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Camps in nature can be great for kids, but they can also expose campers to floods, wildfires and heat. Here are the top questions experts say people should ask camps about safety.

Much of the Midwest was once a great swath of prairie and oak savanna before it was transformed by farms, patchy forests and small towns.

With just over a week until the Iowa caucuses, organizers for various candidates are trying to make sure their troops will show up in force for one of the most important early contests for the presidential nomination. NPR's Laura Ziegler reports that for many people in Iowa, the up-close-and-personal nature of the caucus process offers them a chance to meet the candidates and for many, it is the closest encounter they have with representative democracy.

Host David Wright talks with ethnobotanist Mark J. Plotkin, Ph.D, about his new book Medicine Quest. Plotkin has done extensive research throughout the rainforests of South America to explore the healing secrets of the natural world. Plotkin says we have a lot to learn from the biodiversity of the rainforest, especially from unlikely sources such as spiders, snakes and tree bark.

NPR's Michele Kelemen reports that environmentalists in Russia are going to court over Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's restructuring of the country's environmental protection system. Activists fear that the new system is really a cover for a plan to open up long protected nature reserves to commercial usage, to bring in badly needed cash to the central overnment. Kelemen visited a reserve in southern Siberia where rangers are worried about their future and the protection of the reserve.

The Imperial Sand Dunes is a 40-mile-long corridor of wind-swept desert in the southeast corner of California -- a place treasured by off-road vehicle enthusiasts and nature lovers alike. But a proposed plan to manage the dunes is making both groups unhappy. Erik Anderson reports for Weekend All Things Considered.

NPR's David Baron profiles a community where a woman was killed by a mountain lion. There have been several lion sightings in the Sierra Nevada foothills recently, even in some of the new subdivisions. Yet for many who've moved there from cities, it's part of living close to nature. Newcomers are more worried about a proposed new Wal-Mart than being attacked.

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks to Jim Head, Professor Emeritus of the Geological Sciences at Brown University, about China's new space station and the country's rapidly advancing space program.

A study suggests Atlantic bluefin, prized for its buttery flesh, may breed younger, and in more places, than once thought — and it may be time to rethink fishing quotas. Not so fast, critics argue.

The Chevy Bolt can go 238 miles on a single charge and costs about $30,000, after a federal tax credit. But the clean-car industry needs government support to thrive, and that's far from certain.