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The misery of low back pain often drives people to the doctor to seek relief. But doctors are doing a pretty miserable job of treating back pain, a study finds.

The U.S. Geological Survey released a study Thursday showing that large groundwater withdrawals are causing land in California’s Central Valley to sink. The 1,200-square-mile area is sinking up to a foot a year in some places.

Rebecca Mead was 17 the first time she read Eliot's Middlemarch, and the book has remained a favorite ever since. But critic Meg Wolitzer says you don't have to read (or re-read) Middlemarch to love Mead's new book, My Life in Middlemarch, which is a mash-up of literary criticism, memoir and biography of Eliot.

Gen. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency, tells NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday that the government's acquisition of phone records and surveillance of Internet activity is lawful and justified by the changing nature of the war on terrorism.

A new military medal that honors drone pilots and ranks above a Bronze Star has raised the ire of many combat veterans. A new online petition urges the White House to demote the medal.

Tech companies that cooperated with government intelligence-gathering efforts by allowing access to their databases say they did so only reluctantly and that it never involved 'direct access' to servers, according to The New York Times.

Christopher Hopkins has a headache — and the data to prove it. He and other computer programmers are exploring ways to turn heaps of personal health stats into something shareable and easy on the eyes.

Two Russian-born scientists won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on graphene, the strongest and thinnest substance ever discovered. But one of them, Andre Geim, also holds a more dubious honor: He won an Ig Nobel prize in 2000 for his work on the magnetic levitation of frogs.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will collect cosmic rays and was designed to search for antimatter created during the Big Bang. The project was nearly scrapped, but the persistence of one key researcher kept it alive. It will be carried to the space station aboard space shuttle Endeavour's final flight.

A mile-deep mine in South Dakota was closed a decade ago. Now, it's been cleaned up and revamped as an underground science laboratory. Scientists hope the experiments thousands of feet underground will help prove the existence of dark matter.