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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There will be more big typhoons, some in poor countries, some in wealthier regions. But one thing we all share is a difficulty in keeping the next disaster in mind as we rebuild. Most cities are coastal, where even the certainty of big losses hasn't dissuaded people from moving into harm's way. -
Eternity is a long time to keep meat fresh for pharaoh. New research reveals the chemical secrets of ancient Egyptian beef and poultry "meat mummies" that were buried alongside the dearly departed to feed them in the great beyond. -
Scientists suspect that warming air and rivers, as well as smaller winter snowpack, is endangering western trout. But on a ranch in Montana, methods to protect trout from the effects of cattle ranching are helping the trout become more resilient to the inevitable change in their environment. -
In the northern Rockies of Montana, wildlife is a part of daily conversation. Fishing alone generates $250 million a year, and the pursuit of trout brings in most of that money. But record droughts and declining snowpack mean streams are becoming less habitable for this revered fish. -
Super Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines, destroying whole towns, killing thousands and displacing more than 600,000 people — and it raises questions about emergency policies and realities in Pacific coastal nations.
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Huge stone slabs weighing up to 300 tons that now reside in Beijing's Forbidden City were slid more than 40 miles in 15th- and 16th-century China over water-lubricated ice roads in the dead of winter. Though spoked wheels had been around for almost 3,000 years, the ice roads were smoother and required less manpower. -
It's been a year since Hurricane Sandy knocked the mid-Atlantic states for a loop. Scientists say that as sea level rises, such storms are likely to occur more often. But the new, more realistic flood maps could boost flood insurance rates. Will politics trump science? -
Conventional wisdom about early human evolution is that several species arose in Africa. But a skull found in the former Soviet state of Georgia could upend this idea. The discovery suggests that there may have been more variety in a single species than previously suspected. -
Chemical compounds discovered in a mosquito fossil from Montana offer scientists clues to what the very old insect ate before it died. The bug's final blood meal was likely from a bird, researchers say, and could lead to other hints about ancient Earth. -
Nearly a year's worth of rain was dumped on parts of the state in four days this fall. The downpour from the heavens created a slurry on the mountainsides that scrubbed away soil, trees, boulders and buildings. Scientists say the flooding may have been a once-in-a-thousand-years event. -
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. -
The chemistry of dozens of streams and rivers across the U.S. is changing. Waters are becoming more alkaline — the opposite of acidic. And the reason is counterintuitive — researchers believe that acid rain is to blame.
