Joe Palca
Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, "Joe's Big Idea." Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca is also the founder of NPR Scicommers – A science communication collective.
Palca began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent for Science Magazine.
In October 2009, Palca took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Palca has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society's James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing. In 2019, Palca was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in journalism.
With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he worked on human sleep physiology.
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NASA mission managers haven't heard from the Martian rover Opportunity since June. A dust storm interfered with communication but the storm is over now and engineers hope to hear from the rover soon. -
The European Space Agency's BepiColombo will take seven years to reach the innermost planet in our solar system, where temperatures at the surface can reach 800 degrees Fahrenheit. -
Astronomers have found a distant dwarf planet that appears to confirm the existence of Planet Nine, a giant planet lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system.
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A researcher in Australia has invented a low-tech, insecticide-free trap that might be able to reduce bites from a particularly pesky mosquito in some neighborhoods. -
New options for nonaddictive pain treatment are sorely needed. One researcher is borrowing from the field of cancer nanomedicine to test an idea that could bring relief to chronic pain sufferers. -
Harbor seals use sensors in their whiskers to help discern predator from prey. It's all about the way the water whirls, say scientists who are now training computers to be better trackers, too. -
Mars, Earth and the sun have lined up, a celestial orientation known as opposition. This particular opposition occurs at a time when the orbit of Mars takes it closest to the sun. -
Scientists say they've found what appears to be a briny lake near the south pole on Mars. It's possible that some kind of microbial life once lived in the lake. -
A tiny accelerator could be useful in medicine as well as basic science. Instead of speeding up beams of electrons through giant tunnels, the aim here is to build accelerators on semiconductor chips. -
Astronomers have found 12 more moons orbiting the planet Jupiter. These moons are all small — just 5 kilometers or less across — and one of them behaves very strangely.
