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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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.
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The head of the Russian space agency has said his country will end its participation in the International Space Station in 2024. What does this mean for the future of its partnership with NASA?
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NASA is releasing four more cosmic images from the James Webb telescope.
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NASA's newest and most powerful observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, will release its first color picture on July 12 at 10:30am EST.
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NASA's $10 billion new telescope showed the world something remarkable today: an image of some of the first galaxies to form in the universe. -
NASA has lost contact with a satellite called CAPSTONE intended to study a new kind of orbit around the moon. It's the same orbit the agency plans to use in future missions to send humans to the moon.
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Twenty teams in Canada received small grants to develop portable medical tools that could be used on long interplanetary space flights. They could also be useful in remote parts of Canada.
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By converting sounds to images, scientists can use artificial intelligence to quickly find and assess animals' calls, even deep in the ocean.
