Crowdfunding Effort Seeks to Save Venice's Everyday Gondolas

"Even if you haven't been to Venice, you're probably familiar with the city's famous tourist gondolas: With baroque silver ornaments, shiny black lacquer, and sumptuous red seat cushions, they're unabashedly fancy, not to mention ubiquitous. A ride with a gondolier costs at least 80 euros (about $105), rain or shine (and it's 110 — $144 — more to be serenaded)."

"But there's another kind of gondola — a much simpler breed called atraghetto. There's no fancy ornamentation, no soundtrack, and instead of one gondolier, there are two. They're typically used to get locals from one side of the Grand Canal to the other, and they cost just 70 cents."

Book News: Harper Lee Says Literary Agent Exploited Her Health

• "Harper Lee is suing to recover royalties from her former literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who she claims tricked her into signing over the copyright to her novel To Kill A Mockingbird while she was recovering from a stroke in an assisted-living facility. The 87-year-old author regained the rights in 2012, but says Pinkus has still been collecting royalties. Cue the where's-Atticus-Finch-when-you-need-him jokes."

Long Hidden Vatican Painting Linked To Native Americans

"For close to 400 years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime."

"Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned 15th century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans."

"The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494 — just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World."

Please Don't Delete This Interview About Spam

"Open up your email on any given morning and you might get two or three notes from friends — and twice as many from people trying to sell you energy pills, offshore real estate or virility enhancers."

"And some promise riches: You've just won the Lithuanian National Lottery, which you cannot recall entering, or that a man in Kenya needs your help: "Please, sir, only you can help" to move $20 million through your bank account; all he needs is your routing number."

"That's spam. Not the meat-like loaf, but unbidden emails, many of them not even sent by actual people, but robot programs. And their volume is often much greater than the amount of real information people find in their inboxes."

He Helped Discover Evolution and Then Became Extinct

"A

sk most folks who came up with the theory of evolution, and they'll tell you it was Charles Darwin."

"In fact, Alfred Russel Wallace, another British naturalist, was a co-discoverer of the theory — though Darwin has gotten most of the credit. Wallace died 100 years ago this year."

"Wallace developed some of his most important ideas about natural selection during an eight-year expedition to what was then the Dutch East Indies — modern-day Indonesia — to observe wildlife and collect specimens. Few places on earth can rival this vast archipelago's tremendous diversity of plant and animal life."

How One Family Built Americas Public Palaces

"A Washington, D.C., museum wants you to spend some time looking up — to see soaring, vaulted tile ceilings built by a father-son team who left their mark on some of America's most important public spaces."

"These ceilings grace landmarks that include state capitols, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall — as well as some more ordinary buildings. One of them is Engine Number 3, a small brick firehouse not far from the Capitol Building — where yes, they still slide down one of those shiny brass poles. It's one of the oldest fire stations in the District of Columbia."

"Built in 1916, the firehouse has bright red doors, gleaming trucks and a narrow, gently arched ceiling over the entryway. The underside of the arch is lined with white tiles arranged in a ziggy-zaggy herringbone pattern."

Why Caffeine in Coffee Is a Miracle Drug For the Tired

"NPR's Coffee Week is winding down, but we'd be remiss if we didn't give some space to caffeine, the most widely used stimulant drug in the world."

"As much as we may enjoy the nutty dark roast aromas and the sensations of a warm beverage, coffee is often just a caffeine delivery system for a groggy brain. Approximately 80 percent of caffeine is consumed in the form of coffee, and in the U.S., we average about two cups of coffee per day. That 200 milligrams of caffeine affects our brains, our performance, and maybe even our health."

"Many believe that humanity's caffeine addiction has wrought a lot of benefits. Earlier in the week, historian Mark Pendergrast told us about how coffee (and caffeine) helped Western civilization "sober up" enough to get down to business. And Jerry Seinfeld claimed coffee has made us a more productive society."

How Coffee Influenced the Course of History

"Coffee is a powerful beverage. On a personal level, it helps keep us awake and active. On a much broader level, it has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture."

"Coffee plants grow wild in Ethiopia and were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years, but it wasn't until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds. 'Then it really took off,' historian Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep."

