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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While a new U.S. intelligence report has found that Iran suspended efforts to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, experts say a big a part of the program remains intact: Iran is enriching uranium for fuel. But how efficient is the Iranian system?
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Climate experts are trying to come up with new ways to cut emissions of greenhouse gases after the current international climate treaty expires in 2012. One proposal is to pay developing countries to stop cutting down trees. The experts are gathering in Bali, Indonesia. -
With a barrel of oil hovering above $90, many of the major oil companies are heading for the Gulf of Mexico. Higher oil revenues mean they can spend more to drill farther out at sea and deeper down.
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Two companies say the best way to slow global warming is to dump iron into the oceans. The iron would trigger blooms of tiny plants that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then keep it trapped deep in the ocean. But scientists are wary.
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A draft report released Friday warns that climate change could threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the decades to come. The international panel of scientists predicts drought and drying in many regions, including the American West.
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Fossils found in northern China show that some of the first birds on Earth lived on the water. The exquisitely preserved fossils, resembling modern ducks or loons, lived 110 million years ago, when many forms of today' animals started to take shape.
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The federal government reports that far more underwater pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico were damaged by hurricanes last year than they realized. Weather and the pressure to find divers and oil-rig workers have overtaxed available resources.
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President Bush vows in his State of the Union speech to increase funding to develop coal-fired power plants that produce no polluting emissions. But the federal government is currently undermining efforts by states to require power companies to use an existing "green" technology that's already available.
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The ivory-billed woodpecker was thought to be extinct. Now, scientists say it's been sighted again and conservationists are planning ways to protect it. The striking bird has been discovered in the Big Woods area of Arkansas.
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Engineers at a California electric utility are searching for missing nuclear fuel. The fuel doesn't pose a significant risk, but the case highlights the much bigger problem of how to store increasing stocks of nuclear waste. Hear NPR's Christopher Joyce.
