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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The Mountain West has some of the highest rates of depression and suicide. Researchers think the mountains, with a lack of oxygen at high altitude, could be interfering with people's mental health.
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Chronic wasting disease is an illness that's spreading in deer, elk and moose and there are at least three bills being considered at the national level to provide funds to research and fight it.
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Many images that have been traditionally used to depict the Black Death are, in fact, not images of the plague at all. Now, a group of dedicated historians are trying to correct the record.
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NASA plans to send people to the Red Planet in the 2030s. In the meantime, a remote location in southern Utah serves as a non-NASA training ground for the Mars-minded.
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They're the Godzillas of the virus world, pushing the limit of what is considered alive. Researchers are trying to figure out where they came from. (And no, they aren't known to make people sick.)
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Meet Kate Rubins, a virus-hunter turned astronaut. When she sequenced DNA in space for the first time, she opened the door to a new era in space biology.
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They don't have wings, but bacteria sure can fly. Researchers at MIT say that tiny bubbles trapped by raindrops play a part in launching bacteria on long-distance flights.
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U.S. emissions of smog-forming pollutants have dropped, but smog levels in the western U.S. have increased each year. Now, researchers say, they've found out why — it's wafting from across the Pacific Ocean.
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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.
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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.