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Peter Payette of Interlochen Public Radio reports on biotech companies' efforts to grow potentially toxic plants in controlled environments. One such place is an abandoned copper mine in Michigan, where plants are grown 200 feet underground.

Jennifer Schmidt of member station WBUR takes a look at the history of Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound. The potion has been available in the United States for over a century, and its various marketing campaigns over the years have charted a century's changing responses to women's health problems.

Host Bob Edwards talks with Bill O'Hare, co-author of a report claiming that the overall health of children born in the U.S. increased during the 1990's.

Commentator Laura Archer Pulfer thinks she may have found the most ridiculous way to waste money...at an Oxygen bar.

NPR's Martin Kaste reports from Colombia on the growing power of right-wing paramilitary groups in that country's decades-old guerilla war. The paramilitary groups have been responsible for hundreds of deaths in recent months.

Int he third part of the series "What Makes a City Great," NPR's Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg offers an unlikely candidate.

A radicial approach to boost scores on state standardized tests is being tried by the Kansas City-Missouri School District--inviting students to study on Saturdays. Laura Spencer of member station KCUR in Kansas City reports that if scores don't improve, the state will take over the school district.

The German Government released figures that shows attacks last year by Neo-Nazis against foreigners have risen by 40 percent over the same period in 1999. From Berlin, NPR's Guy Raz reports on how a group of social psychologists view how history of being passed from one generation to the next.

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."

NPR's Kathy Lohr reports on the national debate over minors' access to abortions. Many states have passed parental involvement laws. One mother says if the state had informed her, she could have talked her daughter out of having an abortion. Other parents say they should NOT be notified because the law forces some minors to go underground, where they get illegal and unsafe abortions.