"By the 1500s, he says, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world. Within another 150 years, it took Europe by storm."

How Coffee Brings the World Together

"Coffee is more than a drink. For many of us — OK, for me — it's woven into the fabric of every day."

"It also connects us to far corners of the globe."

"For instance, every Friday, a truck pulls up to the warehouse of Counter Culture Coffee, a small roaster and coffee distributor in Durham, N.C., and unloads a bunch of heavy burlap sacks."

"On any random day, that truck could bring "10 bags from a farm in El Salvador; 20 bags from a cooperative in Burundi; two bags of a special coffee from Guatemala," says Kim Elena Ionescu, one of the coffee buyers for Counter Culture Coffee. She travels the world, visiting coffee farms and deciding which beans the company will buy."

So Hot Right Now Has Climate Change Created a New Literary Genre

"When Superstorm Sandy hit New York City last fall, the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, like most everything else, totally shut down. It was a week before power returned to FSG, according to Brian Gittis, a senior publicist. When he got back to his office, he began sorting through galleys — advance copies of books. And one of them caught him off guard."

"Its cover had an illustration of the Manhattan skyline half-submerged in water."

"'It was definitely sort of a Twilight Zone moment,' Gittis recalls."

"The book was Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich. Its protagonist is a boy genius who spins out worst-case scenarios and sells his elaborate calculations to corporations. Given what happens next — a disastrous hurricane floods New York City — it's tempting to say that Rich himself predicted Sandy. He didn't, of course. He was as surprised as anyone else."

On Its 7th Birthday Is Twitter Still the Free-Speech-Party?

"Since then the social media company has been an important communication tool in everything from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, to its use as a megaphone for celebrities. Over the years, its relationship to its free speech principles has changed."

From Trivial To Global Town Hall

"When it was founded, Twitter seemed rather trivial. I visited the company's tiny San Francisco offices in 2007 and spoke with co-founder Biz Stone. He told me about his first tweet."

"'I was at home ripping up old carpet and sweating,' he recalled. 'It was terrible. It was gross.'"

"Then Stone's phone buzzed in his pocket and he saw a tweet: 'Evan Williams is wine tasting in Napa.'"

God Particle Update:   Think They've Pinned Down the Higgs Boson

"The Large Hadron Collider sits in a 17-mile long circular tunnel straddling France and Switzerland. There are two scientific instruments called detectors located at distinct points around the tunnel. These detectors measure the debris when larger atomic particles are smashed together. Now, scientists have analyzed results from both these detectors, and both have seen a particle consistent with what theoretical models have predicted would be the Higgs Boson.

"Although the result is gratifying in the sense that the collider was built largely to find the Higgs, finding it exactly as predicted is a little disappointing. Finding something that wasn't predicted would mean there's an entire new field of physics is waiting to be discovered."

Six Words: Ask Who I Am Not What?

"This month NPR begins a series of occasional conversations about The Race Card  Project, where people can submit their thoughts on race and cultural identity in six words. Thousands of people have shared their six-word stories and every so often NPR Host/Special Correspondent Michele Norris will dip into the trove of six-word stories to explore issues surrounding race and cultural identity for Morning Edition. You can find hundreds of six-word submissions and submit your own at www.theracecardproject.com."

"Sometimes the themes that surface in The Race Card Project involve deep philosophical differences and seismic divides over fairness, opportunity, equal treatment and festering historic wounds. And then sometimes the six-word essays reveal personal memories or smaller moments in everyday life. For example, dozens of people have submitted Race Cards that touch upon a simple, seemingly innocuous encounter revolving around a question that goes something like this: Where do you really come from?"

Aspirin vs Melanoma Study Suggest Headache Pill Prevents Deadly Skin Cancer

"It's not the first study that finds the lowly aspirin may protect against the deadliest kind of skin cancer, but it is one of the largest."

"And it adds to a mounting pile of studies suggesting that cheap, common aspirin lowers the risk of many cancers — of the colon, breast, esophagus, stomach, prostate, bladder and ovary."

