On Sept. 27, 2024, The Golden Goose Awards were announced for the 13th annual season, which spotlights obscure, silly sounding or odd fundamental discovery research that has led to outsized societal benefits. The 2024 awardees:

It’s a Family Affair: The Resurgence of the Red-Cockaded Woodpecker. Jeff Walters’ research on the birds backed up his hypothesis that the homebody birds had an evolutionary advantage. The new practices have been so striking that the federal government proposed downlisting the woodpeckers from “endangered” to “threatened.”

From Poop to Protection: Satellite Discoveries Help Save Antarctic Penguins and Advance Wildlife Monitoring. Where there’s poop, there are penguins — that was the logic of scientist Mathew Schwaller who noticed that bright pink penguin poop appeared on satellite images. The idea set in motion a 40-year mission to track penguin populations via satellite imagery, leading to the discovery of 1.5 million previously undocumented Adélie penguins and a whole new way to track wildlife.

How We Think: Brain-Inspired Models of Human Cognition Contribute to the Foundations of Today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI). Decades before AI emerged as the platform for innovation that it is today, David Rumelhart, James McClelland, and Geoffrey Hinton were exploring a new model to explain human cognition.

Former U.S. Representative Jim Cooper (D-TN) inspired the creation of this award as a strong counterpoint to criticisms that fundamental discovery research was wasteful federal spending. In 2012, the Golden Goose Awards’ founding organizations took up Representative Cooper’s idea and issued the first three awards to groups of researchers whose seemingly obscure, federally-funded research had led to major breakthroughs in biomedical research, medical treatments, and computing and communications technologies.

Since then, groups of researchers have been recognized each year for breakthroughs in the development of life-saving medicines and treatments; game-changing social and behavioral insights; and major technological advances related to national security, energy, the environment, communications, and public health.

In 2017, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the founding organizations, brought the award under its stewardship.