National and World News from NPR

Which U.S. city has the worst-dressed citizens?

According to readers of Travel and Leisure magazine, it's Anchorage.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. If you have trouble sleeping, your doctor might send you to a sleep lab and spend $3,000 a night to chart your sleep cycle, or you could do the same thing at home with a commercially available headband, which wirelessly transmits your sleep data to your smartphone for under 100 bucks.

How to convince voters that while the economy isn't roaring, the situation is still improving?

That's President Obama's challenge, made more difficult with every passing month where the jobs report disappoints, as on Friday. The latest Labor Department report informed us that only 69,000 jobs were created in May, less than half what analysts had forecast. Meanwhile, the jobless rate ticked up a tenth of a percentage point to 8.2 percent.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

And now for our Video Pick of the Week. Flora's still here and positioned perfectly to take us on a safari.

FLORA LICHTMAN, BYLINE: We're still on safari.

FLATOW: We're still on safari.

LICHTMAN: The safari continues, this time to slightly larger organisms. See if you can see with your naked eye, and maybe in your own backyard. These guys are glow-in-the-dark - I have you already, don't I?

FLATOW: Yeah.

LICHTMAN: Millipedes - which, I didn't know - let me - can I tell you the story of how this came about?

Earlier, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney blamed what he said have been President Obama's "failed" economic policies for the nation's stubbornly high unemployment rate and weak job growth.

In Minnesota this hour, President Obama conceded "we've got a lot of work to do before we get to where we need to be," but also claimed credit for policies that he said prevented another Great Depression after the financial crisis of 2008.

The board of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), which represents most nuns in the United States, rejected a report from the Vatican that found they were running afoul of church doctrine.

The report, which among other things expressed concerned about the group's "radical feminism," was issued in April and ruled that an American archbishop would bring the nuns back in line.

Reporting in Science, researchers write that a combination of therapies, willpower and chocolate helped rats with severe spinal cord injuries learn to walk and even run again. Neurobiologist Moses Chao, not affiliated with the study, discusses the rehab method and whether it could work in humans.

In Ignorance: How It Drives Science, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein writes that science is often like looking for a black cat in a dark room, and there may not be a cat in the room. Firestein discusses why the hit-or-miss process, the "not knowing" is the true engine of science.

Scientists at the University of Leeds are exploring ways to use magnetic bacteria to build biocomputers of the future. Meanwhile, another group of researchers, reporting in Science, write that they have unearthed deep-sea microbe that live off nutrients from the dinosaur age.

Russian President Vladimir Putin denied claims made by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton that Russia is "in effect, propping up" the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

"We don't supply weapons that can be used in civil conflicts," Putin told reporters in Berlin after he met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.