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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The U.S. government suspects that China's surveillance balloon may have blown off course. It wouldn't be the first time. -
Satellite data show water levels plummeting at the Kakhovka Reservoir. The reservoir supplies drinking water, irrigates vast tracts of farmland, and cools Europe's largest nuclear plant. -
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. -
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. -
More than three years after his tweet, the U.S. government has formally declassified the image from one of its most powerful spy satellites. -
Advocates for inoculation are distressed by what they see as a new political focus on an old public health measure. -
"You know, this image of Neanderthals being brutes, is not quite accurate," says paleogenticist Laurits Skov. "The more we learn about them, the more like humans they appear to be."
