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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Engineers at Dartmouth College have developed a computer chip that can detect a single particle of light. Cameras with the chip would have visual abilities even a superhero would envy. -
Turns out that Einstein was right about what happens when neutron stars collide. An international team of astronomers has confirmed his theory for the first time.
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A two-story tall, digital camera is taking shape in California. It will ultimately go on a telescope in Chile where it will survey the sky, looking for things that appear suddenly or change over time. -
Scientists have long sought a way to fight mosquito-borne viruses without pesticides. For researchers like Scott O'Neill, the Wolbachia bacteria offered that chance. But they had to prove it. -
People who have Type-1 diabetes would love to be free of insulin injections and pumps. Researchers in San Francisco are now testing in animals an implantable pouch of living, insulin-releasing cells. -
Three scientists won this year's Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of gravitational waves. These ripples in space and time are generated when really big things, like black holes, collide.
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NASA's probe has spent the past 13 years orbiting Saturn, making a number of important discoveries along the way. On Friday, it will hurl itself into the planet's atmosphere and disintegrate. -
The Army wanted a new, small device that could pull a person rapidly up a rope. The invention they eventually got has uses far beyond the military. -
The blood thinner warfarin, which prevents blood clots, owes its existence to some cows who got very sick after eating spoiled hay — and to a chemist who spent years trying to figure out why.
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In Leipzig, Germany, two scientists from very different backgrounds are working on a unique research project.
