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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Andrea Turkalo spent 22 years in central Africa, studying rare forest elephants. Then civil war forced her to flee — and poachers killed many of the elephants she'd shared a life with. -
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. -
The world's biggest extinction some 250 million years ago wiped out 90 percent of all living things. What caused it has puzzled scientists, and now they think microbes may have done it.
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OK, maybe it just munched vegetation, small animals and eggs. But this newly named dino looked like a cross between a chicken and a bulked-up ostrich. Five-inch claws? We'd have stayed out of its way. -
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. -
Congress has tried to boost premiums on the cheap, subsidized insurance FEMA offers. But property owners in flood zones protested the rate hikes, and legislators backed off in 2013, calling for "further study." Meanwhile, a string of bad storms has left the program $24 billion in debt — so far. -
Archaeologists are now mapping a wall in eastern China that is as much as 15 feet tall in some places, and predates the more famous barrier by 300 years. Hundreds of miles long, it was likely erected to keep neighboring Chinese dynasties from invading each other, historians say.
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In 1965, a majority of the world survived on less than 2,000 calories a day per person. Now, 61 percent of people worldwide have access to 2,500 or more calories each day. -
Long protected by the Endangered Species Act, the Yellowstone grizzly population may have grown enough to come off the list. But many independent biologists say the Yellowstone grizzly is far from healthy, and they're trying to keep the government from "delisting" it.
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The storm's damage and disruption to homes, cities and families is undisputed. But researchers studying the underwater coastline say Long Island fared relatively well. The face of the shore retained much of its shape because underwater ridges of sand just offshore may have cushioned the blow. -
Previous estimates of the climate-warming gas were based on the rough number of methane-emitting sources on the ground — such as factories, refineries, stoves, swamps, landfills and cattle herds. But by directly measuring levels of methane in the air instead, a new study puts the total much higher.
