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 irony: tobacco plants may be key in preventing COVID-19. Two companies are using the plants to produce proteins for a vaccine. One candidate vaccine is already in a clinical trial.
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Several COVID-19 vaccine candidates are being tested now. But why does it take 30,000 volunteers to know if one is safe and effective? And what does it mean to say a vaccine candidate is working?
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Emergency use authorization makes it easier for doctors to use a drug in a manner not specifically approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA granted these drugs this status in March.
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The impact of the drug on the virus is being studied, but there is not yet evidence from medical trials — and there have been some warnings about side effects from taking the medicine.
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NASA's six-wheeled rover landed on the red planet in January 2004 for what was billed as a 90-day mission. The plucky robot was still going until a dust storm on Mars last summer killed it.
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There's a new probe on Mars. After Monday's tricky landing, NASA's InSight spacecraft is to deploy a sensitive seismometer and temperature probe to let scientists explore the planet's interior.
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The NASA mission is set to launch Saturday morning. The InSight spacecraft will land in the Elysium Planitia to listen for "Marsquakes" and learn more about what Mars is made of.
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Hawking was a theoretical physicist who changed how scientists think about gravity. He also wrote the best-selling book A Brief History of Timeand lent his machine-aided voice to TV shows. He was 76.
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NASA's probe has spent the past 13 years orbiting Saturn, making a number of important discoveries along the way. On Friday, it will hurl itself into the planet's atmosphere and disintegrate.
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In 1997, the spacecraft's mission paved the way for the more sophisticated rovers operating on the Red Planet today.