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Liane Hansen visits pedal-steel player Robert Randolph in the House of God Church in Orange, New Jersey. The 23-year-old guitar prodigy is part of a little-known group of church musicians playing "sacred steel", and he's now playing more and more on the club circuit. The Word, on Ropeadope Records, with Randolph, keyboardist John Medeski and the North Mississippi Allstars has just been released on CD.

Scott talks with author Michael Azerrad about the indie rock movement. Mr. Azerrad's book is Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991 (Little, Brown).

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."

Scott talks with Jeffrey Flax, a true fan of Cal Ripken.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Scott speaks with Loren Janes, a stuntman who has doubled for Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Jack Nicholson AND Debbie Reynolds during his 48-year career. This weekend he receives the "Golden Boot" award, for lifetime achievement in movie Westerns.