Geoff Brumfiel
Geoff Brumfiel works as a senior editor and correspondent on NPR's science desk. His editing duties include science and space, while his reporting focuses on the intersection of science and national security.
From April of 2016 to September of 2018, Brumfiel served as an editor overseeing basic research and climate science. Prior to that, he worked for three years as a reporter covering physics and space for the network. Brumfiel has carried his microphone into ghost villages created by the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan. He's tracked the journey of highly enriched uranium as it was shipped out of Poland. For a story on how animals drink, he crouched for over an hour and tried to convince his neighbor's cat to lap a bowl of milk.
Before NPR, Brumfiel was based in London as a senior reporter for Nature Magazine from 2007-2013. There, he covered energy, space, climate, and the physical sciences. From 2002 – 2007, Brumfiel was Nature Magazine's Washington Correspondent.
Brumfiel is the 2013 winner of the Association of British Science Writers award for news reporting on the Fukushima nuclear accident.
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Earthlings seemed to generate more good news in 2022 off the planet than on. From deflecting an asteroid to sending a camera deep into the universe, a look back on the year in space.
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Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology track time with atomic clocks. But what is time, really? Physicists are still trying to answer that question.
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Fusion energy has remained a distant dream for decades, but scientists announced they got more energy back than they put in to create the reaction. How close are we to fusion energy powering society?
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Scientists announced a major breakthrough in nuclear fusion. They were able to coax more power out of an experiment than they put in.
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A giant laser facility in Livermore, Calif., says it has created net energy from nuclear fusion. It's an important breakthrough, but fusion power remains a distant dream. -
A NASA spacecraft passing by the moon on Monday is carrying 12,000 varieties of yeast. Researchers hope the tiny "yeastronauts" can teach them about how radiation will affect humans in space.
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The world is doing away with the leap second, an extra second that gets inserted into the global timescale every few years due to earth's slowing rotation.
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A briefing slide obtained by NPR through the Freedom of Information Act shows that former President Trump tweeted a classified satellite photo in 2019.
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New research shows that a type of primate known as an aye-aye loves picking its nose. Researchers say the findings raise interesting questions about why nose-picking is such a common behavior.
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Advocates for inoculation are distressed by what they see as a new political focus on an old public health measure.
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Researchers have uncovered the first Neanderthals that are related to each other. The finding shows that these ancient people lived in clans similar to those of modern humans.
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Experts in Russian doctrine worry that as the war in Ukraine gets more desperate, Russia might be tempted to detonate a nuclear weapon.
