I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn't much of a Daft Punk fan. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo's mixture of electronic genres — techno, house, disco — but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn't turn me on in any other way.
Luke Tanner, 7, gets vaccinated for measles at a clinic near Swansea, Wales, in April. Wales is at the center of a measles outbreak that has been linked to one death.
Great Britain is in the midst of a measles epidemic, one that public health officials say is the result of parents refusing to vaccinate their children after a safety scare that was later proved to be fraudulent.
More than 1,200 people have come down with measles so far this year, following nearly 2,000 cases in 2012. Many of the cases have been in Wales.
Internal Revenue Service Director of Exempt Organizations Lois Lerner as she was sworn in at a hearing held Wednesday by the House Committee On Oversight & Government Reform.
Credit Marco Thines/Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung
Plant pathologists sequenced the genome of 19th century potato specimens like this one from London's Kew Gardens herbarium, collected during the height of the Irish famine in 1847.
An international group of plant pathologists has solved a historical mystery behind Ireland's Great Famine.
Sure, scientists have known for a while that a funguslike organism called Phytophthora infestans was responsible for the potato blight that plagued Ireland starting in the 1840s. But there are many different strains of the pathogen that cause the disease, and scientists have finally discovered the one that triggered the Great Famine.
In Orlando, Fla., early Wednesday "an FBI agent was involved in a deadly shooting connected to the Boston Marathon bombing case," NBC News is reporting. A man who was being questioned by the agent is dead. NPR's Dina Temple-Raston and Carrie Johnson have also confirmed the news.
Just how firm the man's alleged connection to the marathon case is, though, remains unclear.
Good morning. I'm Linda Wertheimer. A drummer in Baltimore pulled off the interstate yesterday, out of gas. So he pulled his drum kit out of the trunk and sat up on the shoulder and played along with traffic. When a state trooper pulled up, drummer boy explained he was just biding his time until help arrived, practicing his chops. He got away without a ticket and with the gift of gas from the highway department. Rock on. It's MORNING EDITION. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
Well, our wings have been clipped by some listeners. Yesterday, we told you about how some scientists in Canada saw their research crops destroyed by geese. We used the term Canadian geese. Listeners like Frank Kohn said we got that wrong.
FRANK KOHN: They're not Canadian geese. They're Canada geese because they don't hold passports, as far as I know, and it's not a nationality. It's a species name.
Lawmakers are demanding to know what went wrong and who is to blame at the IRS. Two Senate committees held hearings yesterday on the agency's aggressive handling of applications from conservative groups who were seeking tax-exemption. A top IRS official facing a House committee, today, intends to invoke her Fifth Amendment right not to testify. NPR's Peter Overby reports.
Here's some news for travelers. If you can't afford or don't want to pay the price for a hotel room, maybe you've used the cheap lodging site Airbnb. If so, you have to take New York City off your list. The popular website has suffered a major setback in court. A judge in New York ruled that an Airbnb user in Manhattan violated local laws when he rented a room to an out-of-towner.
