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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A space rock zipped by Earth on Sunday night. Astronomers knew it didn't pose a threat, in part thanks to a new automated warning program called Scout.
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The object known for now as 2014 UZ224 is only about 330 miles across and takes 1,100 years to orbit the sun. But one of the most interesting things about it is the way researchers found it.
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How thin can a camera be? Rice University researchers created a "FlatCam" without lenses — one that can even be potentially made into wallpaper. Its roots trace to early pinhole cameras.
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You think bringing a new toothbrush to market is easy? The seven-year saga of two dental entrepreneurs struggling to bring their patented brush to consumers suggests otherwise.
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For a class project, three engineering students at Rice University devised an inexpensive robotic arm to help a teenager with an uncommon bone disease.
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Dengue fever, a nasty disease caused by a virus, is just beginning to show up in the U.S. It's carried from person to person by mosquitoes, and one researcher studying the spread is looking for clues in the age of the insects. But it's not very easy to tell how old a mosquito is.
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A newly excavated site in central Texas contains evidence that the first human settlers in the Lone Star state arrived more than 15,000 years ago — that's more than 2,000 years earlier than scientists originally thought.