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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Scientists eavesdropping in trees have decoded a high stakes game of hide and seek. Katydids rely on ultrasound to find mates and listen for bats, which use ultrasound to find the bugs, and eat them. -
This week's executive order to roll back climate regulations may sit well with the fossil fuel industry, but most of corporate America is unimpressed. Many large companies are sticking to their plans to tackle climate change by investing in renewable energy and green practices.
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The idea of plumes of moisture curling above our heads might seem beautiful, but new research shows atmospheric rivers to be among the most damaging of weather systems. -
Scientists concede that oil and gas production is only partly to blame for the 3 percent surge in the greenhouse gas in the last decade. Obama tightened rules on the industry. Will Trump repeal them? -
A new study looks at clusters of tornadoes, like those that hit the Southeast this week. They are costly in lives and insurance payouts. -
Researchers say the ice is melting more quickly than they've ever seen. They think it's because warm water is circulating under the ice shelf, and that the melting process appears to be irreversible. -
Capuchin monkeys in Brazil have been seen making sharp stone flakes. It was previously thought that only humans and their ancestors had flaking skills. -
New research reveals that the amount of methane from oil and gas operations is much larger than previously thought. But the recent uptick in methane emissions seems to be from agriculture.
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Flood managers suspect August's big rainstorms and floods in Louisiana are becoming more common there and elsewhere because of climate change. One clue: Much of the damage was beyond the flood plain. -
July 2016 was Earth's hottest month on record. And Arctic ice has shrunk this year almost as much as it did in 2012 — the most severe melt to date.
