Talk of the Nation

"Moral injury" is a term used in the mental health community to describe the psychological damage service members face when their actions in battle contradict their moral beliefs. Thought it isn't diagnosable, doctors and veterans are searching for ways to support those who have experienced this inner conflict.

Division III basketball games don't often make headlines. In a game against the Faith Baptist Bible College, Grinnell College Fox Squirrels guard Jack Taylor scored 138 points and broke the NCAA record for single-game scoring.

NPR's Neal Conan reads from listener comments about past segments on the topics of banning high school football and shoplifting.

At 86, the legendary singer says he's at the top of his game and more passionate than ever about his art. In his memoir, Life Is a Gift: The Zen of Bennett, he reflects on more than six decades in the recording industry and a lifetime surrounded by family and friends.

The conflict in eastern Congo has been called one of the world's worst humanitarian disasters. As fighting intensifies in eastern Congo between government forces and the rebel M23 group, tens of thousands of Congolese civilians have fled camps and homes in search of safety.

If you've seen the film The Hurt Locker, you probably remember a scene where a bomb defuser in an 80-pound Kevlar suit takes the long walk to extinguish an unexploded bomb. Brian Castner, author of The Long Walk, spent years as an explosive ordinance disposal officer in the U.S. Air Force, and knows that long walk well.

In the film Lincoln, Sally Field plays Abraham Lincoln's wife Mary Todd, opposite actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Field lobbied hard for the role of Lincoln's emotionally-tormented wife, and did extensive research to capture the character.

As tensions build between Israel and Hamas increase, leaders on both sides have expressed their willingness to reach a diplomatic solution. New leadership in Egypt and more powerful weapons have changed the nature of the conflict.

The line between Black Friday and Thanksgiving gets blurrier every year. This year, employees and consumers are circulating petitions protesting retailers' plans to open on Thanksgiving. Journalist Lewis Turner says he's worked on eight of the last ten turkey days, and it's not all bad.

When parents pass away, fall ill or become overwhelmed, older siblings may adjust and fill the role of the guardian. Kathy Borkowski shares her experience with raising her three siblings after her parents died, and child psychologist Vicki Panaccione discusses how this relationship works on both sides.

"I'm pure geek, pure logic," says Temple Grandin, an animal scientist and professor at Colorado State University. Science Friday visited Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human and many other books on livestock and on autism, in her office to hear about her life and work.

The country knew who its next president would be late in the evening of Election Day. But despite a nationwide push to electronic voting, some municipalities took days longer to finish counting their votes. Larry Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice looks at technologies and systems that worked during this year's election, and at voting processes that fell short of the mark in counting the vote.

In July, physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider announced finding signs of a Higgs boson-like particle — a key clue to questions about the basic makeup of the cosmos. In his new book The Particle at the End of the Universe, physicist Sean Carroll of Caltech talks about the building of the LHC, what it has found so far, and what researchers hope to investigate in the coming years.

A provocative new study published in Trends in Genetics suggests that human intelligence has been slowly deteriorating since societies moved away from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Study author Gerald Crabtree, of Stanford University, discusses the controversial work.

In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick pieced together the structure of DNA — "the now-famous double helix. To celebrate the release of a new annotated and illustrated edition of his 1968 book, The Double Helix, James Watson reflects on the groundbreaking discovery.