Alexandra Witze

Contributing Correspondent

Alexandra Witze is a contributing correspondent based in Boulder, Colorado. Among other exotic locales, her reporting has taken her to Maya ruins in the jungles of Guatemala, among rotting corpses at the University of Tennessee's legendary "Body Farm," and to a floating sea-ice camp at the North Pole. She has a bachelor's degree in geology from MIT and a graduate certification in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Among her honors are the Science-in-Society award from the National Association of Science Writers (shared with Tom Siegfried), and the American Geophysical Union's award for feature journalism. She coauthored the book Island on Fire, about the 18th-century eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki.

All Stories by Alexandra Witze

  1. Genetics

    Factory of Life

    Synthetic biologists reinvent nature with parts, circuits.

  2. Earth

    West Antarctica warming fast

    A reconstructed temperature record from a high-altitude station shows an unexpectedly rapid rise since 1958.

  3. Space

    California meteorite a scientific gold mine

    Sutter’s Mill rock preserves rare, fresh material from outer space.

  4. Space

    News in brief: Possible planet looks habitable

    Astronomers find a body in the habitable zone of a nearby sunlike star by pushing the limits of detection.

  5. Space

    Moon probes set for smashing end

    NASA to guide gravity-seeking spacecraft into the side of a lunar cliff.

  6. Quantum hops

    A little closer to teleportation and new computers.

  7. Physics

    Higgs discovery helps make sense of matter

    Long-sought boson completes standard model of physics.

  8. Astronomy

    Clutch of distant galaxies reveals the infant universe

    The Hubble telescope spies stars lighting up the cosmic dawn.

  9. Science & Society

    Descending to the Challenger Deep

    Director James Cameron reveals the science of his deep-sea exploration.

  10. Planetary Science

    Violent past revealed by map of moon’s interior

    A gravity survey by twin orbiters reveals how much the lunar surface was pummeled by meteorite impacts early in its history.

  11. Space

    Earth in the black

    Images capture fine details of planet’s night lights.

  12. Space

    Extraterrestrial chorus heard in radiation belts

    Van Allen probes capture sound of electromagnetic disturbances in Earth’s magnetosphere.