"The new study, in the journal Cancer, looked at melanoma in 60,000 post-menopausal Caucasian women. (Light-skinned people have the highest risk of this cancer.) Over a 12-year period, women who took aspirin at least a couple of times a week had a 20 percent lower risk of developing melanoma."

Since End of Last Ice Age Rates of Global Warming Amazing and Atypical

"There's plenty of evidence that the climate has warmed up over the past century, and climate scientists know this has happened throughout the history of the planet. But they want to know more about how this warming is different."

"Now a research team says it has some new answers. It has put together a record of global temperatures going back to the end of the last ice age — about 11,000 years ago — when mammoths and saber-tooth cats roamed the planet. The study confirms that what we're seeing now is unprecedented."

"What the researchers did is peer into the past. They read ice cores from polar regions that show what temperatures were like over hundreds of thousands of years. But those only reveal changes in those specific regions; cores aren't so good at depicting what happened to the whole planet. Tree rings give a more global record of temperatures, but only back about 2,000 years."

Wanna Play? Computer Gamers Help Push Frontier of Brain Research

"People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause."

"Right now I'm at the novice level of a game called EyeWire, trying to color in a nerve cell in a cartoon drawing of a slice of tissue. EyeWire is designed to solve a real science problem — it aims to chart the billions of nerve connections in the brain."

"'There's no way the professional scientists alone can analyze all of that,' says Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 'We need people to help us.'"

Pink Floyd's Dark Side 40 Years Later

"It begins with a heartbeat. Released in 1973, The Dark Side of the Moonwas Pink  Floyd's eighth studio album. It would become one of the best-selling albums of all time, and its iconic cover image still hangs in college dormitories everywhere."

"The record turned 40 this week. To mark the occasion, Weekend Editionasked All Songs Considered hosts Robin Hilton and Bob Boilen where they were when they heard Dark Side for the first time. Hear the full version of this story by clicking the audio link on this page."

First Listen: Jimi Hendrix 'People, Hell and Angels'

"Given that Jimi Hendrix has been dead for more than four decades, the visionary guitarist has remained awfully prolific: He left behind a formidable tape library, full of alternate takes, discarded ideas and collaborations of varying quality, and those materials have been mined in the making of far more albums and compilations than he churned out during his 27 years. That one such collection would produce a chart-topping single in 2013 is a testament to Hendrix's enduring appeal, not to mention technological advancements and the eternal struggle to maximize the commercial clout of a lucrative catalog."

"Thankfully, the newest collection of Hendrixiana (titled People, Hell and Angels, out March 5) is a suitable addition to the guitar giant's large posthumous output, drawn from recordings he'd made between 1968 and 1970 with a variety of co-conspirators. (Stephen Stills even turns up to play bass in 'Somewhere.') With producers and preservationists taking great pain to ensure that listeners never notice their work, these polished-up and previously unreleased recordings all shine a spotlight on Hendrix's considerable charisma; it's no fluke that 'Somewhere' has already reached an audience well beyond diehards."

Dictionary of Idioms Gets Everybody On the Same Page

"If you've ever shot the breeze, had a heart-to-heart, or bent somebody's ear — in fact, if you've ever talked at all — odds are you've used an idiom. These sometimes bizarre phrases are a staple of conversation, and more than 10,000 of them are collected in the latest edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, which came out this week."

"The new volume contains hundreds of new entries. Author Christine Ammer tells NPR's Renee Montagne that idioms are added to the book based on how commonly they're used. 'I usually go by the frequency with which I hear them used and where I see them used in print,' she says. 'There are some that simply jump out at you because they're used so often, even though they may be of very early provenance.'"

Scientists Trace Orgin of Destructive Russian Meteor

"Scientists from Colombia believe they have pinpointed the origin of the giant  meteor that smashed into a remote region of Russia earlier this month, injuring more than 1,000 people."

"Using some of the dozens, if not hundreds, of videos that captured the once-in-a-century event, the scientists have calculated the Chelyabinsk meteor's trajectory, tracing it back to a group of Earth-crossing objects known as Apollo asteroids. Unlike objects in the Asteroid Belt, which orbit between Mars and Jupiter, Apollos sideswipe Earth's orbit, posing a risk of collision. According to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center, more than 4,800 Apollo "close approachers" have been identified to date."