NPR News

Spotted owls are on the decline despite two decades of work to bring them back. So, later this month, wildlife officials are releasing a new plan to protect the owls, and it includes a controversial new approach: eliminating their cousins.

In a dense forest near Muir Woods, just north of San Francisco, National Park Service ecologist Bill Merkle plays a recording of a spotted owl in hopes of hearing from a real one.

"I think they're just probably 50 or 60 feet up there," he says.

A smiling Rep. Gabrielle Giffords can be seen this morning in the first photos released of the Arizona Democrat's face since she was shot in the head on Jan. 8.

Is your job a pressure cooker? Most people are familiar with the metaphor, but not the actual device — once a common household item.

"It was the wedding gift that you gave. People got a pressure cooker," says Lorna Sass, author of The Pressured Cook. She says when Presto introduced its version of the gadget at the 1939 World's Fair, it didn't take long for it to catch on.

As you enter Cocktail Culture, an intoxicating exhibit of apparel, accoutrement and ephemera at the Rhode Island School of Design's Museum of Art, it's hard not to think of Billy Strayhorn's lyrics in his jazz standard "Lush Life":

I used to visit all those very gay places
those come-what-may places
where one relaxes on the axis of wheel of life
to get the feel of life
from jazz and cocktails

On-Air Challenge: You are given three words, starting with the letters T, O and P, and must come up with a fourth word that can follow the words and complete a familiar two-word phrase. For example, given the words "taste," "oral" and "paternity," the answer would be "test," as in "taste test," "oral test" and "paternity test."