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This summer's dry weather is drawing comparisons to the droughts of the 1950s and even the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Technology and techniques developed from those hard times are helping to save some of today's crops, but there's no substitute for water.

A marathon baseball game in St. Louis raises money for families of injured or deceased firefighters and police officers.

A special breed, viola da gamba players rarely meet their own kind. But once a year, they come together for an annual jam session they call a conclave.

As part of her seven-nation tour of Africa, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited South Sudan. NPR's John Burnett visited the one-year-old nation during Clinton's visit. He joins guest host Susan Stamberg to talk about Clinton's visit and the challenges facing the new nation.

Congress wrapped up its summer work to take the remainder of August off. NPR's David Welna joins guest host Susan Stamberg to explain what Congress accomplished, and what's left on the must-do list before the November election.

Landing on Mars is no walk in the park. It requires years of planning, thousands of engineers and, in the case of NASA's Curiosity rover, billions of dollars. NPR's Joe Palca has covered the last four successful landing missions and has some thoughts about process of getting to Mars.

You find out so much about a country when it's hosting the Olympics. It's almost as if the Games lay bare a nation's soul. NPR's Philip Reeves says that's what's happening in Britain. He's finding the experience unnerving, as he explains in this letter from the Olympics.

Scientist Adam Steltzner worries about whether the Mars rover landing equipment he helped design will work. But in his garden, where he approaches things like the engineer he is, he is firmly in charge.

Orthodox Jews around the world have been reading the Talmud, cover to cover, for almost seven and a half years straight. Day by day, they read each of the more than 2,000 pages of the holy book, and this past week, they finished the last page together in celebration.

Swimming the final race of his Olympic career, Michael Phelps gilded his resume just a bit more, helping the men's 4x100m medley relay team claim the gold medal. Phelps turned away a surprising challenge from the Japanese relay team, which had the lead when he went into the water to swim butterfly.