Four New Elements Are Added To The Periodic Table

"For now, they're known by working names, like ununseptium and ununtrium — two of the four new chemical elements whose discovery has been officially verified. The elements with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118 will get permanent names soon, according to theInternational Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry."

"With the discoveries now confirmed, 'The 7th period of the periodic table of elements is complete,' according to the IUPAC. The additions come nearly five years after elements 114 (flerovium, or Fl) and element 116 (livermorium or Lv) were added to the table."

"The elements were discovered in recent years by researchers in Japan, Russia and the United States. Element 113 was discovered by a group at the Riken Institute, which calls it 'the first element on the periodic table found in Asia.'"

"Three other elements were discovered by a collaborative effort among the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. That collaboration has now discovered six new elements, including two that also involved the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee."

Lack of Deep Sleep May Set the Stage For Alzheimer's

"There's growing evidence that a lack of sleep can leave the brain vulnerable to Alzheimer's disease."

"'Changes in sleep habits may actually be setting the stage' for dementia, says Jeffrey Iliff, a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland."

"The brain appears to clear out toxins linked to Alzheimer's during sleep, Iliff explains. And, at least among research animals that don't get enough solid shut-eye, those toxins can build up and damage the brain."

"Iliff and other scientists at OHSU are about to launch a study of people that should clarify the link between sleep problems and Alzheimer's disease in humans."

"It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease."

George R. R. Martin Admits Winter Isn't Coming At Least Not For Awhile

"Care to break the hearts of Game of Thrones fans everywhere? It might just take seven words:

'THE WINDS OF WINTER is not finished.'"

"So wrote George R.R. Martin in a lengthy blog post published in the wee hours Saturday. The author had hoped to publish the sixth installment of his massively popular fantasy book series, A Song of Ice and Fire, early in 2016 — which meant finishing and submitting the manuscript to his publishers before the end of 2015."

"But Martin says those hopes have been dashed."

"'You're disappointed, and you're not alone. My editors and publishers are disappointed, HBO is disappointed, my agents and foreign publishers and translators are disappointed,' Martin writes, 'but no one could possibly be more disappointed than me.'"

Rachmaninoff: An American Without Assimilation

"The question of assimilation has been on my mind a lot lately. Living in this great country where individuality is embraced, our current obsession with assimilation for those choosing the U.S. as their new home seems like a strange paradox."

"Consider the Russian composer, pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff. When he moved to America in 1918 he could not let go of ties to his mother country. Even with the house he bought three years later in New York, he tried to recapture the spirit of a beloved country estate owned by his relatives."

"Does this constitute a rejecting of American values? I would propose just the opposite: The freedom afforded our newest citizens offers them the gift of safety and comfort to hold their traditions close, bringing a new richness to our American tapestry."

A Physicist Dreams of Catching Dark Matter In the Act

"What's the universe made of?

"It's a question that's been bothering scientists and philosophers for millennia, and has become even more vexing in recent decades, as physicists have become convinced that most of the universe is made of something we can't see or touch or measure."

"At least not yet."

"Richard Gaitskell hopes to change that. He's a physicist at Brown University, and the leader of a team that aims to be the first to describe this mysterious dark matter."

"So, if they can't see or touch or measure dark matter, why are they so sure it exists? One reason is based on work done by astronomer Vera Rubin of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the 1970s. She measured the rate at which galaxies rotate."

How Clementine Churchill Wielded Influence As Winston's Wife

"At the outset, biographer Sonia Purnell didn't know much about Clementine Churchill. "I confess, like millions of others, I had absolutely no idea who Winston Churchill's wife was," Purnell tells NPR's Steve Inskeep."

"But then Purnell stumbled onto a letter from 1940, when Winston Churchill had just become prime minister. It was the middle of World War II, and England was in a very bad state."

"'She realized that he was in danger of losing support of the very people he needed most,' Purnell says. 'He was being brusque and rude and rather overbearing. So, she wrote him this letter. And it just tells him how he needs to bring people alongside him, to make them love him. His behavior changed as a result of this. And people changed their minds about him.'"

