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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CubeSats are only about twice the size of a Rubik's Cube. Once dismissed as tools for students learning the principles of aerospace engineering, they're now being used for more sophisticated missions.
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Scientists are getting closer to developing a wearable patch that can measure hydration and other health markers — in sweat. The hope is it could give athletes more data to boost their performance.
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A lab at Arizona State University tries to find new ways to combat the global scourge of locusts. One solution may have to do with farming practices.
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An engineer has invented a new way to test for the presence of cholera bacterium in water. The test could be useful in remote areas, because it's lightweight and self-contained.
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A powerful telescope is taking shape in the Chilean Andes. When finished, it will repeatedly image huge swaths of the sky, searching for rare events such as merging stars and other events.
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Landing a man on the moon captures the public's imagination. But in the decades after the Apollo program, robots have also generated public excitement about space exploration.
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An instrument on NASA's Mars InSight mission that was supposed to be driven into the planet's soil is stuck. It's designed to measure Mars's internal temperature.
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Small drones have a problem — their battery life runs out relatively quickly. A team of roboticists says it has created special landing gear that can help conserve precious battery life.
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A team led by an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Austin has found two new planets by using artificial intelligence to sift through data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.
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A lot of vaccines and some medications need to be delivered by injection. Two groups of researchers are designing ways of delivering these medications by putting them in pill form.