National and World News from NPR

The International Committee of the Red Cross said today that its crews had reached the restive city of Homs in Syria and they have begun evacuating some of those injured by the shelling.

The Telegraph reports that the Red Cross said two wounded Western journalists were were evacuated, as well as the body of two others. The Telegraph adds:

Filmmaker Woody Allen is notorious for not attending the Oscars each year, despite his numerous nominations.

In Syria, medics working with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent are evacuating the injured from a neighborhood of Homs. The area known as Baba Amr has been under a long and heavy bombardment from Syrian government forces. Melissa Block talks with Saleh Dabbakeh, a spokesman for the ICRC who is in Damascus.

The Martin Luther King Jr. memorial isn't the only monument in Washington, DC, that has grappled with how to make a correction. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, there are more than 58,000 names inscribed on the wall. More than 100 of them have been misspelled, but 62 have been fixed. Memorial fund president Jan Scruggs explains how they've made the corrections.

We've all seen those bathtub refinishing ads that promise a glossy new surface on the dingy old tub.

But a solvent used to make that transformation has killed at least 13 people who used it to strip bathtubs from 2006 to 2011, according to a new study. The chemical, methylene chloride, is sold as a solvent and paint stripper both to professionals and in dozens of do-it-yourself products sold at home improvement stores.

Computer chip makers have long struggled to build ever-smaller transistors to allow faster, more powerful computers. Writing in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a team of scientists describes what may be the ultimate limit of that struggle — a transistor made of a single atom. Michelle Simmons, a physicist at the University of New South Wales in Australia and leader of the project, discusses the work.

Bloomberg News reporter John Lauerman volunteered to have his DNA sequenced by Harvard researchers to demystify the process for the public. What he didn't expect to uncover was that he possessed two gene variants--one linked to rare blood disorders and the other to a higher risk of Alzheimer's.

Reporting in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers write of harvesting electricity from microbe-rich river sediments--enough to power a small LED bulb. Grant Burgess, a marine biotechnologist at Newcastle University, discusses the hunt for electron-burping bugs.

When doctors autopsied tuberculosis patients, they described finding round, white swellings, especially in and around the lungs. Medical historian Howard Markel describes how those potato-like growths led to the disease being called tuberculosis, from the Latin tuber.