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 African crested rat's fuzzy fur has hairs loaded with a poison that can purportedly fell an elephant. But these rats turn out to be social, affectionate creatures. -
Scientists have used a NASA probe way out in space, beyond Pluto, to measure visible light that's not connected to any known source such as stars or galaxies. -
A NASA spacecraft sent out to collect rocks from an asteroid seems to have nabbed a lot of material, but there's now an unexpected problem — a flap isn't closing because some rocks are stuck. -
A NASA Spacecraft Successfully Touched Down On A Rocky AsteroidNASA has collected and is returning its first sample from an asteroid. The rocks and dust could help us understand potentially dangerous space rocks and the history of the solar system. -
A Twinkie stored in a basement for eight years has been transformed by fungi, giving scientists something unusual to ponder and probe. -
Mountains on Pluto look strikingly similar to white-capped peaks on Earth, but these cold, alien mountains got whitened in a completely different way. -
The 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for research into "rewriting the code of life." Emmanuelle Charpentier of France and Jennifer Doudna of the U.S. are the laureates.
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The sun can affect people's electronics, the power grid and communications and navigation systems. But scientists predict that for the next decade or so, the sun's activity will not be too disruptive. -
Scientists have found a gas associated with living organisms in a region of Venus' atmosphere. They can't figure out how it got there if it didn't come from life. -
None of us is perfect, and sometimes the Hubble Space Telescope just flat-out points to the wrong spot in the sky. This has been happening more than ever in the last couple of years.
