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. Physics

    Memories made of light

    Physicists find a more efficient way to store quantum information in a crystal, a step towards super-secure quantum communications.

  2. Earth

    Loop Current will determine spill’s ultimate fate

    Oceanographers track a newly formed eddy in the Gulf of Mexico and where it might carry oil.

  3. Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission lands in Australia

    Capsule recovered, scientists will soon know what the probe collected.

  4. Earth

    Operation Icewatch 2010 gears up

    Climate experts turn their gaze north to monitor this summer's Arctic melt.

  5. Ecosystems

    Sharks use math to hunt

    Marine predators cruise the seas using fractal principles.

  6. Melting at the microscale

    Studying sea ice close-up may improve climate models.

  7. Elemental escape

    Making superheavies may reveal island of stability.

  8. Physics

    Some ‘ball lightning’ reports may be hallucinations

    Magnetic fields generated by real bolts could trigger visual effects in the brain.

  9. Physics

    Record number of photons lassoed into a quantum limbo 

    Physicists entangle five particles, each existing in two states simultaneously.

  10. Physics

    Physics on the Edge

    Over the past couple of years, researchers have made several new discoveries involving bismuth telluride and other related materials, known as topological insulators.

  11. Earth

    Ash from Icelandic eruption may just be the start

    A recently awakened volcano often goes off in tandem with a much bigger one nearby.

  12. Materials Science

    Physicists untangle the geometry of rope

    Equations explain why winding fibers together does the job, no matter what they’re made of.