Now Playing

Loading streams...

Podcasts & RSS Feeds

Richard HarrisRSS
All ContentRSS
View all podcasts & RSS feeds

WWNO People

Susan Larson
Susan Larson
Host of The Reading Life
Fred Kasten
Fred Kasten
Announcer & Producer
Eve Troeh
Eve Troeh
News Director
Eileen Fleming
Eileen Fleming
News Reporter
Ryan Bordenave
Ryan Bordenave
Underwriting Specialist

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.

Pages

Energy
2:57 am
Tue March 20, 2012

Native Alaskans Divided On State's Oil Drilling Debate

Credit Steve Quinn / AP
A drilling rig sits on Oooguruk Island off the coast of Alaska's North Slope. The 6-acre island was built by Pioneer Natural Resources so it could drill for oil on the Arctic Ocean.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Tue March 20, 2012 8:06 am

Shell Oil plans to explore for petroleum off Alaska's north coast this summer. The native people of Alaska have a big stake in both oil revenue and environmental protection. That conflict has played out in recent trips by Inupiats to Washington, D.C., to argue their case.

Read more
Remembrances
12:11 pm
Tue March 13, 2012

F. Sherwood Rowland, Warned Of Aerosol's Danger

Next imagePrevious image
Credit University of California / AP
F. Sherwood Rowland, pictured here in 1989, was one of three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry for work on discovering chemicals that deplete the Earth's ozone layer.
Credit Eric Roxfelt / AP
Rowland receives the Nobel Prize from Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf in 1995. He shared the award with Mario Molina and Paul J. Crutzen.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

The man who warned us that aerosol spray-cans could destroy the earth's protective ozone layer has died.

F. Sherwood Rowland, better known as Sherry Rowland, was a Nobel-prize winning chemist at the University of California, Irvine. And he didn't just keep to the laboratory: He successfully advocated for a ban on ozone-destroying chemicals called CFCs.

Read more
Rebuilding Japan
3:32 pm
Fri March 9, 2012

Crippled Japanese Reactors Face Decades Of Work

Credit Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP/Getty Images
Last year's earthquake and tsunami crippled the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station. Foreign journalists saw cleanup and recovery work in process on Feb. 28.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 9:58 am

The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, lasted for many terrifying minutes. But the multiple nuclear meltdowns that followed created an emergency that lasted for weeks and a legacy that will last for decades.

Here's how the event unfolded. The tsunami knocked out power to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. As a result, the cooling systems failed and three reactors melted down. Steam laced with radioactive material poured into the air. Water contaminated with radiation also flowed into the sea.

Read more
Rebuilding Japan
11:01 pm
Thu March 8, 2012

Trauma, Not Radiation, Is Key Concern In Japan

Next imagePrevious image
Credit AFP/Getty Images
A worker is given a radiation screening as he enters the emergency operation center at Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s tsunami-crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant on Feb. 20.
Credit David Guttenfelder / AFP/Getty Images
A deserted street inside the contaminated exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, on Nov. 12, 2011. Experts say health effects of radiation exposure likely won't be detectable and a bigger problem is the mental health issues resulting from the trauma of the tsunami.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

One year ago this Sunday, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off Japan triggered a tsunami that killed 20,000 people. It also triggered multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.

But health effects from radiation turn out to be minor compared with the other issues the people of Fukushima prefecture now face.

Read more
Energy
3:17 pm
Wed February 15, 2012

Many Jobs May Be Gone With The Wind Energy Credit

Next imagePrevious image
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
From left, enginers Eric Nicosia, Amin Ahmadi and Gavin Boogs work to solve an issue with part of a wind turbine at the Gamesa Corp. factory in Langhorne, Pa., on Feb. 10.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
Angel Gonzales operates a crane to assemble a gear box for a wind turbine. The heavy-lift cranes hoist pieces weighing up to 70 tons.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
Joseph Wright tightens bolts on the hub of a wind turbine. Sixty percent of the components used in wind turbines are manufactured in the U.S., according to the American Wind Energy Association.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
Angel Gonzales assembles a main shaft of a wind turbine. Tens of thousands of jobs depend on a federal tax credit meant to help keep wind power competitive with other forms of electricity.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
At the Gamesa plant, workers can check wrenches and other tools from these vending machines.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
About 175 people work at Gamesa's factory, including Jerry "Jazz" Holt, who is assembling an oil cooler unit.
Credit Maggie Starbard / NPR
Gamesa's factory is a cavernous building that once housed a U.S. Steel foundry. It's about the length of two football fields and produces one nacelle per day.
Credit Photos by Maggie Starbard / NPR/NPR
The Gamesa factory in Fairless Hills, Pa., produces nacelles for wind turbines. Nacelles house the gear box, generator, electrical transformers and wiring. From left, engineers Eric Nicosia, Amin Ahmadi and Gavin Boogs work to solve an issue with a nacelle at the factory on Feb. 10.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 10:01 am

The wind power industry in this country has grown fast in recent years, but that could come to a screeching halt.

