Valerie Brown is a freelance science writer based in Oregon's Willamette Valley. She has written about environmental health, climate change, nuclear radiation, and many other issues for High Country News, Science, and other publications. She was a professional musician for a dozen years before turning to non-fiction writing.
By age 10, most people are exposed to enough radiation to be at risk, but the science is so complicated that exposure could even have benefits.
Emerging research shows that bacteria have powers to engineer the environment, to communicate and to affect human well-being. They may even think.
Presidential advisory group moves to broaden focus of cancer research to precaution, prevention.
Only more and better data will settle a dispute about the possibility that environmental pollution can cause inheritable disease.
The murky waters of the debate over chemical exposures and health just got murkier. And a bit nastier.
In the capricious world of nuclear waste, a scientist focuses on promising technologies for the capture and storage of the maddeningly elusive iodine-129.
Professor Nalini Nadkarni enlists a Washington state prison in sustainability research that has turned the prison green — and may help convicts turn their lives around.
Believing you're fat may be more emotionally damaging than actually being obese.
Oregon researchers develop counseling approaches that reduce anorexia, bulimia and obesity among young women — apparently for years.
Advances in the field of epigenetics show that environmental contaminants can turn genes "on" and "off" triggering serious diseases that are handed down through generations. But there's also a more heartening prospect: The same diseases may be treated by relatively simple changes in nourishment and lifestyle.
Father and son researchers studying violence in video games find that the cumulative aggression seen in the current study reflects a low-grade social violence that's ultimately more insidious than headline-grabbing meltdowns.