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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China is no longer taking the world's waste. The U.S. recycling industry is overwhelmed — it can't keep up with the plastic being churned out. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. -
Giant gyres of plastic in the ocean grab headlines, but it's the tiny bits of plastic that scare scientists. And they've made their way everywhere, a new study finds — including in our seafood. -
Islands in Southeast Asia were clearly important in the evolution of early humans, say scientists who have turned up 50,000-year-old remains of what they suspect is a previously unknown human species. -
Every year, 8 million tons of plastic wash into the oceans. The biggest sources are in Asia. In the Philippines, one man is going head-to-head with multinational corporations to stop the plastic tide. -
The fortuitous dip in emissions of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, during the past three years is over, as economies turn up. The trend in the near future looks grim, say climate scientists. -
Almost 100 million years ago, when the South Atlantic Ocean was young, giant reptiles prowled the seas. Scientists have found a trove of these ancient creatures in the African nation of Angola. -
A scientific panel, convened by the U.N., lays out a challenging path to keep the global climate from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — the red line for dangerous consequences. -
The world's oldest drawing was made 73,000 years ago in a South African Cave on a rock with an ocher "crayon." -
The spread of air conditioning may have kept some people from dying in this summer's extreme heat. But studies project more heat-related illnesses as the climate warms. -
The engineer views a landfill as a living ecosystem, and the plastic that clogs it as a serious threat that crowds out life and never goes away. Can we eliminate the waste before it smothers us?
