Articles

Below are links to a selection of stories I've done over the past few years. Most are from the Boulder Daily Camera, where I was a staff writer focusing on science and the environment from 2003-2007. I've grouped them by subject and in no particular order, though the newest tend to be listed first. A handful are cross-listed. My production in 2007-2008 was limited by a Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado and work on my book, From Jars to the Stars. "Randomalia," the last of those listed, includes humor and heartbreak from my experiences doing general-assignment reporting. The point here being, although I'm a science and environment writer, I'm a writer.

I link to outside sources where possible, but have reformatted many Camera and other newspaper stories because they're not otherwise accessible.

 

Space

• Hurry-Up Satellites, These Pentagon mavericks want to launch spacecraft within a week of taking the order. Wish them luck. (Smithsonian Air & Space, July 2012)
• Space budgets are made to be broken, a commentary about the apparently eternal nature of space missions being unable to keep costs down (The Space Review, December 20, 2010)
• Short-order satellites, about the U.S. Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space program (Defense News, April 2009)
• Repairing Hubble a tall order (Rocky Mountain News, November 15, 2008)
• Spaceship Colorado (ColoradoBiz Magazine, November 2008; (.pdf 2.7 mb))
• Star Gazing Mission: Spacecraft to look for planets (about NASA's Kepler mission, Daily Camera, January 30, 2007)
• Boulder creation could help unveil ancient universe (about the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph instrument for the Hubble Space Telescope (Daily Camera, November 5, 2006)
• Deep Impact: encounter and one year later (Daily Camera, July 4, 2005 and July 2, 2006)
• To Pluto. . . and Beyond (NASA New Horizons launch, Daily Camera, January 20, 2006)
• B612 confronts asteroid threat: Group wants to practice altering the route of meteors (Daily Camera, April 3, 2005)
• Black hole may be giant fryer, or the lighter side of being spaghettified. (Daily Camera, April 20, 2005)
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Climate Change

• Connecting science and policy to combat climate change (ScientificAmerican.com, March 17, 2009)
• Climate Science: Where Next? (The Daily Climate, February 17, 2009)
• Glacier Man, (.pdf, 1.2 mb) a profile of University of Colorado glaciologist Tad Pfeffer (Coloradan Magazine, December 2008)
• It's later than you think (Deadline report on the first release from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, Daily Camera, February 3, 2007); also Change to climate to hit poor the hardest (Release of second working group, on impacts and mitigation, Daily Camera, April 7, 2007)
• Pork pares research: NOAA climate-study projects hurt by federal earmarking (Daily Camera, April 9, 2006)
• Q&A with Al Gore (Daily Camera, May 16, 2005)
• Mongolian mom integral to project, about a woman who had collected Gobi Desert air samples for NOAA for 16 years (Daily Camera, August 5, 2006); also Lab leads global warming research, a story introducing NOAA's carbon-hunting Climate Monitoring & Diagnostics Laboratory, now part of the NOAA ESRL Global Monitoring Division (Daily Camera, May 29, 2005)
• Clean energy's impact on global climate, summarizing the potential of several current renewable-energy technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds by 2030 (Daily Camera, July 13, 2006)
• NCAR wraps Earth in a box, about the CCSM3, one of the world's great climate models (Daily Camera, January 30, 2005)
• North Pole sea ice may melt by 2040, researchers find (Daily Camera, August 24, 2005. One of the first popular-press stories citing summer Arctic melt dates in the first half of the 21st century.)
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General Science

• Taking the Waste out of Wastewater (Mines Magazine, Fall/Winter 2009)
• Spotlight on Christian Shorey's "liberal science" education (Mines Magazine, Summer 2009)
• Andre Revil goes beyond science (Mines Magazine, Spring 2009)
• Portraits in carbon (900 kb .pdf; World Watch Magazine, January-February 2007)
• At age 10, new matter is certainly growing up, a retrospective on the 10-year anniversary of Nobel Prize-winning discovery of Bose-Einsteine condensate (Daily Camera, June 5, 2005)
• Quantum computing at sub-zero temps, about solid-state quantum computing at NIST (Daily Camera, April 15, 2005)
• A screen-test star: Flat-panel guru is ahead of the curve (Daily Camera, April 30, 2007)
• Atomic clock 'race' heating up: JILA advance highlights promise of laser-based timekeeping (Daily Camera, December 1, 2006)
• Proposed lab would mine deep science, a trip into the proposed Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory site in a Colorado molybdenum mine. The site later lost out to the Homestake mine in South Dakota. (Daily Camera, December 24, 2006)
• Lasers vaporize ancient diet mysteries, on "dental work" done on 1.8-million-year-old paranthropus teeth (Daily Camera, November 10, 2006)
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Environment

• Upset over Cemex plant, an investigative piece exploring just how bad (or good) the controversial cement plant in Lyons, Colo. actually is (Daily Camera, December 4, 2005)
• State grapples with mercury (Daily Camera, November 25, 2006)
• Early and under budget, about the Rocky Flats nuclear plant cleanup's completion (Daily Camera, October 14, 2005)
• County's open vistas vanishing and Thinkers paint dour population picture, commemorating/rueing the U.S. population reaching 300 million (Daily Camera, September 17, 2006)
• Snow Packed and Students trade toil for awesome skiing, stories about a trip above the treeline to study Boulder's water source (Daily Camera, May 15, 2005)
• Pine beetle threat looms over county (Daily Camera, August 11, 2006)
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Energy

