NPR News

We've known for a while that a food's aroma has a big influence on our perception of how it tastes. Now it looks like smell also can affect how much we eat.

People who ate vanilla custard in a laboratory ate smaller bites when they smelled a stronger cream aroma, according to a new study. The stronger the smell, the smaller the bite.

If you're the type who likes to hike, ski or climb mountains, you might want to pack a bottle of ibuprofen — not just for achy muscle aches, but to help prevent altitude sickness.

Tens of millions of people travel to high-altitude spots each year, and a quarter of them wind up with acute altitude sickness from ascending too fast. The headaches, dizziness, sleeplessness, nausea, vomiting and other symptoms can ruin a vacation. In severe cases, it can cause fatal swelling in the brain.

Writing about Clark Terry in the past, I've grumbled that this great and distinctive trumpeter had long been stereotyped as a pixie-ish jazz jester. There's more range and deep blues feeling to his sound than that. It wasn't all sweetness when he was growing up poor in St. Louis, touring in the Deep South before WWII or breaking the color line with TV orchestras in 1960.

Beethoven would try as many as 70 different versions of a musical phrase before settling on the right one. But other great ideas seem to come out of the blue. Bob Dylan, for example, came up with the lyrics to the chorus for "Like a Rolling Stone" soon after telling his manager that he was creatively exhausted and ready to bail from the music industry. After going to an isolated cabin, Dylan got an uncontrollable urge to write and spilled out his thoughts in dozens of pages — including the lyrics to the iconic song.

One day after Mitt Romney's win in Illinois and the talk that has again raised about the former Massachusetts governor being the "inevitable" Republican presidential nominee, he's picked up the coveted endorsement of former Florida governor Jeb Bush.

The military justice system has been crafted to work efficiently, but Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales can expect a lengthy legal process as he faces accusations that he killed 16 men, women and children in Afghanistan

Bales is locked up in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as he and his lawyer prepare for a case that involves a horrendous mass murder. In addition, it's a stress point that could trigger retaliation against American troops and even affect the course of a U.S. war that's more than a decade old.

Can your doctor really say that online?

Well, doctors can and do say all kinds of derogatory things about patients online. On the other hand, some doctors take another tack and use their computers and smartphones to ask patients out. And then there are the doctors who go online to prescribe medicines for patients they've never seen.

Transcript

DAVID GREENE, HOST:

This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm David Greene.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

And I'm Steve Inskeep. Good morning.

In the southern French city of Toulouse, police are in a stand-off with a man suspected of carrying out a series of shootings. The suspect is described as a 24-year-old French citizen, of North African heritage. He is said to be an al-Qaida sympathizer.

Here's the first of more than 5,600 comments we saw this morning when we went to Texas Gov. Rick Perry's Facebook page and opened up a post on his wall thanking those who supported his bid for the Republican presidential nomination:

"Governor Perry, I am experiencing mid-cycle cramping. Is this a punishment from god for not getting pregnant this month?"