Nell Greenfieldboyce
Nell Greenfieldboyce is a NPR science correspondent.
With reporting focused on general science, NASA, and the intersection between technology and society, Greenfieldboyce has been on the science desk's technology beat since she joined NPR in 2005.
In that time Greenfieldboyce has reported on topics including the narwhals in Greenland, the ending of the space shuttle program, and the reasons why independent truckers don't want electronic tracking in their cabs.
Much of Greenfieldboyce's reporting reflects an interest in discovering how applied science and technology connects with people and culture. She has worked on stories spanning issues such as pet cloning, gene therapy, ballistics, and federal regulation of new technology.
Prior to NPR, Greenfieldboyce spent a decade working in print, mostly magazines including U.S. News & World Report and New Scientist.
A graduate of Johns Hopkins, earning her Bachelor's of Arts degree in social sciences and a Master's of Arts degree in science writing, Greenfieldboyce taught science writing for four years at the university. She was honored for her talents with the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists.
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The first astronomer to discover moons around Jupiter was Galileo, back in the year 1610, but astronomers are still finding more and more moons around this gas giant. -
Astronomers are debating how quickly the observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope should be made public. -
Astronomers who win time to use space telescopes typically get a period of time when they alone can see the resulting data. But telescope managers are considering making all data public immediately.
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Policymakers have long grappled with how to handle experiments that might generate potentially dangerous viruses. Now, officials are considering whether oversight needs to be expanded. -
To commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, a group of scientists decided to dig up his body and sequence his DNA.
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The year 2022 was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Gregor Mendel. He's known as the father of genetics, so scientists exhumed Mendel's body and examined his DNA. -
Geologists rely on tiny crystals of the mineral zircon to understand the timing of key events in Earth's early days, like the rising of continents and the emergence of oceans. -
Zircon is the "time-lords" of the earth. They are indestructible and take up radioactive materials, so they're used to track events in deep time that would otherwise be lost to us.
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Testing pregnant people's blood to look at free-floating DNA can tell doctors about the health of the fetus. But these tests sometime turn up DNA that might be shed by cancerous cells. -
The ruling is the latest twist in a long-running dispute over where dozens of federally-supported former research chimps should live out the remainder of their days.
