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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Inventing even the simplest product is a fraught process. Mike Davidson and Mike Smith have learned that lesson the hard way as they seek to change the way teeth get cleaned. -
The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module was pumped up after it arrived at the International Space Station in 2016. NASA says it's doing well in the harsh environment. -
Entrepreneur Mary Anderson thought it made no sense that New York streetcar drivers had to keep jumping off to clean snow from the windshield. She soon won a patent for her "window cleaning device." -
NASA's Juno spacecraft will fly directly over the Great Red Spot, a swirling storm on Jupiter, on Monday. Scientists are hoping to gain a better understanding of the storm and why it persists. -
In 1997, the spacecraft's mission paved the way for the more sophisticated rovers operating on the Red Planet today. -
In a crowdsourced search for celestial objects, four volunteers helped scientists identify a brown dwarf by studying images taken over the years by a NASA satellite. -
A human rights group finds itself with an interesting problem — an overwhelming number of videos to catalog as it builds legal cases. Computer scientists are creating tools to analyze the videos. -
The NASA has spotted enormous cyclones at the gas giant's north and south poles. The probe has also returned other data that have project scientists scratching their heads. -
The device isn't the first technology that can turn water vapor into drinkable liquid water. But its creators say it uses less power and works in drier conditions — the key is something called a MOF.
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Astronomers think there's an undiscovered planet lurking in the far reaches of the solar system, and they're asking the public's help to find it.
