NPR: Story of the Day Podcast

Research shows that sleep deprivation makes people emotionally volatile and temperamental — a fact that hasn't escaped the notice of some reality TV producers, who deny contestants sleep in an effort to kick up televised drama.

At Fort Lee in Virginia, soldiers train to become 92Ms — mortuary affairs specialists. They will go on to help recover, identify and prepare the remains of fallen soldiers. The 92Ms use the language of medical examiners, and they also make sure to properly honor the soldiers in their care.

Among the victims of a powerful earthquake near Chengdu, China, are hundreds of young students who are feared dead after being trapped in the rubble of their middle school.

Conservation scientist Gary Nabhan says the best way to recover some of America's at-risk species is to eat them. He documents lost and threatened foods in his new book, Renewing America's Food Traditions.

After spending 10 years traveling the world in a 1962 double-decker bus that maxes out at 33 mph, the Sprockets Circus family is ready for the next attraction: a home. The trip taught its members some valuable lessons about their fellow man.

Now that many airlines are charging for a second checked bag, one packing expert reveals tricks travelers can use to pack everything they need in one checked bag. He says the key is to draw up a list and bundle wrap clothes.

After years of struggling with their son's gender identity issues, Robert and Danielle decided to seek treatment. One option they are looking into would buy Armand, now Violet, more time to decide whether he wants to physically become a female. But it comes with risks.

Thousands of miles apart, two families noticed their toddler sons gravitated toward toys, colors and clothes generally associated with girls. Each family eventually decided to go with radically different approaches to their child's identity issues, as directed by their therapists.

FBI agents on Tuesday raid the Office of the Special Counsel, the agency that investigates whistleblower and discrimination complaints by federal employees. The FBI is examining allegations of political misconduct by agency employees.

James Lee Woodard walked out of a Texas prison last week after almost three decades behind bars. The state now agrees that Woodard was wrongfully convicted in 1981 of killing a girl he had been dating. Woodard is the 17th man from Dallas to be cleared by DNA evidence.

A year after one of the most powerful tornados on record obliterated Greensburg, Kan., wind turbines, dozens of houses and some of the world's most environmentally friendly buildings have sprouted where the storm left only splintered rubble.

Justin Fenton discusses his three-part series in The Baltimore Sun on the unbelievable criminal life of Cindy McKay. Among her crimes, McKay faked her own death and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from a seminary.

Following the controversy over shoddy care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other hospitals, the Army has changed the way it treats injured soldiers like Sgt. Scott Metcalf. Still, problems such as shortages of trained staff remain.

About 5 percent of patients are unhappy with the results of their Lasik procedure. Some cite lack of information about possible results to be key. The FDA is beginning a Lasik study and wants to hear from those who are dissatisfied.

The Democratic presidential campaigns are crisscrossing Indiana, stopping in Republican strongholds such as Martinsville. In this town with a troubled racial history, voters share their views on the match-up between a white woman and a black man.

Scientists all over the world are matter-of-factly amending, changing and rearranging living creatures for all kinds of reasons, some silly, some profound. Take the case of the MIT team that made the icky-smelling bacteria E. coli and gave it a wintergreen-scented twist.

The Griffieons have owned a farm for five generations and are training their three children to take it over. But the couple has differing views on whether or not to sell genetically modified products and treat their produce with herbicides and pesticides.

How you appear in the virtual world could affect your behavior in real life according to researchers at Stanford University. We examine how people interact psychologically with their virtual-reality selves.

The actress, whose career has spanned splashy Bond blockbusters and Sondheim on stage, plays a shy, sweet English spinster in the Masterpiece TV series based on Elizabeth Gaskell's tales.

After beginning to go bald in 2006, a penguin in San Francisco was fitted with a wet suit — and started to re-grow his feathers. Pam Schaller, a senior aquatic biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, shares Pierre's remarkable story.

Chefs at the Culinary Institute of America have teamed up with Harvard's medical school to show Americans how to make healthful food instead of quickie meals of pizza or taquitos. And they're starting with physicians.

There is an unofficial moratorium on taking encores at New York's Metropolitan Opera. But tenor Juan Diego Florez broke the 14-year old ban Monday night, singing 18 high C's back to back.

