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NPR's Allison Aubrey examines the danger that common food allergies pose to some Americans. Common allergens, such as peanuts and certain grains, are often unlisted as ingredients on food packaging, or contaminate other food prepared in the same factory. Such problems lead to product recalls every year and have prompted the Food and Drug Administration and food processors, to find ways to test for allergens.

NPR's Van Williamson reports on the declining blue crab population in the Chesapeake Bay. As this regional symbol grows scarce, Marylanders may have to change more than their eating habits. (6:52 -

In the final installment of the favorite summers series, NPR Special Correspondent Susan Stamberg talks with a kayaking couple, Jason Hale and Dixie-Marie Prickett, who are taking this summer to fulfill a dream -- paddling some of America's most challenging rivers.

Health officials in Houston, Texas, have discovered mosquitoes carrying the virus that causes St. Louis encephalitis in seven areas of the city. NPR's Wade Goodwyn travels with one of the health department's "mosquito men" as he makes his way through Houston's extensive sewer system, trapping mosquitoes and sending them back to the lab for testing. (6:15) CORRECTION, aired on All Things Considered Sept. 6, 2001: Wade Goodwyn's report about a mosquito surveillance officer in Houston brought out the science police in the audience. Dr. Victor Sloan of Scotch Plains, N.J., writes this: "In Wade Goodwyn's excellent story on Houston's mosquito hunters, he said 'when the dry ice melts.' Melting is the act of a solid becoming liquid. Dry ice does not melt, it sublimes. That is, it goes directly from a solid to a gas, without ever becoming liquid. When I was about 10, my father tried to explain this to me. It took me years to believe him."

Joe Gutierrez, a 41-year veteran of the steel mills, has some stories to tell. He's one of the writers in a new book of short stories and poems penned by steelworkers.

Many of the short stories in Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail, Bobbie Ann Mason's new collection, "are about people busting out of something," the author tells Bob Edwards on Morning Edition. "A lot of times they're coming home, coming full circle in kind of a zig-zaggy way."

For years, St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was an anomaly in lower Manhattan. The small church stood across the street from the twin towers of the World Trade Center, on some of the most valuable real estate in New York. But St. Nicholas church was destroyed by falling debris on September 11th. Now, rather than selling their land, the parishioners are pledging to rebuild the church as a monument to those who died. NPR's Melissa Block reports.

Paleontologists may have gotten dinosaur nostrils all wrong. Until now. As NPR's Richard Harris discovered, dinosaur artists up until now had simply guessed where the nostril would appear on a dinosaur's snout.

U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is a professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. Collins' latest work is called Sailing Alone Around the Room.

It turns out that migrating birds like to fly in a V-formation because they get more miles per gallon that way. NPR's David Kestenbaum reports that scientists writing in this week's Nature studied the aerodynamics of tame pelicans. The birds liked to fly along behind the researchers' boat.