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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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Research News
3:48 am
Tue July 17, 2012

For Seeds, Rodents Are Like Taxis

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Originally published on Tue July 17, 2012 11:17 am

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

This next story takes on some new scientific research involving wily rodents, rodents that run around through the rainforest stealing mercilessly from one another. That doesn't sound very nice, but they're actually providing a service for the forest that may once have been provided by wooly mammoths.

NPR's Richard Harris could not resist telling a story with such an intriguing cast of characters.

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Research News
4:40 am
Thu July 12, 2012

U.S. Feel Less Guilt About Environmental Choices

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Originally published on Fri July 13, 2012 7:56 am

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RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

You might think that Americans, renowned for consuming a disproportionate share of the Earth's resources, would feel the most guilty about using up those resources. Not so, according to a new study. NPR's Richard Harris reports on the latest findings from a National Geographic project called Greendex.

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Science
3:45 am
Wed July 11, 2012

Hot Weather Gets Scientists' Attention

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Originally published on Wed July 11, 2012 5:30 am

How much of the recent hot weather can be attributed to global warming? Scientists will no doubt dig into the data and grapple with that question in the months to come. They have already taken a stab at that question regarding some of last year's extreme weather events, like the drought in Texas.

Research News
2:25 am
Fri July 6, 2012

Dead Reefs Can Come Back To Life, Study Says

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Credit laszlo-photo / Flickr
Coral polyps feed in the plankton-rich waters by Santa Catalina, Panama. A new study of coral reefs off the Pacific coast of Panama shows that dead coral reefs may be able to recover from rising ocean temperatures and other environmental disasters.
Credit Romeo Gacad / AFP/Getty Images
Fish swim by a colorful variety of coral near Indonesia's Komodo island.
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Originally published on Fri July 6, 2012 11:10 am

Coral reefs may be able to recover from disaster, according to a study that provides a bit of reassurance about the future of these endangered ecosystems.

Coral reefs around the world are at risk as the ocean's temperature continues to rise. Those trends could kill not only coral but also the fish and other species that depend on the reefs. Those reefs are important for people as well.

'Shocking' Reef History

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Science
11:08 am
Wed July 4, 2012

New Subatomic Particle May Be Physics' 'Missing Link'

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Credit CERN / AFP/Getty Images
This graphic depicts a proton-proton collision from the search for the Higgs boson particle.
Credit Denis Balibouse / AP
Fabiola Gianotti of the ATLAS group (left) and Joe Incandela of the Compact Muon Spectrometer team announced their findings during a presentation Wednesday in Switzerland.
Credit Fabrice Coffrini / AFP/Getty Images
British physicist Peter Higgs (right), who proposed the Higgs boson in the 1960s, speaks with Belgium physicist Francois Englert at Wednesday's event.
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Originally published on Thu July 5, 2012 6:51 am

Scientists have discovered a new subatomic particle with profound implications for understanding our universe. On Wednesday, they announced they've found a particle believed to be the long-awaited Higgs boson. Nicknamed the "God particle," it represents the final piece in a theory that explains the basic nature of our universe.

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Science
2:35 am
Mon July 2, 2012

Is The Hunt For The 'God Particle' Finally Over?

Credit CERN
This image, from a sensor at the particle accelerator at CERN, is an example of the data signature a Higgs particle might generate.
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Originally published on Mon July 2, 2012 8:17 am

Before we get to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, we might see some pyrotechnics from a giant physics experiment near Geneva, Switzerland.

Scientists there are planning to gather that morning to hear the latest about the decades-long search for a subatomic particle that could help explain why objects in our universe actually weigh anything.

The buzz is that they're closing in on the elusive Higgs particle. That would be a major milestone in the quest to understand the most basic nature of the universe.

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Energy
4:49 am
Sun July 1, 2012

Ahead Of Alaska Drilling, Shell Practices Cleaning Up

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Trainees with Royal Dutch Shell learn to deploy oil spill booms in the waters near the port of Valdez in Alaska. The company is training about 200 spill responders.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Geoff Merrell is Shell's superintendent for emergency response in Alaska. The training mission on this day is to deploy and retrieve 1,000 feet of oil containment boom.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
The first step in responding to oil spills is to try to ring the oil with floating booms.
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Originally published on Mon July 2, 2012 12:02 pm

Royal Dutch Shell could drill several exploratory oil wells into the waters off the north shore of Alaska this summer. The potential prize is huge, but so is the risk, should there be an oil spill in this pristine and remote region. And that risk is on everyone's mind since the BP blowout in the Gulf of Mexico two years ago.

Shell is now training hundreds of workers to confront oil in icy waters. But for now, the training is taking place in the calm, ice-free waters far to the south, near the port of Valdez.

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Science
5:22 am
Sat June 23, 2012

Rio+20 Doesn't Get Further Than Vague Declaration

Credit Andre Penner / AP
U.N. General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's Secretary of the Conference Luis Figueiredo Machado and Rio+20 Secretary General Sha Zukang attend the closing ceremony of the Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.
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Originally published on Sat June 23, 2012 10:15 pm

The Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development was the biggest United Nations conference ever, but it may be one of the biggest duds. It produced no major agreements — just a vaguely worded declaration that has been widely derided.

More than 45,000 people registered for the event in Rio de Janeiro, but diplomats couldn't even agree about the meeting's objective until 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday, just before heads of state and other high-level delegates started arriving in Rio.

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Energy
5:11 pm
Tue June 19, 2012

Shell Faces Pushback As Alaska Drilling Nears

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Shell says it hopes to never need to use its new 300-foot-long, $100 million oil recovery ship named Nanuq for anything other than drills and training.
Credit The Washington Post / Getty Images
Richard E. Reanier, an independent archaeologist working for Shell Oil, uses GPS to record the location of the remains of a sod house along the Chukchi Sea coast near Wainwright, Alaska, in July 2011.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Pete Slaiby, Shell's vice president for Alaska, says the costs of doing business in Alaska are big, "but the volumes are substantial."
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Originally published on Tue June 19, 2012 5:59 pm

The federal government could soon give the final go-ahead for Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean. Shell has spent $4 billion since 2007 to prepare for this work, and is hoping to tap into vast new deposits of oil.

But the plan to drill exploratory wells is controversial — opposed by environmental groups and some indigenous people as well.

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Energy
2:15 am
Tue June 19, 2012

Rio Environment Meeting Focuses On 'Energy For All'

Credit Andrew Burton / Getty Images
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks during a news conference on June 7 at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Ban wants to focus on making energy available to the poorest populations of the world.
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Originally published on Tue June 19, 2012 8:48 am

Diplomats and activists from around the world are meeting in Rio de Janeiro this week to talk about how the planet's growing population can live better lives without damaging the environment. The Rio+20 meeting marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, a watershed meeting to address topics as diverse as climate change and biodiversity.

At this follow-up meeting, delegates hope to highlight an issue that was almost absent from the Earth Summit: making energy available to everyone in the world.

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