When foodies hear the phrase "tough reservation," they might think of the French Laundry in Napa or Le Cirque in New York, both known for their six-month waiting lists. They're a snap compared with Talula's Table in the historic Pennsylvania town of Kennett Square.

We make a lot of noise here on Earth with our TV and radio broadcasts, and some of that sound escapes into space. But how far will our signals travel? Can Lucille Ball's laugh be heard across the universe?

In rural southwestern Virginia, Mary and John Peluso meticulously assemble microphones modeled after some of the world's legendary and infamous microphones, but at a price today's musicians can afford.

Saturday, independently owned record stores across the country toast loyal patrons with giveaways and in-store performances. Singer-songwriter James McMurtry remembers browsing, and awkwardly self-promoting, in music shops.

American citizens have written to the first ladies of the nation since the days of Martha Washington. The letters make requests, ask for favors, criticize and praise. A number of letters to presidents' wives have been collected in the new book Dear First Lady.

What if you stretched out on stain-resistant carpet and then licked yourself? The average dog harbors at least twice the level of a type of chemical pollutant found in people. A new report has found a wide range of industrial chemicals in household cats and dogs.

As global demand for meat products has increased in recent years, so has awareness of the environmental damage that the industry causes. Modern meat production uses enormous amounts of energy, pollutes water supplies and creates greenhouse gases.

At just 16 years old, Kristen Byrnes is attracting attention for her Web site, which attacks mainstream science's views on climate change.

Animated heroine, beloved of preschoolers throughout the U.S., breaks the cartoon mold: She's Latina, bilingual, a tomboy and she knows how to get problems solved. NPR's Rolando Arrieta explores how Nickelodeon's scrappy heroine came to be.

Italy holds its parliamentary elections the day after tomorrow and the political campaigns have some surprising parallels to the contest in the U.S. For example, one of the two major candidates for prime minister is a relative newcomer to the national stage.

In her home studio in East Hampton, New York, illumination artist Ellen Frank is working to revive the atelier, a workshop where apprentices learn the skills of a master by working with the artist on his or her original works.

It turns out there may be some truth to the curious phenomenon through which Colbert Report guests excel following an appearance on the show. Political science professor James Fowler found a bump in Democratic campaign contributions.

"Change" may be the most common word being flung around on the presidential campaign trail this year. But William Safire, who chronicles political words and phrases, notes that "change" was big in Abraham Lincoln's day, too.

Among the 30,000 runners in Sunday's London Marathon are six Maasai warriors. In anticipation of their trip, the conservation charity Greenforce prepared a pamphlet to help the Maasai meet the strange residents of London.

Infants and toddlers who slept less than 12 hours a night were more than twice as likely to be overweight by age 3. That's according to a study in this week's Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. Other studies have produced similar findings with school-age children and adolescents.

Father Yod's followers were a fixture on the Sunset Strip in the late '60's. They took names like Electricity, dressed in robes and lived communally in a mansion in the Hollywood Hills. A large group of followers, including many of Father Yod's 13 wives, recently held a reunion.

Three days after the Rev.. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, performer Nina Simone and her band played at the Westbury Music Festival on Long Island, N.Y. They performed "Why? (The King of Love is Dead)," a song they had just learned, written by their bass player Gene Taylor in reaction to King's death.

He's more bigoted than Archie Bunker, more short-tempered than Jackie Gleason, and much more trouble-prone than his animated precursor Fred Flintstone. NPR's Julie Rovner profiles South Park's wildly inappropriate fourth-grader.

Once upon a time, Democrats were extolling that they had two worthy contenders to choose from in Clinton and Obama. But now, some Democrats say they might just vote Republican if their preferred candidate doesn't win the party nomination.

Turmoil in the stock market has people on edge, but Yale's investment guru, David Swensen, explains how his allocation strategy and rebalancing technique have earned consistent double-digit returns over the past two decades.

Unlike most members of their species, the chimps of the Senagelese grasslands spend most of their time on the ground. As Frans Lanting observed their creative survival tactics -- hunting with spears and drumming to impress potential mates -- he was reminded of himself.