The industry depends on a federal subsidy to keep it competitive with other forms of electricity. It's a tax credit wind farms get for the power they produce. That credit expires at the end of the year, and it's not clear whether Congress will renew it.

The tax credit was initially created to encourage wind energy, since it is a clean and secure source of electricity. But these days the argument is all about jobs.

Read more
Shots - Health Blog
9:06 am
Fri February 10, 2012

How My Voice Went Silent

Credit Courtesy of Richard Harris / NPR
Everything looked fine on my CT scan, but I didn't sound even close to right.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Fri February 10, 2012 2:10 pm

There's an old joke around newsrooms: News is something that happens to your editor.

If you'll pardon the self-indulgence, I'm going to take this truism one step further: News is what happened to me.

I was laid low the week before New Year's Day by a mysterious headache and a blazing sore throat. A few days later I lost my voice.

My doctors eventually pinpointed the cause by snaking a small camera down my nose. My left vocal fold (or vocal cord if you prefer) had stopped working. It was essentially paralyzed, other than the occasional twitch.

Read more
Science
4:02 pm
Wed February 8, 2012

'Amasia': The Next Supercontinent?

Next imagePrevious image
Credit Chris Scotese / University of Texas at Arlington
This map shows what the Earth's landmass looked like in the Precambrian era, about 738 million years ago.
Credit Mitchell, et. al. / Nature
The Americas and Asia may fuse together to form a new supercontinent, "Amasia."
Credit Mitchell, et. al. / Nature
Two of the previous supercontinents, which formed 200 million years ago (Pangaea) and 800 million years ago (Rodinia).
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

The Earth's continents are in constant motion. On at least three occasions, they have all collided to form one giant continent. If history is a guide, the current continents will coalesce once again to form another supercontinent. And a study in Nature now shows how that could come about.

You can think of continents as giant puzzle pieces shuffling around the Earth. When they drift apart, mighty oceans form. When they come together, oceans disappear. And it's all because continents sit on moving plates of the Earth's crust.

Read more
The Two-Way
2:35 pm
Wed January 11, 2012

EPA Creates Website To ID Biggest Emitters Of Greenhouse Gases

Share
E-mail
Comments
By

Originally published on Wed January 11, 2012 2:39 pm

Ever wondered who the big greenhouse-gas emitters are in your neck of the woods? The answer is now just a click away.

The US Environmental Protection Agency today unveiled a new website that identifies most of the nation's biggest emitters of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases. It lets you, for example:

Read more
World
7:00 am
Sun December 11, 2011

At Last, Nations Agree To Landmark Climate Deal

Credit Rajesh Jantilal / AFP/Getty Images
Tired delegates work into the early hours of Sunday morning on the final day of the climate talks in Durban, South Africa.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

After a third sleepless night, climate negotiators in Durban South Africa finally found a way to reach a compromise early Sunday morning. The deal doesn't set hoped-for new targets to limit global warming, but delegates ultimately decided to embrace it rather than risk a major collapse of this international process.

Read more
Environment
2:23 pm
Thu December 8, 2011

At Climate Talks, Frustration And Interruptions

Credit Stephane De Sakutin / AFP/Getty Images
The U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern delivers a speech on Dec. 8 in Durban, South Africa, during the U.N. Climate Change Conference. The climate talks entered their second week entangled in a thick mesh of issues with no guarantee that negotiators and their ministers will be able to sort them out.
Share
E-mail
Comments
By

United Nations climate talks, like many negotiations, are a blend of dead seriousness and theater. Today at the talks in Durban, South Africa, an American college student provided a moment of theater by shouting out a short, unauthorized speech during the main session of the talks. Her interruption encapsulated frustration with the pace of the talks in general, and the United States' role in particular.

Read more

Pages