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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Deep in a French cave, researchers have found numerous ovals of broken stalagmites. They believe the rings were arranged by ancient Neanderthals.
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Rising sea levels put extra pressure on coastal bedrock in South Florida. Eventually, as seawater moves in, it could contaminate plants on the surface and the region's stores of freshwater beneath. -
Already, neighborhoods flood more often in Coral Gables, Fla., and water has seeped up from beneath low-lying buildings and yards. Mayor James Cason wants his city prepared for the economic fallout.
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A nearly complete fossilized skull from Argentina helps explains the success of these giant dinosaurs that roamed some 95 million years ago. -
The 15-year project wasn't a flight of fancy. Biologists used a plane to successfully teach many young, captive-bred whooping cranes to migrate cross-country. But the birds aren't reproducing well. -
Scientists say the buzz picked up by hydrophones in the Pacific may be caused by "fish farts" — the emptying of air bladders that let clouds of fish rise and fall during daily hunts for food. -
The nets that ensnare the giant totoaba fish also trap and kill an endangered porpoise called the vaquita.
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Before it does damage, an earthquake sends out a "P wave" that scientists use to find location and size. The U.S. quake warning system under development on the West Coast is built around the P wave. -
The weather trail that led to a blizzard in the Mid-Atlantic likely started with a very warm Pacific, scientists suspect. Whether climate shifts will bring more strong El Niños is still uncertain. -
The U.S. had 10 weather events in 2015 that cost $1 billion or more in damage, with December the warmest and wettest month on record. Climate scientists blame a warming climate and strong El Nino.
