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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In the moonscape of Death Valley, one mystery stands out: boulders that seem to creep along the desert floor when nobody's looking. Thanks to video and GPS, scientists now think they know why.
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Marine biologists worry that certain species won't survive the shifts in sea acidity that climate change brings. But research on sea grasses along California's coast suggest marine preserves can help.
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Maybe it was messier than we thought, some scientists now say. Big brains, long legs and long childhoods may have evolved piecemeal in different spots, in response to frequent swings in climate. -
Pluck the silk of a spider web and it vibrates like a guitar string, scientists say. By strumming the strands and detecting the tune via sensors in its legs, a spider gets key information.
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The Smithsonian is set to unpack something it's never had before: a rare, nearly complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. It's a gift from a Montana museum that says this T. rex deserves to be famous. -
Pipelines conveying natural gas in Washington, D.C., are old and wearing out, with approximately four leaks per mile, a recent scientific survey of the pipes suggests. Researchers say the average amount of methane lost to leaks in Washington seems to be more than twice the national average for cities.
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A drop in the numbers of fierce beasts worldwide might seem like good news for deer and antelope. But expanding herds of grass-eaters leave stream banks naked and vulnerable to erosion, and can even change the stream's course, according to scientists calling for more protection of large predators. -
When hunter-gatherers started adding grains and starches to their diet, it brought about the "age of cavities." At least, that's what a lot of people thought. But it turns out that even before agriculture, what hunter-gatherers ate could rot their teeth. The problem: At least some of these ancients had a thing for acorns. -
The DNA from a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bone found in a cave in Siberia is more evidence that genetic mixing took place among Neanderthals and other hominid groups. One researcher hopes to use such evidence to help compile a catalog of the genetic changes that make modern humans unique. -
For decades, DNA has been used to identify victims of crime, even victims of war crimes. But there's no international standard for using DNA analysis for identifying bodies after a disaster. So some scholars are calling for an international group with the same reach as weapons inspectors.