
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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The crisis in the northwestern part of Haiti seems to have stabilized, but many more people may be carrying the cholera bacteria without showing symptoms. Doctors and aid groups are rushing to quell the outbreak.
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The crisis in the northwestern part of Haiti seems to have stabilized, but many more people may be carrying the cholera bacteria without showing symptoms. Doctors and aid groups are rushing to quell the outbreak.
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When oil prices go up, so do natural gas prices, and both increases have a ripple effect on the economy. Shampoo bottles, pantyhose, buttons — you name it, and it requires oil or gas to make it.
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With that bullwhip and fedora, he's not your typical archaeologist. Sometimes, in fact, Indy's more treasure hunter than scientist. In the real world of archeologists, Indy's adventure-addicted character doesn't quite match the facts.
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Warmer air temperatures have triggered the collapse of an enormous ice shelf along the coast of Antarctica, scientists say.
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Christopher Joyce recently traveled with archeologists to a remote mountain lake in Peru to extract sediments from a lake bottom. They discovered that dry land archeologists do better working in the dirt than they do in a rocky rowboat.
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While a new U.S. intelligence report has found that Iran suspended efforts to build a nuclear weapon in 2003, experts say a big a part of the program remains intact: Iran is enriching uranium for fuel. But how efficient is the Iranian system?
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Climate experts are trying to come up with new ways to cut emissions of greenhouse gases after the current international climate treaty expires in 2012. One proposal is to pay developing countries to stop cutting down trees. The experts are gathering in Bali, Indonesia.
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With a barrel of oil hovering above $90, many of the major oil companies are heading for the Gulf of Mexico. Higher oil revenues mean they can spend more to drill farther out at sea and deeper down.
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In Brazil, a fast-growing soybean industry is fueled by demand from Europe and China. But foreign consumers are also pressuring Brazilian farmers to stop clearing tropical forests, a major storehouse of the carbon that contributes to global warming.