Joe Palca

In the news business, an evergreen is a story that doesn't have to run on a particular day, but can stay fresh for a long time.

This is an evergreen story about an evergreen. In particular, a group of plants called bryophytes. Turns out they may be evergreen quite ...

Quite a few medical school students have something against obese people, and most of those who have such a bias are unaware of it.

That's the conclusion of study appearing in the July issue of Academic Medicine. It was conducted at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, ...

Climate scientists have a good reason to want to get away from it all. To get an accurate picture of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, you have to find places where the numbers won't be distorted by cities or factories or even lots of vegetation that ...

If you are up at 5 in the morning in Honolulu and are wondering what to do, I have a suggestion: Head over to Pier 38 and watch the Honolulu Fish Auction. It's quite a scene.

Getting up at 5 may seem a bit extreme, but for recent arrivals to ...

Computers were created to be useful tools, but all too often it's still a chore to get technology to do our bidding.

Corinna Lathan imagines a future that's no longer a chore, where computers understand our wants and needs so well that we don't even have to think about ...

Astronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69.

...

People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause.

Right now I'm at the novice level ...

Data from a soil sample on Mars have NASA scientists buzzing with excitement over a finding that could be "one for the history books." But they're not spilling the beans about their discovery just yet.

Experts are taking a close look at the country's levees after the failure of one caused massive flooding in New Jersey during Superstorm Sandy. Some argue that rebuilding levees may o...

There's no state agency that regulates or maintains levees in the Garden State. But the flooding brought by Sandy will inevitably bring calls for more flood-protection systems.

Drink that Slurpee too fast, and you risk an attack of "brain freeze." Scientists are fascinated by the headaches caused by consuming cold things. But alas, they still don't know where ice cream headaches come from.

Summer living is supposed to be easy — school is out, the days are long, the traffic eases. But it's not all diving boards and lemonade: Summer can throw us some curveballs, too. NPR ...

If you think astronauts just want dehydrated dinners and freeze-dried ice cream, think again. After a few days in space, they start reaching for the hot sauce.

In fact, they may start craving foods they didn't necessarily like on Earth.

"They crave [spicy] peppers, they crave sour and sweet things," ...

Joe Palca, NPR science correspondent and co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us, talks about why things are annoying and offers a scientific explanation of what irritates us and gets under our skin. Helping explain this phenomenon is Flora Lichtman, multimedia editor for NPR's Science Friday and co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us.