Rae Ellen Bichell
Rae Ellen Bichell is a reporter for NPR's Science Desk. She first came to NPR in 2013 as a Kroc fellow and has since reported Web and radio stories on biomedical research, global health, and basic science. She won a 2016 Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award from the Foundation for Biomedical Research. After graduating from Yale University, she spent two years in Helsinki, Finland, as a freelance reporter and Fulbright grantee.
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Carp are a major food source, but they've been plagued by viruses. Scientists now say they have a simple solution. And along the way, they hit on an ancient commonality between fish and people. -
Wild hogs inflict $1.5 billion in damage on U.S. property each year. But biologists can now track the elusive animals via tiny bits of DNA the swine leave behind in puddles and ponds. -
Scientists now have a fairly noninvasive way to test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare form of dementia. A similar test, they say, might offer earlier diagnoses of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. -
They were ugly. And, unfortunately, they were not equipped with an anus. But the sand dwellers could be an important part of filling in our own early evolutionary tree. -
Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf is about to lose an iceberg the size of Delaware. Scientists gathering in the U.K. are scratching their heads about why it's cracking off. -
If the rift gets long enough, Antarctica will lose a chunk of ice the size of Delaware. -
Black holes aren't all doom and gloom. Some of these incredibly dense matter-suckers fling powerful jets of light and charged particles — the space version of a fireworks show. -
When scientists got their hands on a collection of the world's biggest gem diamonds, they found something surprising inside — clues about what sits hundreds of miles beneath our feet. -
NASA engineers are trying to figure out why a part of the rover's robotic arm keeps stalling just as it's about to drill into Martian rock. -
Millions of years ago, a dinosaur about the size of a sparrow had a bad day. It got stuck in tree resin. Paleontologists recently came across the rare amber fossil containing its tail in Myanmar.
