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Alabama is considering a bill to make sweet potato the state vegetable after a proposal from an unlikely group of high school students.

In a study of the early coronavirus epidemic in the U.S., a third of people who were hospitalized were African American. Top risk factors were high blood pressure and obesity.

In Turkey, the government is touting its donations of medical supplies abroad even though coronavirus is taking a steep toll in Turkey and the economy is on the brink.

NPR's reporter in Nairobi finds his parents connecting with his kids through TikTok. Formerly the realm of Gen Z, the app's now a family board game where Grandma and Grandpa reveal their silly selves.

Shatner, 90, became the oldest person to fly into space, according to Blue Origin. The company, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its first human spaceflight in July.

California's top election official has announced that organizers of a campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have submitted enough valid signatures to place the question before voters later this year.

The iconic 26.2-mile trek through all five of the city's boroughs returned in person on Sunday after it was cancelled last year due to the pandemic.

The rule change is an apparent victory for Norway's female handball team after it was fined for wearing shorts rather than the requisite bikini bottoms over the summer.

NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."

The threat of Russia invading Ukraine is real, the Biden administration insists. At the same time, top officials say they hope that being vocal about the intelligence they have could deter action.