Now Playing

Loading streams...

Podcasts & RSS Feeds

Richard Harris		RSS
All Content	closeNews podcasts Use iTunes Use a different player	RSS
View all podcasts & RSS feeds

WMUK Staff

Gordon Evans

News Reporter/Producer

Morning Edition Host

Announcer & Producer

Announcer & Producer

Announcer & Producer

Announcer & Producer

News Director

Chief Engineer

Program Director

Underwriting Director

Kim Willis

Development Associate

Martin Klemm

Sound Engineer

Gordon Bolar

General Manager

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.

Go Fish (Somewhere Else): Warming Oceans Are Altering Catches

Credit Melissa Farlow / National Geographic/Getty Images

Crew members unload a catch of sockeye salmon at Craig, Alaska, in 2005. Researchers say fish are being found in new areas because of changing ocean temperatures.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Wed May 15, 2013 7:39 pm

Listen

Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

"The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

8:45 am

Mon April 22, 2013

This Scientist Aims High To Save The World's Coral Reefs

Next image Previous image

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science takes a water sample during his experiment on part of the Great Barrier Reef. The water is slightly pink because his team is using a dye to trace an acid-neutralizing chemical as it flows across the reef.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Ken Caldeira, a researcher with the Carnegie Institution for Science, pilots an aluminum skiff filled with equipment for his experiment on the reef. He is trying to figure out whether corals would grow faster if he neutralized human-induced changes in the ocean's acid balance.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Caldeira pours fluorescein dye over the coral to determine which direction the current is flowing. This spectacular dye is also used in medical diagnosis and is considered harmless for the reef.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Tubes snake back to a floating tank (the yellow object in the background), which is attached to a skiff anchored just off the reef. The tank contains antacid and some red dye.

Credit Courtesy of Lilian Caldeira

The world's oceans are 30 percent more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution because carbon dioxide from cars and power plants dissolves in ocean water and turns into carbonic acid. That threatens the health of the world's coral reefs.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

The antacid mixture is pumped over the reef during the hourlong experiment. Caldeira hopes it will neutralize the water and help the coral grow.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Field assistant Benjamin Cox keeps track of water samples as they are drawn from the edge of the reef. The samples will be analyzed in a chemistry lab back on One Tree Island.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

The sun sets at One Tree Island. The research Caldeira's team is doing might help save small patches of coral reefs, but it would be impossible to scale up a chemical treatment to protect whole reefs from increasing ocean acidity.

Credit Courtesy of Lilian Caldeira

Researchers from the Carnegie Institution for Science spent a month at a remote research outpost — One Tree Island, at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef — to study how changing ocean acidity is affecting coral reefs.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Members of the research team fend for themselves in a communal kitchen (while fending off persistent ants) before heading out for a challenging day on the reef.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Mon April 22, 2013 9:52 pm

Listen

Most scientists find a topic that interests them and keep digging deeper and deeper into the details. But Ken Caldeira takes the opposite approach in search for solutions to climate change. He goes after the big questions, and leaves the details to others.

5:01 pm

Mon February 25, 2013

Increased Humidity From Climate Change Could Make It Harder To Tolerate Summers

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Mon February 25, 2013 7:23 pm

Listen

Transcript

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Now, a story about heat, the sweaty, miserable kind. Heat plus humidity. Working outdoors or playing sports on a hot, muggy day can be dangerous, even deadly. And as the climate continues to warm, being outside will become even more challenging. Those are the findings of a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

NPR's Richard Harris tells us more.

3:34 pm

Thu February 14, 2013

Traces Of Anxiety Drugs May Cause Fish To Act Funny

Credit Courtesy of Bent Christensen

Perch exposed to the anxiety drug oxazepam were more daring and ate more quickly than fish that lived in drug-free water.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Thu February 14, 2013 5:40 pm

Listen

Many of the drugs we take aren't actually digested — they pass through our bodies, and down through the sewer pipes. Traces of those drugs end up in the bodies of fish and other wildlife. Nobody's sure what effect they have.

Now, a paper being published in Science magazine finds that drugs for anxiety drugs — even at these very low levels — can affect the behavior of fish.

5:00 pm

Tue February 12, 2013

Did North Korea Test A 'Miniature' Nuclear Bomb?

Credit Kim Jae-Hwan / AFP/Getty Images

An official with the Korea Meteorological Administration shows a seismic image of a tremor caused by North Korea's nuclear test, in Seoul on Tuesday.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Mon February 25, 2013 1:19 pm

Listen

North Korea's latest nuclear weapons test is much more powerful than the previous two, according to estimates made by instruments that measure seismic waves from the blast. It's about the size of the bomb that devastated Hiroshima in World War II.

But it's not so easy to verify the claim that the nuclear explosive has also been miniaturized. That's a critical claim because a small warhead would be essential if the rogue regime chose to threaten the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile.

Big bombs are easier to make, but they aren't all that useful as a threat.

Now Playing

Podcasts & RSS Feeds

WMUK Staff

Richard Harris

Pages

The Salt

1:06 pm

Wed May 15, 2013