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.
-
Seismologists say Monday's earthquake took place in a complex junction of faults that was long overdue for a big one. The destructive shaking was spread across many kilometers. -
A devastating earthquake has struck southern Turkey and Northern Syria. It's a seismically active part of the world known for big quakes.
-
A spy balloon from China has been causing alarm in the U.S. What is it doing, and is it a threat to national security?
-
China's foreign ministry described the balloon as "a civilian airship" for meteorological research that had blown far off course by winds. The Pentagon suspects it's collecting sensitive information.
-
Computers traditionally excel at rocketry, so why do new artificial intelligence programs get it wrong?
-
Even guardians of America's atomic clocks say time doesn't work the way we think it does.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A briefing slide obtained by NPR through the Freedom of Information Act shows that former President Trump tweeted a classified satellite photo in 2019.
-
More than three years after his tweet, the U.S. government has formally declassified the image from one of its most powerful spy satellites.
