Joe Palca Honored for Winning ACS Grady-Stack Award

That unique reporting style of Joe Palca, science correspondent for National Public Radio, has earned him the top chemistry reporting award from the world’s largest scientific society. Palca has just been named the 1998 recipient of the American Chemical Society’s James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. The annual award, which includes a $3,000 prize, is the Society’s highest honor for public communication about chemistry. It was established in 1955 to recognize, encourage and stimulate outstanding reporting that increases the public’s knowledge and understanding of chemistry, chemical engineering and related fields. Champagne is truly “chemistry in a bottle,” says Palca. In a New Year’s Eve report broadcast on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Palca used the beverage to explain the chemical process of fermentation, especially the special second fermentation step that gives champagne its characteristic bubbles—actually carbon dioxide that has been dissolved in the liquid.

The CO2 is responsible for the distinctive ‘pop’ when a bottle is opened, and for producing the small amount of foam on the top of a glass of champagne. And that’s where Palca’s lipstick advice comes in. Lipstick, he says, has an anti-foaming agent that causes the foam bubbles in champagne to burst. If you like the foam, “and who doesn’t,” adds Palca, don’t wear lipstick. The same holds true for beer, he says.