NPR News

It seems so obvious that hospitals looking to minimize infections should go with faucets that sense your hands instead of the old-fashioned ones people have to touch with their grubby mitts.

Well, researchers at Johns Hopkins Hospital ran some bacterial tests on both types of faucets just to be sure the ones that use electric eyes are OK in places where patients vulnerable to infection would be treated.

Kentucky and Tennessee have reportedly become the second and third states to turn over their supplies of an increasingly rare lethal-injection drug to the Justice Department.

The drug, sodium thiopental, is one of three drugs that most states that enforce capital punishment use in their lethal injections. But when a company in Illinois stopped making the strong sedative, supplies ran short — and federal officials believe some states may have gone outside the law to acquire it.

Ella Leya has quite a voice and quite a story. Born in Azerbaijan, she was a Muslim girl who loved jazz. When a couple of influential Americans heard Leya sing, they helped her and her son Sergei leave the USSR. They wound up in the U.S., where she married a rabbi and settled in Chicago.

Leya's new album, The Secret Lives of Women, features songs about Anne Boleyn, Cleopatra, Princess Diana and Sappho, all of whom Leya says inspire her.

Scientists surveying the bottom of the Pacific Ocean have discovered something they knew was there but had never seen before: a shipping container.

Cargo ships regularly lose these containers overboard — they write them off and collect insurance. But now marine biologists have found one off the coast of California and have decided to study how it may affect sea life. Already, they've discovered that the container has become a new type of habitat on the muddy ocean floor, attracting its own suite of creatures.

Sir Ben Kingsley in a universally acclaimed bio-epic? Definitely not this time around.

Joseph Lelyveld's new biography of Mahatma Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi And His Struggle With India hasn't even hit bookstores in India, but it has already unleashed a firestorm of controversy.