Jorge Castro, a visiting professor of ecology from Spain, sips water in the shade of a burnt tree in New Mexico's Bandelier Wilderness area, adjacent to the Bandelier National Monument. This site was devastated by last year's Las Conchas fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Driving along the Forest Service roads on the edge of the Bandelier National Monument, you can see the destruction wrought by the Las Conchas fire. The megafire burned more than 150,000 acres of forest — about twice the area of Manhattan.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Craig Allen, a research ecologist with the United States Geological Survey, points to the devastation in Bandelier's Cochiti Canyon, which was burned by the Las Conchas fire. According to Allen, these megafires are "the new normal."
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Wildflowers and weeds dot a once-forested landscape. The suppression of natural forest fires during the past century has set the stage for devastating megafires, setting new records in size and intensity.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Castro sits in a field that used to be forested by Ponderosa pine trees in the Dome Wilderness, an area adjacent to Bandelier.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
The skeleton of a lone tree torched in the Las Conchas fire
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Cochiti Canyon lies south of the Santa Fe National Forest, located near the Bandelier National Monument. The canyon was ravaged by a firestorm that spread out of the Las Conchas fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Allen (left) and Castro look across the wasteland of a plateau reduced to ashes during the Las Conchas fire. Because the fires stripped vegetation from hillsides, these areas are now vulnerable to flash floods during the summer rains.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
The skeletal remains of a tree are seen in front of a boulder in the Dome Wilderness area.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Allen surveys the moonscape of a plateau devastated by the Las Conchas fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Collin Haffey, a biotechnician with Bandelier National Monument (left), and Allen examine a tiny Ponderosa pine tree sprouting up in the burn zone in the Dome Wilderness. Indigenous species of trees have failed to return to the area since the Las Conchas fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A budding Ponderosa pine tree sprouts up in the burn zone, a sliver of hope for potential forest regrowth.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Jorge Castro, a visiting professor of Ecology from Spain, sips water in the shade of a burnt tree in New Mexico's Bandelier Wilderness area. Last year's Las Conchas fire devastated the area burning over 150,000 acres of forest.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Craig Allen, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, walks up a bluff overlooking Cochiti Canyon, which was destroyed by last year's Las Conchas megafire.
Fire scientists are calling it "the new normal": a time of fires so big and hot that no one can remember anything like it.
One of the scientists who coined that term is Craig Allen. I drive with him to New Mexico's Bandelier National Monument, where he works for the U.S. Geological Survey. We take a dirt road up into the Jemez Mountains, into a landscape of black poles as far as you can see.
Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., says Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the GOP vice presidential candidate, asked him to end his Senate bid after recent comments he made referring to "legitimate rape."
Republican Rep. Todd Akin's decision to stay in the U.S. Senate race in Missouri is likely to leave him with support from the state's evangelical community, but not much more, says a political scientist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis.
The daily fighting in Syria included this gun battle Wednesday involving rebels in the northern city of Aleppo. Still, the rival sides recently worked out a prisoner swap in which two women were freed from state custody, while the rebels released seven pro-government fighters.
The bitter fighting in Syria seems to grow worse by the day, yet the rebels and the government do occasionally manage to work out something that requires each side to trust the other: prisoner swaps.
In one recent exchange, two women held by the government were freed in exchange for seven men who were fighting on behalf President Bashar Assad's regime.
The "Loving Happiness Band," supported, in part, by the Communist Party, plays for a crowd on Nanjing Road.
Credit Frank Langfitt / NPR
In 1999, Shanghai turned Nanjing Road, the city's most famous shopping area, into a walking street. On summer nights, thousands fill the street, surrounded by colonial architecture and riotous neon signs.
In the 1920s and 1930s, Shanghai was one of the world's most exciting — and notorious — cities. But all that came to an end in the middle of the last century, when the Communists took charge.
Over the past decade or so, though, a vibrant Shanghai has re-emerged. Today, it's a dynamic city of 23 million, with a skyline that dwarfs Manhattan's.
The question of whether to circumcise a newborn son is no question at all for most observant Jews. In Europe, the practice has come under fire. This summer, a German regional court ruled that circumcision is physical abuse, and a Swiss hospital temporarily banned the procedure. The debate has infuriated Jewish community leaders there.
In Israel, even the most secular Jews overwhelmingly have their sons circumcised. But the debate in Europe has drawn attention to a still small but growing number of Israeli Jews who are forgoing the procedure.
The Larsen B ice shelf, a large floating ice mass on the eastern side of the Antarctic Peninsula, shattered and separated from the continent 10 years ago. A NASA satellite captured the event in this image from Feb. 23, 2002. The 650 foot-thick, 1,250-square-mile ice shelf had existed since the last ice age.
Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. But a new study finds that the story isn't quite so simple.
There's no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice. But a lingering question is whether these events can be attributed to human-induced global warming.
Cuba has tight advertising restrictions, so Cedric Fernando uses his British-made 1955 MG convertible to spread the word about his Indian restaurant, Bollywood, in Havana.
Cuba has hot weather, hot music, hot politics and hot Cubans. So why is the food so bland?
Tourists who have visited the island, particularly Cuba's state-run restaurants, know that Cuban chefs are deeply fond of frying their ingredients, but the range of seasonings tends to span from salt to garlic, with not much else in between.
Enter the Spice Man. He is Cedric Fernando, co-proprietor of the first and only Indian restaurant in Cuba, called Bollywood. And he's definitely turning up the heat in the kitchen.
School started this week in Florida, but some students still haven't finished their summer courses. Many needed to make up classes they failed during the school year, but this summer they had just one option, online school. As Sarah Gonzalez of member station WLRN reports, some students are now struggling to catch up.
SARAH GONZALEZ, BYLINE: Louis Gonzalez finished his freshman year at Wiregrass Ranch High School in Pasco County, but this year, he's still considered a freshman, although his schools has a different name for him.
The Russian republic of Tatarstan used to be held up as a model of moderate Islam coexisting with Christianity. But Muslims there are increasingly worried that the region may be falling under the influence of radical imams who received their training in Saudi Arabia. In July, Tatarstan's top Muslim cleric was severely wounded by a car bomb, and his deputy was shot to death by gunmen. Police blame Muslim militants, but local Tatar nationalists say the attacks are really provocations created by a Russian government that wants a firmer grip on the oil-rich republic.
