Christopher Joyce
Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.
For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk.
In addition, Joyce has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest.
Before coming to NPR, Joyce worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce's stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award as well as the 2016 Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences.
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The U.S. government's most comprehensive climate report to date is at odds with the statements made by President Trump and his Cabinet. -
Warmer waters and air are playing a role in this year's monster storms.
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The index measures wind speed like the traditional scale, one of its developers says, but also "the size of the storm and how fast it's moving forward." -
A researcher tallied how much has been manufactured since plastic's invention: "Eight point three billion metric tons of plastics produced so far. That's just really a staggering amount." -
A scientist discovers how some spiders go undercover as a less delicious species to evade predators.
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Eggs evolved over 300 million years ago and now come in all kinds of shapes, from Tic Tacs to teardrops to pingpong balls. After studying some 50,000 eggs, a team of researchers thinks it knows why. -
Scientists who found the fossils believe they are the remains of five people and far older than all previous finds. But how do the remains really fit into the bushy family tree of modern humans? -
President Trump announced Thursday the U.S. will leave the Paris agreement. The decision is likely to have a big impact on both the climate and environmental policy around the world.
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The Sea Grant program, which funds research on coastal environments, is slated by White House for elimination in 2018. If it goes, a project that finds leaking septic tanks goes down the drain, too. -
A new survey shows that the sound of cars and planes and other forms of noise pollution are rampant across the American wilderness. In many cases, man-made noise is drowning out the background sounds.
