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Richard Harris

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

Award-winning journalist Richard Harris reports on science issues for NPR's newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Harris, who joined NPR in 1986, has traveled to the ends of the earth for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest and the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis).

In 2010, Harris' reporting uncovered that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. He covered the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.

Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many of the journalism and science industries' most prestigious awards. The University of California at Santa Cruz awarded Harris the 2010-11 Alumni Achievement Award – the school's highest honor. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry.

As part of the team that collaborated on NPR's 1989 series "AIDS in Black America," Harris was awarded a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a first place award from the National Association of Black Journalists and an Ohio State Award. In 1988, Harris won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award for his report, "Anti-Noise: Can Technology Turn Noise into Quiet?" which explored a revolutionary technology that uses computer-generated noise to cancel out, not just mask, unwanted noise.

Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues. Under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harris spent the summer of 1980 as a Mass Media Science Fellow reporting on science issues for The Washington Star, in Washington, D.C.

Harris is co-founder of the Washington, D.C., Area Science Writers Association, as well as past president of the National Association of Science Writers.

A California native, Harris was valedictorian of his college graduating class at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, with highest honors.

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Environment
2:11 pm
Wed January 16, 2013

Could Some Midwest Land Support New Biofuel Refineries?

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Credit J.E.Doll / Michigan State University
Vegetation like the kind growing here at Michigan State University's Kellogg Biological Station could one day be used to feed small biofuel refineries spread throughout the Midwest.
Credit Nature
This map shows the potential biomass collection within 10 states. Each circle represents an area of about 7,800 square miles, which could produce about 23 million gallons of ethanol per year. A gigagram, or Gg, is about 1,100 tons.
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Originally published on Fri January 18, 2013 4:16 am

Millions of acres of marginal farmland in the Midwest — land that isn't in good enough condition to grow crops — could be used to produce liquid fuels made from plant material, according to a study in Nature. And those biofuels could, in theory, provide about 25 percent of the advanced biofuels required by a 2007 federal law.

But there are many ifs and buts about this study — and, in fact, about the future of advanced biofuels.

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Energy
11:38 pm
Mon January 7, 2013

Drilling Rig's Thick Hull Helps Prevent Oil Spill

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Originally published on Tue January 8, 2013 3:06 am

A Shell Oil drilling rig has been pulled of the rocks, where it washed up a week ago during a storm. It has been towed to a bay where divers will inspect it for damage. The incident raises questions about the oil company's controversial plans to continue exploring for oil in the Arctic Ocean this summer.

Science
12:00 am
Tue January 1, 2013

The Year Of The Higgs, And Other Tiny Advances In Science

Credit Barcroft Media/Landov
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider announced the discovery of the Higgs boson on July 4, the long-sought building block of the universe. This image shows a computer-simulation of data from the collider.
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Originally published on Tue January 1, 2013 6:44 am

It's a year-end tradition to cobble together a list of the most important advances in science. But, truth be told, many ideas that change the world don't tend to spring from these flashy moments of discovery. Our view of nature — and our technology — often evolve from a sequence of more subtle advances.

Even so, chances are good that this year's list-makers will choose the discovery of the Higgs boson as the most important discovery of 2012.

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Space
1:34 pm
Thu December 20, 2012

In Calif. Gold Country, A Rush That's Out Of This World

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Credit UC Davis
A section of the Sutter's Mill meteorite, dubbed "Darth Vader," is studied at a lab at the University of California, Davis. The meteorite is made of carbonaceous chondrite, which contains materials that formed the planets of the solar system.
Credit Rich Pedroncelli / AP
Robert Ward found a piece of the meteorite at a park in Lotus, Calif., on April 25. The 100,000-pound meteorite was blown apart into small pieces as it met the Earth's atmosphere.
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Originally published on Thu December 20, 2012 7:18 pm

On the crisp, clear morning of April 22, a 50-ton asteroid slammed into the Earth's atmosphere and shattered into countless pieces. Remarkably, they rained down onto Sutter's Mill, Calif., the exact spot where gold was discovered back in 1848, triggering the gold rush. And so follows a story of serendipity and scientific discovery.

"I was out on my hillside burning some branches and so forth, and I heard this sonic boom," says Gold Country resident Ed Allen. "It wasn't just one boom. It was a series of booms, literally right over my head."

