How Your Sandwich Changed The World
What road did your lunch travel before it reached your plate? NPR's latest animated video follows a BLT from the fields where it began its journey.
Humans
When Is It 'Terrorism'? How The Media Covers Attacks By Muslim Perpetrators
In the last five years, just 12% of terrorist attacks in the U.S. were carried out by Muslims. More than 50% were perpetrated by far right extremists. So why the media focus on "Islamic terrorism"?
Ethiopia's Coffee Farmers Are 'On The Front Lines Of Climate Change'
A new study says that Ethiopia could lose more than 50 percent of its coffee growing regions to climate change. But, higher altitude areas could become more suitable for coffee in the coming decades.
A Couple's Quest To Stop A Rare Disease Before It Takes One Of Them
Twenty years. That's how long two grad students, Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel, think they have before a deadly disease envelops Sonia's brain. The Massachusetts couple is now racing to find a cure.
Can You Find The Defibrillator At Work? Half Of People Say No
People who work in the hospitality and service industries were even less likely to know where to find an AED, according to a new survey. The devices can restart someone's heart after cardiac arrest.
A Mother's Early Death Drives Her Daughter To Find A Treatment
Sonia Vallabh knows that by the time she's middle-aged, a rare inherited disease will likely start killing off her brain cells. She and her husband have become scientists to try to stop the disease.
Doctor Who Wrote 1980 Letter On Painkillers Regrets That It Fed The Opioid Crisis
In 1980, Dr. Hershel Jick wrote a one-paragraph letter about low rates of addiction among hospitalized patients given narcotics. It was later cited as evidence that long-term opioid use was safe.
Research Finds Dressmakers Have Good Eyes, And Not Just For Style
In a study of people from a variety of professions, dressmakers were found to have superior 3-D vision. Could their endless hours of delicate handwork be honing eyesight?
A Few Genetic Tweaks To Chinese Bird Flu Virus Could Fuel A Human Pandemic
Three genetic changes could be enough to make a bird flu strain that's already killing some people in China highly contagious. Are experiments with a deliberately mutated version too risky?
The Roots Of Consciousness: We're Of Two Minds
Surgery that severs the link between brain hemispheres reveals that those halves have way different views of the world. We ask a pioneering scientist what that tells us about human consciousness.