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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Where do myths about coronavirus vaccines come from and why do they spread? NPR takes a look at how rumors about vaccines and fertility reached the public earlier this year. -
The nation's top doctor, Vivek Murthy, says misinformation will keep sowing mistrust and endangering lives unless all Americans do their part to fight it. -
Satellite imagery shared exclusively with NPR shows new buildings going up at a huge, remote airfield near an old nuclear test range. -
The system is designed to provide early warning of what might or might not be actual side effects. But anti-vaccine groups are bending the data to their own ends. -
President Biden told U.S. intelligence agencies to investigate whether the coronavirus spread after a lab leak in China. Scientists welcome the request, but many still think it came from the wild. -
Researchers say the herd immunity threshold isn't the right finish line to end the pandemic. Instead, the public should just focus on getting as many people vaccinated as possible. -
The idea of herd immunity has been sold to the public as the way out of the pandemic. Some medical experts say the idea is probably not that useful in terms of understanding how the pandemic ends.
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The coronavirus pandemic has created an opening for vaccine opponents to peddle alternative therapies, unproven cures and website subscriptions. -
Vaccines have created a way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, but public health experts are worried that hesitancy and misinformation may stop the U.S. from reaching the goal of herd immunity.
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Nuclear inspections have been a key part of the Iran nuclear deal. International inspectors stand to permanently lose access to key sites, unless the U.S. and Iran can find a way forward.
