Joe Palca
Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, "Joe's Big Idea." Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca is also the founder of NPR Scicommers – A science communication collective.
Palca began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent for Science Magazine.
In October 2009, Palca took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Palca has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society's James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing. In 2019, Palca was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in journalism.
With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he worked on human sleep physiology.
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Here's NPR correspondent Joe Palca, from a 1993 broadcast, to commemorate the anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA.
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Correspondent Joe Palca is retiring after 30 years covering science for NPR. We have an homage to his work - sometimes silly, sometimes serious, always scientific.
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More than two decades ago a small probe carrying an even smaller rover landed on Mars. Pathfinder and the Sojourner rover paved the way for sophisticated robotic explorers that have landed since 1997.
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Technicians are putting the final touches on the world's largest digital camera at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The camera will be sent to Chile and installed on a telescope in the Andes.
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NASA's InSight probe landed on Mars in 2018 to help scientists study the planet's interior. But Martian dust has been building up on InSIght's solar arrays, which could end its mission.
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A new report commissioned by the National Science Foundation finds a culture of silence and fear among employees at U.S.-run facilities in Antarctica. -
The inventors of Corbevax said it was cheap, easy to make, effective and safe. They hoped it could bring vaccine equity to countries that can't access costlier shots. Has it lived up to its promise? -
The vaccine maker alleges that its rivals Pfizer and BioNTech used some patented features of its mRNA technology to develop their COVID vaccines. -
As part of our summer series on sweat, we get answers to the questions: Do we need to sweat during sleep? And, why does a warm bath help you sleep, even if it makes you sweat?
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NPR begins a celebration of sweat — what it's made of, where it comes from and what it smells like. Spoiler alert: most of the time it doesn't have any smell at all.
