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At Roosevelt High School in Seattle, teachers are using a new science curriculum called the Inquiry Method to teach biology. It's supposed to inspire curiosity -- sometimes at the expense of memorization of facts. NPR's Robert Smith is spending a whole year following the teachers and students at Roosevelt, and has this report. (6:15)

Journalist David E. Hoffman's new book is called The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia. He profiles a group of men who became leaders in post-soviet Russia, taking over industry, commanding private armies and buying up television stations. Hoffman is the former Moscow Bureau chief for the Washington Post. Now he is based in D.C. as the newspapers Foreign Editor.

John talks with NPR's Ketzel Levine about plants that do well in offices. While many plants will shrivel under fluorescent light, plants that are suited to irregular care and indirect light can thrive. Listeners can follow along on Ketzel's web site, Talking Plants. (6:30)

U.S. government investigators are working overtime screening potential federal employees at what could be the most unique office space in America: deep inside a Pennsylvania mountain, in the caverns of an abandoned mine. For All Things Considered, NPR's Pam Fessler gets a rare glimpse inside Iron Mountain..

Last year, we broadcast a story about a North Dakota high school basketball championship back in l968. NPR's John Ydstie played in that game. After hearing the piece, a listener named Ted Sherarts, took a car trip through the small towns of North Dakota. He sent us his travel diary, and we hear excerpts from that trip. (7:30)

His Broadway musicals include Bye, Bye Birdie, Annie, Applause, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman, and Golden Boy, which originally opened on Broadway in 1964 and starred Sammy Davis Jr. The show will be revived later this month by City Center Encores in New York. Strouse also composed music for film and TV, including "Those Were the Days," the theme song for TV's All in the Family.

Most American scientists are as much administrators, teachers and thinkers as they are experimenters. NPR's Joe Palca has a profile of a young chemical engineer at Northwestern University who hopes to discover new drugs, and how she really goes about it.

NPR's Richard Harris reports on the 2001 Mars Odyssey -- the latest spacecraft to go to Mars. It's been in orbit around the planet for a mere two weeks, but already its made some remarkable discoveries. (3:30)

John Steinbeck's 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath brought widespread attention to the hardships of Dust Bowl farmers struggling to find work in California during the Great Depression. On Morning Edition, Brian Naylor reports on the classic epic's origins as part of NPR's Present at the Creation series.

Sipping whiskey and flashing arm tattoos, R&B singer Toni Price performs at a small club in Austin in a weekly ritual called Hippie Hour. NPR's John Burnett has Price's story.