• Award-winning battery's secret is 'buried,' a news feature about an National Renewable Energy Laboratory-developed solid-state lithium ion battery technology with promise in applications ranging from RFID to electric vehicles (September 11, 2009)
• NREL center turns materials design upside down, a news feature about the National Renewable Energy Lab's Center for Inverse Design (August 14, 2009)
• Priming the New Energy Pump, a cover story about the renewable and oil & gas industries in Colorado (ColoradoBiz Magazine, March 2009)
• Energy answer is blowin' in the wind, about lagging funds for wind-energy research; accompanied by CU professor tackles wind-power questions, about the old man who took would-be wind revolutionaries' phone calls at the National Wind Technology Center (Daily Camera, April 22, 2007)
• Solar researcher seeks quantum leap, about third-generation nanodot-driven solar panels (Daily Camera, February 17, 2007)
• Clean energy's impact on global climate, summarizing the potential of several current renewable-energy technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions by two thirds by 2030 (Daily Camera, July 13, 2006)
• Efficiency the exception: Green techniques rare in home building, an enterprise look at how inefficient our homes are and how relatively easy it would be to build better ones (Daily Camera, March 12, 2006)
• Plants fuel new petrol, about NREL's cellulosic ethanol research; and NREL ethanol money lags, a year later (Daily Camera, February 20, 2006 and January 25, 2007)
• Xcel, NREL studying wind-to-hydrogen (Daily Camera, December 15, 2006)
• Inventor turns algae into fuel, about Solix Biofuels founder Jim Sears (Daily Camera, December 8, 2006)
• Peak oil pumps up experts, from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil-U.S.A.'s inaugural conference (Daily Camera, November 11, 2005)
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Health Care

• 'Bionic pancreas' on the horizon? (UCH Insider, June 2009) and Lauded diabetes researcher may be closing in on preventing childhood diabetes (UCH Insider, August 2009)
• Spine Center getting good outcomes with an “X” Factor (UCH Insider, May 2009)
• 'Super Survivors' defy odds, hint at cancer’s future (UCH Insider, May 2009)
• UCH program handles resculpted hearts (UCH Insider, April 2009)
• The Medical Emergency Team's offer you can't refuse (UCH Insider, December 2008)
  
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Military

• Tall Order, about a satellite-based hyperspectral imager capable of sniffing out smart bombs from space (C4ISR Journal, April 2010)
• New schedule for Hawkeye and Schedule dilemma, about budget-driven delays to the U.S. Navy's E-2D Advanced Hawkeye program (C4ISR Journal, May 2010 and June 2009)
• Short-order satellites, about the U.S. Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space program (Defense News, April 2009)
• Smart Travelers, about vision systems in unmanned ground vehicles (C4ISR Journal, April 2009)
• Virtually there, about the Command Post of the Future (C4ISR Journal, April 2009)
  
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Biological & Health Science

• Magic waters? A story about purportedly "magic" spring in the mountains above Boulder. Won the 2004 Colorado Society of Professional Journalists' "Best 1A Reader" (Daily Camera, August 1, 2004)
• Ex-fullback tests arm slings, with a heavy dose of first-person perspective (the fullback had done surgery on my shoulder two years earlier). Daily Camera, August 28, 2005.
• From Yellowstone to Mars and accompanyting Life without streaks or sunlight, about Yellowstone National park's role in the search for life on other worlds (Daily Camera, August 14, 2005)
• Brain's function analog, digital - CU researchers develop computer models of the mind's inner workings (Daily Camera, October 6, 2006)
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Investigative

• Efficiency the exception: Green techniques rare in home building, an enterprise look at how inefficient our homes are and how relatively easy it would be to build better ones (Daily Camera, March 12, 2006)
• Pork pares research: NOAA climate-study projects hurt by federal earmarking (Daily Camera, April 9, 2006)
• Upset over Cemex plant; explores just how bad (or good) the controversial cement plant in Lyons, Colo. actually was (Daily Camera, December 4, 2005)
• Magic waters? A story about purportedly "magic" spring in the mountains above Boulder. Won the 2004 Colorado Society of Professional Journalists' "Best 1A Reader" (Daily Camera, August 1, 2004)
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Randomalia

• Return to the Rails, a feature about how the solution to America’s transportation problems could be 100 years in the past. (University of Denver Magazine, fall 2010)
• Fallen U.S. soldier returned to family -- Kowalczyk 'smart, mature and dedicated to mission', about Boulder's first casualty of the Iraq war (Daily Camera, April 27, 2007)
• Out on a cold night, in which Boulder County Cares volunteers struggle with what to do with a 75-year-old homeless woman they find at a Starbucks (Daily Camera, December 5, 2004)
• Sheep shearers sharp at stock show: "Dying breed" still indispensable to wool production (Daily Camera, January 8, 2006)
• A foaled Blizzard weathers winter: Family gets help caring for orphaned quarter horse (Daily Camera, January 17, 2007)
• Crane Man has unparallelled view, a profile of crane operator Marshall Holt as he helps build the Hotel St. Julien in Boulder (Daily Camera, October 13, 2003)
• Service goes to the dogs ... and horses and hamsters, in which The Rev. Rol Hoverstock blesses animals (Daily Camera, September 29, 2003)
• Group hug falls 2,857 short of Guinness record, (Daily Camera, August 11, 2003)
• U.S. 36 death ends man's short life: Mother of mentally troubled man wants better public care (Daily Camera, August 11, 2003)
• The physics of Santa revisited (Daily Camera, December 24, 2005)
• Robot warrior stands down, about Mike Konshak, the most intense hobbyist I have ever met (Daily Camera, April 3, 2003)
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