Some restaurants and tourist attractions now have bar codes that cell phone users can scan to download an array of information. Will the pilot program take off like it has in Japan?

Artist Justin Gignac began putting garbage into boxes and selling them for as much as $100 to poke fun at the notion of value. A second project involves selling paintings of objects for the price of the item depicted. It's gotten him fancy dinners, video games and more.

Bram Cohen, 26, wrote a groundbreaking program called BitTorrent. Affected by Asperger's Disorder, he says he sometimes needs his friends to remind him what's socially appropriate.

In Semantic Antics, lexicographer Sol Steinmetz traces how even the most basic words --including "deer," "balloon" and "kid" -- have changed meaning in unusual and unexpected ways.

In a new anthology of baseball essays, sportswriter Stefan Fatsis celebrates his beloved, 31-year-old baseball glove. He talks to Robert Siegel about how he set out to find out about his mitt's history and what he learned along the way.

The Girl Scouts have launched a major makeover to revitalize their brand and boost their membership, especially among minorities. The group hopes to debunk the image of girl scouting as making crafts, camping and baking cookies.

A cheap but highly addictive form of heroin known as "cheese" has swept through Dallas in recent years, and local health officials are seeing Hispanic children as young as 9 suffering from the crushing effects of withdrawal.

Comic books -- or, in more highbrow parlance, graphic novelizations -- are nudging their way onto the shelves of bookstores and the pages of literary magazines. And writers such as Joss Whedon and Jodi Picoult are trying their hand at the genre.

Onboard a modern ocean liner, travel to the frozen continent is a far cry from the life-risking affair that it was for early explorers. But Antarctica's allure is still just as powerful.

The walls of Dublin's Kilmainham Jail hold two centuries of Irish history, but the place is most strongly associated with the Easter Rising of 1916, which laid the seeds for Ireland's eventual break from British rule. Many nationalists were held and executed there.

When jazz pianists are improvising riffs, their brains act much more like the dreaming brain, with inhibition turned down and creativity cranked way up, a new study finds.

Though his faith has waned over the years, author John Marks finds a metaphor for his own struggle with belief in the shadowy, invisible world of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown's book, Basic Brown , reads like a primer for aspiring politicians. He shares advice for political success and explains why he's delighted by the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Seventy-five years after the repeal of Prohibition, alcohol-related debates still flare up across the nation. In Alabama, beer with more than 6 percent alcohol is illegal. That means some of the most coveted brews in the world are off-limits. But that may soon change.

Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq amid mass demonstrations across the country. If the United States is still in Iraq today, does that mean the anti-war movement has failed altogether?

The icy ocean around Antarctica is one of the most unspoiled in the world. It's world-renowned for its penguins, but one team of scientists is more concerned about the animals you can't see -- and the fate these microscopic creatures may face in a warming world.

Iraq promises to be the top issue in an emotionally charged House race in Pennsylvania. The father of a fallen Marine will take on the only Iraq war veteran serving in Congress.

She's one of theater's Everest roles, exhausting, perilous -- and irresistible to any actress with a sense of adventure. Even Marge Simpson couldn't resist her. NPR's Lynn Neary asks why Streetcar is such a wild ride.

On Friday, math enthusiasts celebrate pi, the infinite number representing the relationship between a circle's diameter and its circumference. Represented by the Greek letter pi, the number is usually shortened to 3.14, so festivities take place on March 14 or 3/14.

Photos of Leslie Hall in bejeweled sweaters turned her into an Internet star. But an influx of fans left her in debt, so she squeezed into a gold lame bodysuit and started rapping.

A new study finds that one out of every four teen girls has a sexually transmitted disease. An official involved in the study discusses why the figure is so high and why African-American girls are the hardest hit.

With $50 and a plane ticket to Haiti, one can buy a slave. This was just one of the difficult lessons writer Benjamin Skinner learned while researching his book, A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery. He discusses the challenges of writing about this disturbing institution.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Phoenix utilizes extreme tactics, like pink underwear for inmates and charging individuals with smuggling themselves, to discourage crime and root out illegal immigrants. Although some say he's a repressive "clown," most voters back him wholeheartedly.