Joe Palca

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.

A city in Brazil is using a genetically modified mosquito to control the spread of diseases like Dengue fever and the Zika virus. NPR reports on whether the scheme is working.

Overheated lithium-ion batteries have been a problem for airplanes, cars and even "hoverboards." A chemical engineer at Stanford University thinks she has a solution to the problem.

Hold out your hand for a century, and 100 million particles of dark matter will pass through each second without leaving a trace. Still, a physicist in South Dakota thinks he may be able to catch one.

A tool for modifying genes is spreading through the biomedical research world like wildfire. As part of the series Joe's Big Idea, NPR's Joe Palca explores why CRISPR-Cas9 is becoming indispensable.

College student Austin Martin has created a website that uses rap lyrics to teach vocabulary to middle and high school students.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have found a field of dinosaur footprints on the Isle of Skye. The footprints were made by giant dinosaurs 50 feet long that weighed nearly 20 tons. (This piece initially aired on Dec. 3, 2015, on All Things Considered.)

Most people visit the Isle of Skye off the west coast of Scotland for the beautiful scenery or historic castles or maybe the Talisker Distillery.

Not Stephen Brusatte. He goes to Skye for the dinosaurs. And he's pretty jazzed about what he and his team discovered on a recent ...

Named Sustainability Base, a NASA facility in California is a model for energy-efficient federal buildings. It's powered by a fuel cell like those used on spacecraft and recycles water for flushing.

NASA is building a 2-pound helicopter drone that would help guide the vehicle on the Red Planet's surface. That way, the rover wouldn't need to wander as much to find its way around.

This is the time of year that ancient Greeks gave thanks to the goddess Ceres for bringing forth a bountiful harvest. Modern planetary scientists give thanks to a different Ceres — not a goddess, but the largest object in the belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Studying Ceres should help researchers ...

Even the smartest robot does a miserable job picking up objects it hasn't been programmed to recognize. One way robots may get better at it is to learn by experience, a researcher says.

Harold Kroto shared a Nobel in 1996 for finding a new type of carbon molecule that ignited the field of nanotechnology. Find a passion where — with hard work — you can be the best, he advises.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be shared by three scientists for their work on how cells repair damage to DNA. They have discovered DNA damage can lead to mutations, which in turn can lead to cancer.

The work of Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar details how cells repair damaged DNA and preserve genes.

Mothers have been warned for years that sleeping with their newborn infant is a bad idea because it increases the risk the baby might die unexpectedly during the night. But now Israeli researchers are reporting that even sleeping in the same room can have negative consequences: not for the child, ...

Mars is basically a pretty arid place, so it's pretty astonishing that the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to spot signs of liquid water on the planet's surface.

But even more astonishing in a way is that one of the places where signs of water was spotted is a ...

Personal rapid transit was supposed to be the future of public transport: lightweight pods on elevated tracks, on-demand destinations. But funding issues make cities reluctant to change course.

NPRreads is a weekly feature on Twitter and on The Two-Way. The premise is simple: Correspondents, editors and producers from our newsroom share the pieces that have kept them reading, using the #NPRreads hashtag. On Fridays, we highlight some of the best stories.

This week, we bring you three ...

What if there were a way to take the waste heat that spews from car tailpipes or power plant chimneys and turn it into electricity? An entrepreneur says something called thermoelectrics is the key.