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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China is no longer taking the world's waste. The U.S. recycling industry is overwhelmed — it can't keep up with the plastic being churned out. This doesn't bode well for our plastic waste problem. -
As consumers rebel against plastic waste, there's a growing question: Do we invent something people can toss without harming the environment or do we change people by giving them a chance to reuse?
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Plastic waste litters cities, oceans and even the air. Largely overlooked is how making plastic affects the environment. Plastic is a big contributor to global warming. So are its alternatives. -
Entrepreneurs are eager to find substitutes for plastic that naturally degrade. One option is a "natural" plastic made by microbes and then eaten by them. But the process is still in the early days.
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Giant gyres of plastic in the ocean grab headlines, but it's the tiny bits of plastic that scare scientists. And they've made their way everywhere, a new study finds — including in our seafood. -
It was the biggest extinction in Earth's history. A new Smithsonian exhibit notes that some of the same things that killed over 90% of ocean species 250 million years ago are happening now. -
The Cocos Keeling Islands make up barely 6 square miles in the Indian Ocean. It's a good place to measure debris because almost no one lives there. Scientists were flabbergasted by what they found. -
Until now, the only Denisovan remains came from a cave in Siberia. The new find is "much more complete," one expert says. -
Tiny fragments broken down from larger pieces of plastic have already been found in rivers, lakes, oceans and in agricultural soil. But very few studies of wind-borne microplastic have ever been done.
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Islands in Southeast Asia were clearly important in the evolution of early humans, say scientists who have turned up 50,000-year-old remains of what they suspect is a previously unknown human species.
