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On the whole, Kansas has never really been thought of as a driving challenge. A glance at a state road map reveals a grid-like layout with relatively few twists and turns. Doctoral student Brandon Vogt knew that from personal experience. He frequently drove the width of the state, making the trip from Boulder, Colo., to Colombia, Mo. And he began to wonder just how flat Kansas really was. Vogt's research now confirms his suspicions: Kansas really is flatter than a pancake. Robert Siegel talks with Vogt about his findings, which are published in the Annals of Improbable Research.

The past 10 years have brought a surge of young women into the nation's juvenile justice system. In Part 2 of the series Girls and the Juvenile Justice System, NPR's Michele Norris visits a Boston detention center, originally designed to house delinquent boys, now struggling to cope with a new population of girls.

Two U.S. soldiers are killed when their convoy comes under attack in northern Iraq. Recent attacks on American soldiers have prompted the U.S. Army to adopt an informal system of reward and punishment. Soldiers hand out food and water in neighborhoods free of attacks, while they set up roadblocks and conduct searches in areas where violence persists. Hear NPR's Eric Westervelt.

Host Steve Inskeep speaks with Jim Clupper, a librarian in Islamorada, Fla., about the town's monument to the victims of the nation's worst hurricane on record, which hit the Florida Keys in 1935. The memorial to the hundreds of victims is one of the sites featured in a book about not-so-famous, but noteworthy sites across the country catalogued in a book called James Dean Died Here: The Locations of America's Pop Culture Landmarks. (# Santa Monica Press; ISBN: 1891661310.)

Three soldiers from the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division were killed today in a grenade attack while guarding a children's hospital near Baghdad. At least one Iraqi bystander was injured. Eight U.S. soldiers have died since U.S. forces announced the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons. NPR's Ivan Watson reports.

Thomas Dorsey combined sacred and secular styles to create a revolution in music. His story is the latest in "Honky Tonks, Hymns and the Blues," a special 11-part weekly series on the creation of American musical traditions.

Student Gita Jackson, 13, talks about the type of music she enjoys as part of the ongoing "What Are You Listening To?" series. She says that she and her musical tastes disprove the stereotype of "the Britney Spears-loving, Forever 21-wearing, valley girl-speaking, smiley prepubescent white girl."

The largest cemetery in the Arab world is located in the southern Iraqi city of Najaf. The cemetery surrounds the Shrine of Imam Ali. It is a sacred site for all Shiites, and many of them bring relatives to be buried there. Hundreds of thousands of tombstones stretch as far as the eye can see. Locals call the cemetery the "Valley of Peace," but it has been the scene of violence as well. When the Shia uprising of 1991 began to collapse, many of the rebels fled to the cemetery, where they were brutally killed by Saddam Hussein's forces. Thousands of other Shiites died as a result of Saddam's repression, and many of them also lie in the cemetery. And thousands of those who died in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war are buried there as well. The cemetery grew to eight times its previous size during the rule of Saddam Hussein. Kate Seelye reports.

Arab television stations air a new tape, allegedly from Saddam Hussein, in which the speaker mourns the killing last week of Saddam's two eldest sons. Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, senators grill Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on the Bush administration's failure to provide clear guidance on the costs of the U.S. mission in Iraq. Hear NPR's Tom Gjelten.

Farmworkers, construction workers and firefighters are dying from excessive heat on the job. The federal government has no heat standard to protect them, and climate change is making things worse.