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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One reason is that it would take the Curiosity rover about a year to get there, even with no obstacles and no traffic. But the other reason might surprise you. -
Personal rapid transit was supposed to be the future of public transport: lightweight pods on elevated tracks, on-demand destinations. But funding issues make cities reluctant to change course.
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This week's selection of what NPR correspondents, editors and producers are reading online includes a prison story and a baseball tale.
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What if there were a way to take the waste heat that spews from car tailpipes or power plant chimneys and turn it into electricity? An entrepreneur says something called thermoelectrics is the key. -
Can a computer program craft passable prose — something readers can't distinguish from human-authored stuff? How about poetry, or dance mixes? New contests pose those challenges.
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The drug derived from the venom of cone snails must be injected into the spinal column to get beyond a patient's blood-brain barrier and bring relief. But scientists think they may have a workaround. -
Sometimes one person's insight transforms medicine. Dr. John Clements is one of those people. In the 1950s he discovered a slippery lung substance key to breathing, and to the survival of tiny babies. -
Scientists have long wondered what's in the wispy cloud of gas floating in the space between the stars, absorbing starlight. Turns out it's a form of carbon named after architect Buckminster Fuller.
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Scientists have had a hard time finding the weak spots of Cryptosporidium parvum, but now that's changing. It's not a common killer in the U.S., but it's a different story in the developing world.
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Entrepreneurs are turning to Oak Ridge National Lab's supercomputer to make all sorts of things, including maps that are much more accurate in predicting how a neighborhood will fare in a flood.
