Inside New Mexico

A California think tank says global warming will gain more buy-in if it is viewed as an economic opportunity rather than a problem to be solved.

Archaeologists have unearthed the world's oldest musical instruments: flutes. These vulture-bone flutes no doubt helped warm our ancestors' spirits as they pushed north into Europe's hostile Ice Age conditions.

Salty ice grains inside in Saturn's outer ring point to a possible underground ocean on the moon Enceladus.

In 2001, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology began conducting autopsies on all slain service men and women. Captain Craig T. Mallak describes how the physical (and sometimes virtual) autopsies of soldiers have assisted in the design of body armor, helmets and vehicle shields.

A new ad by a major activist group blames the health care system's ills on greedy insurance companies and promotes a government-backed insurer as the cure. But the diagnosis is flawed.

President Obama signed Monday legislation enabling the Food and Drug Administration to regulate tobacco with broad new powers over marketing. But his closet smoking has raised some eyebrows among health advocates and led to some uncomfortable moments for the president.

Forty years ago, Ohio's Cuyahoga River, which had been compared to "an open septic tank," caught fire. Cuyahoga became a rallying cry for environmentalists and sparked the creation of the EPA and the Clean Water Act. Now the river teems with fish and wildlife.

As health care becomes more and more complicated, some people are turning to patient advocates to help them get through the system. Advocates help coordinate care, accompany patients to doctors' appointments and help negotiate the increasingly complex world of medicine.

Rescission, the act of retroactively canceling health insurance, is fairly common, a new congressional report finds. Companies can cancel policies right before a patient is scheduled to have major surgery if the patient failed to tell the company — either deliberately or inadvertently — of a pre-existing condition.

NPR reporter Richard Knox tells the story of his father's last weeks of life. Throughout the roller-coaster course of kidney and liver failure and multiple cardiac arrests, Knox struggled to make the best decisions for his father's care. Hardest of all was deciding when to fight and when to let him go.