Rachel Kaufman, freelance writer

Interrogator of gargoyle lovers, frog fondlers, and the eternal optimists saving the news industry

Featured Stories

Mobile Apps Help Find Sustainable Seafood

By Rachel • Jul 21st, 2010 • Category: Environment, Featured Stories, Food

from National Geographic’s Green Guide Not too long ago, if you wanted to know what type of seafood was best for the environment, your tools didn’t get any more high-tech than a wallet card or a fridge magnet. But the fridge magnet doesn’t help much when you’re at the grocery store, and wallet cards are [...]



Compost Cab Helps City Dwellers Turn Garbage to Soil

By Rachel • Jun 25th, 2010 • Category: Environment, Featured Stories, Food

from National Geographic’s Green Guide If you live in a city, you might have a window box or a pot of tomatoes on your balcony. You might even be lucky enough to have a small backyard garden. But do you compost? Probably not: composting in a small space is tough, not to mention smelly. You [...]



3 Future Oil-Spill Fighters: Sponges, Superbugs, and Herders

By Rachel • May 11th, 2010 • Category: Environment, Featured Stories, Science

Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades. Soon, though, tech of the future could be cleaning up spills like this one.



Neuromarketers get inside buyers’ brains

By Rachel • Mar 17th, 2010 • Category: Featured Stories, Science

Frito-Lay studied women’s brains to help develop an ad campaign, and Campbell Soup (CPB, Fortune 500) just unveiled a packaging redesign based on consumers’ “neurological and bodily responses” to different mockups. By hooking customers up to EEG or MRI machines, a company can learn about what’s really going on inside a buyer’s brain — possibly even before the buyer knows it.



Lost Roman Codex Fragments Found in Book Binding

By Rachel • Feb 3rd, 2010 • Category: Featured Stories, Science

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2010-02-03 Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition [...]



Worms’ Paralysis Turned On and Off With Light

By Rachel • Nov 20th, 2009 • Category: Featured Stories, Science

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2009-11-20 If Dr. Horrible really did have a “freeze ray,” he might stop the world by zapping it with ultraviolet light, new research suggests. After feeding a light-sensitive chemical to transparent, microscopic worms called nematodes, scientists at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia were able to paralyze the tiny [...]



“Backward” Planet Has Density of Foam Coffee Cups

By Rachel • Aug 17th, 2009 • Category: Featured Stories, Science

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2009-08-17 Contrary to a recent TV cell phone ad, Dunkin’ Donuts isn’t likely to set up shop in space any time soon. But if it did, the donut chain might like to build next to WASP-17b, a newfound planet that’s puffed up to be roughly as dense as a [...]



Give Me Bacon or Give Me More Bacon

By Rachel • Jun 25th, 2009 • Category: Featured Stories, Food

“Bacon cereal.” “Bacon lollipop.” “Bacon spaghetti.” “Bacon bread.” “Bacon coffee.” “Bacon beer.”

In a sane world, none of these exact phrases would return any hits when plugged into Google. This is not a sane world.



Secrets of Swift Sales

By Rachel • Feb 27th, 2009 • Category: Condo Living, Featured Stories, People

BRANDON GREEN RESOLVED to try his hand at real estate after watching a late-night infomercial in 2000. Bored with his job in sales as an IT recruiter in Silver Spring, Green paid $19.95 for Carlton Sheets’s “No Down Payment” video, and applied himself. “My first project was a complete overhaul of a house, 727 11th Street, NE,” he recalls.



History and Mystery in Richmond’s Church Hill

By Rachel • Dec 14th, 2008 • Category: Featured Stories, Places

Church Hill is changing. The historical Richmond neighborhood — site of old mansions, cast-iron work on porches, cobbled streets and the church where Patrick Henry made his impassioned cry for liberty or death — deteriorated rapidly in the mid-20th century. “Church Hill was the drug-infested shooting gallery” of Richmond, says John Johnson, president of the Church Hill Association. But in the past few decades, an aggressive historic preservation effort (and tempting tax breaks) have spurred revitalization and development.