTube science channels, with a bit of a twist—arriving at an answer the question posed in the title of the video isn’t always the point. Instead, host Michael Stevens designs his monthly videos like TV episodes, with segments and tangents, so the journey and the exploration of knowl…

Nominees

Astronaut Chris Hadfield gained online popularity in late 2012 while chronicling life aboard the International Space Station on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Chris has been named the “most social media savvy astronaut ever to leave Earth" by Forbes, and ended his mission in 2013 with a viral music video performing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity." In 2014, he …

In his six-hour PBS miniseries The Brain, David Eagleman says that neuroscience is a key to understanding how we work. And he should know—Eagleman runs the Laboratory for Perception and Action at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in time perception, synesthesia, and visual illusions. As the founding director of Baylor’s Initiative on Neuroscien…

Joanne Manaster

Joanne Manaster not only loves science, but she wants her followers to as well, sending out a daily dose of scientific facts through her Twitter account. Mashable even listed her account as one of the “25 Twitter Accounts That Will Make You Smarter," citing that fun tweets are easy to access and enjoyable to read. Joanne will teach you anything including …

MinutePhysics wants to illuminate complex physics questions, concepts, and mysteries in a minute or two—or sometimes three and a half if it’s a tricky one like antimatter. MinutePhysics covers the pressing and current (“Why Do We Put Telescopes In Space?"), the comical (“How Far Can Legolas See?"), and the puzzling (“Upside Down Mountains in Real Life"). Us…

Paul Andersen is the creator of bozemanscience.com and its corresponding YouTube channel, which hosts videos hosted by Paul, explaining common science lessons from high school courses on biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Named Montana Teacher of the Year in 2011, and a YouTube Edu Guru for his constant stream of science video aimed squarely at students and …

Tested pries into the stuff the internet loves, inspecting and trying out a range of nerd products from cameras to robots. Initially the brainchild of MythBusters’ Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, this YouTube channel has expanded to include technology reviewers Will Smith and Norman Chan, and releases a video every few days on new gadgets and toys (like the …

About the Shorty Awards

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media.

Millions of people participate in The Shortys to recognize individuals and organizations producing great content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, TikTok, Snapchat, and the rest of the social web.

shorty awards finalists will be announced in mid-march!