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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Climate scientists say global emissions of carbon dioxide seem to have dipped a bit in 2015, though the world economy is still growing. China's reduced use of coal may be the main reason. -
Negotiators from nearly 200 countries have spent a week in Paris trying to come up with a new treaty to curb global warming. They've got the rest of this week to finish.
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Past U.S. leaders tried to commit the nation via treaty to steep cutbacks in greenhouse gases. But without congressional support, those pledges fizzled. President Obama is trying regulation, instead. -
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 didn't slow down the gradual warming of the planet. Now governments meeting for a two-week summit are trying an a la carte approach. -
The 1997 Kyoto treaty set targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions that many nations didn't meet. This time, stakes are higher and all countries will be asked to set and meet their own limits. -
Bull trout are dwindling in Montana as their home waters warm and invasive fish devour them. Scooping up threatened fish and moving them higher up the mountain could backfire. Is the risk worth it? -
Drills and screws would damage the frail, 65.5 million-year-old bones of the Smithsonian's 38-foot-long Tyrannosaurus rex. So how do you make it stand? Blacksmiths in Canada are working their magic. -
Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama agreed on at least one thing this week: They need to coordinate action to lower greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change.
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Sound gets into our brains and processed so quickly that it shapes all other perceptions, says neuroscientist Seth Horowitz. "You hear anywhere from 20 to 100 times faster than you see."
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It can take more than just a keen ear to figure out what animals are saying. Sometimes, scientists are learning, you have to talk back to map the rich networks of conversation in a forest. -
For some insects, sound waves or vibrations are the real social media — high-speed rumbles sent through the air and along leaf stems to help the bugs claim territory, send warnings and find mates. -
The trumpeting roar of an elephant is loud. But scientists living with herds in the forests of central Africa say the deep rumbles that humans can't hear, but can feel, carry crucial messages, too.