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Research News
1:57 pm
Wed December 12, 2012

Land Creatures Might Not Have Come From The Sea

Credit G. Retallack / Nature
The fossil remains of Dickinsonia, an Ediacaran organism that's long been extinct. Scientists have long assumed these early life forms lived in the sea, but a new study argues they emerged on land.
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Originally published on Wed December 12, 2012 3:29 pm

Cartoonists have found many clever ways to depict the conventional wisdom that complex life evolved in the sea and then crawled up onto land. But a provocative new study suggests that the procession might be drawn in the wrong direction. The earliest large life forms may have appeared on land long before the oceans filled with creatures that swam and crawled and burrowed in the mud.

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Environment
2:17 pm
Fri December 7, 2012

At Doha Climate Talks, Modest Results At Best

Credit Karim Jaafar / AFP/Getty Images
Delegates attend the last day of the U.N. climate talks in Doha, Qatar, on Friday. U.N. climate negotiators locked horns on the final day of talks in Doha to halt the march of global warming, deeply divided on extending the greenhouse gas-curbing Kyoto Protocol and funding for poor countries.
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Originally published on Fri December 7, 2012 8:50 pm

United Nations climate talks ran into overtime on Friday night, as diplomats pressed for whatever small advantage they could achieve.

As usual, the talks, which are being held in Doha, Qatar, involve closely interwoven issues. They include the usual wrangling over money, as well as early efforts in a multiyear process that is supposed to result in a new climate treaty.

Part of that involves finding a graceful way to phase out the Kyoto treaty, which has not proved to be a successful strategy for dealing with a warming planet.

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Science
2:33 pm
Thu November 29, 2012

Greenland, Antarctic Ice Is Melting Faster

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Credit Ian Joughin / Science/AAAS
An iceberg that likely calved from Jakobshavn Isbrae, the fastest glacier in western Greenland.
Credit Ian Joughin / Science/AAAS
For several summers this deeply incised melt channel transported overflow from a large melt lake to a moulin, a conduit that drains the water through many hundreds of feet to the ice sheet's bed.
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Originally published on Thu November 29, 2012 2:44 pm

Superstorm Sandy sparked a lot of interest in rising sea levels when it swept across the Northeast last month and flooded parts of the coast. Over the next century, more water — and higher sea levels — could come from melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica. How much has been unclear.

But now scientists have developed a much clearer view of how quickly that ice has been melting over the past two decades. And that will help researchers forecast the rate of sea-level rise in the years to come.

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The Salt
7:51 am
Fri October 26, 2012

As California Vote Looms, Scientists Say No To Genetically Modified Food Labels

Credit Paul Sakuma / AP
While lots of labels tout their lack of genetically modified ingredients, if California's Prop. 37 succeeds, foods containing GMOs would have to be labeled.
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Originally published on Fri October 26, 2012 2:05 pm

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Environment
2:53 pm
Thu October 25, 2012

In A Shift From 2008 Race, Obama's Hush On Climate

Credit Steen Ulrik Johannessen / AFP/Getty Images
A boat skims through the melting ice in the Ilulissat fiord, on the western coast of Greenland, in 2008. The glacier is the most active in the Northern Hemisphere, producing 10 percent of Greenland's icebergs, or some 20 million tons of ice per day. But experts say the glacier is in bad shape because of climate change.
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Originally published on Fri October 26, 2012 2:57 pm

This story is part of a two-part series about the presidential candidates' climate policies. Click Here For The Story About Mitt Romney

Both presidential candidates have all but ignored climate change during this election season. Mitt Romney would not make it a priority if he were president.

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Environment
1:39 pm
Thu October 25, 2012

On Climate Policy, Romney Walks A Tightrope

Credit Johannes Simon / Getty Images
A general view of the Aletsch Glacier on April 21, 2007, near Brig, Switzerland, the largest glacier in the Alps. Unseasonably warm weather with temperatures up to 77 degrees Fahrenheit across Switzerland let snow melt, even at Alpine altitudes.
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Originally published on Thu October 25, 2012 3:51 pm

This story is part of a two-part series about the presidential candidates' climate policies. Click Here For The Story About President Obama

Neither presidential candidate mentioned climate change during their three debates — in fact, the issue is nearly absent from the entire campaign. That's because the issue poses challenges for each candidate.

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