Seeing Double, Bob Mondello Picks, 2015's Best Movies Two At A Time

I'm not sure why this happened, but as I assembled this year's best-of list, I kept seeing matched sets: Two terrific desert movies, two swoon-inducing romances, two single-minded crusades by men who think they're already dead, and even a pair of riveting mortgage crisis flicks (and what are the chances of that?). The doubleness is a good organizing principle, since my 10-best list nearly always turns into a 20-best — so here goes:

Two Desert Films: 'Mad Max: Fury Road' And 'The Martian'

Two Beautifully Realized Love Stories: 'Carol' And 'Anomalisa'

Two Cinematic Head Trips: 'Inside Out' And '45 Years'

Two Brutal Historical Epics: 'Son Of Saul' And 'The Revenant'

Two Eye-Openers From The Muslim World: 'Timbuktu' And 'Taxi'

Reporters Notebook: Settling In Seoul

Editor's Note: NPR opened a South Korea bureau in March. Correspondent Elise Hu takes a look at the wonder and the wackiness of life and journalism in East Asia.

"After a K-pop-themed sendoff and an unexpected flight delay, my family and I arrived on a freezing night in early March to open NPR's newest bureau, in Seoul, South Korea. News greeted me on my first day — the Internet was just getting set up at the bureau when an activist slashed the face of the U.S. ambassador to Korea, Mark Lippert. Before our bureau assistant and I had even seen one another, she was off to a press conference at the police station."

"Since then, we've covered a summer of MERS, North Korea's various provocations and South Korea's responses, the frenemy relationship between Japan and Korea, weird wedding culture, binge eating broadcasts, the dark side of PSY and I've made half a dozen trips to Japan and back to report from there, as Japan is this bureau's coverage area."

Cutting Edge Cancer Treatment Has Its Roots in 19th-Century Medicine

"A novel immunotherapy drug is credited for successfully treating former President Jimmy Carter's advanced melanoma. Instead of killing cancer cells, these drugs boost the patient's immune system, which does the job instead."

"Immunotherapy is cutting-edge cancer treatment, but the idea dates back more than 100 years, to a young surgeon who was willing to think outside the box."

"His name was William Coley, and in the late summer of 1890 he was getting ready to examine a new patient at his practice in New York City. What he didn't know was that the young woman waiting to see him would change his life and the future of cancer research."

"Her name was Elizabeth Dashiell, also known as Bessie, says Dr. David Levine, director of archives at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Bessie was 17 and showed up complaining of a problem with her hand. It seemed like a minor injury, just a small bump where she'd hurt it, but it wasn't getting better, and she was in a lot of pain. She'd seen other doctors but nobody could diagnose the problem."

New Conservation Effort Aims To Protect Pap's Papers

"It's been a year since the U.S. and Cuba began normalizing relations. Tourism, business and cultural exchanges are booming. And there is another curious benefactor of those warmer ties — Ernest Hemingway, or at least, his legacy. The writer lived just outside of Havana for 20 years, and that house, called the Finca Vigia, has long been a national museum."

"But years of hot, humid Caribbean weather has taken a toll on the author's thousands of papers and books. A Boston-based foundation is helping restore those weathered treasures, and who better to lead that effort than the original dean of home repairs: Bob Vila, of public televison's This Old House. He tells NPR's Carrie Kahn that he has a personal connection to Cuba. 'I'm American-born Cuban,' he says. "'My Havana-born parents emigrated during the latter part of World War II, and I was born in Miami, raised there and partially in Havana up until the revolution in 1959.'"

Tree Counter Is Astonished By How Many Trees There Are

"Here is a pop quiz: How many trees are on the planet?"

"Most people have no idea."

"A new study says the answer is more than 3 trillion trees — that's trillion with a T, and that number is about eight times more than a previous estimate."

"Thomas Crowther was inspired to do this tree census a couple of years ago, when he was working at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He had a friend who was working with a group with an ambitious goal: trying to fight global warming by planting a billion trees. A billion trees sounded like a lot. But was it really?"

"'They didn't know if planting a billion trees was going to add 1 percent of the world's trees, add 50 percent of the world's trees,' recalls Crowther. 'They didn't even know if it was even possible to fit a billion trees on Earth.'"

Is This Snowy Wonderland Or The World Inside A Petri Dish?

Do you remember cutting paper snowflakes in school? Artist Rogan Brown has elevated that simple seasonal art form and taken it to science class.

These large-scale paper sculptures may evoke snow, but actually trade on the forms of bacteria and other organisms. The patterns may feel familiar, but also a bit alien. You're not looking at a replica of a microbe, but an interpretation of one. And that distinction, Brown says, is important.

"Both art and science seek to represent truth but in different ways," the 49-year-old artist, who lives in France, tells Shots. "It's the difference between understanding a landscape by looking at a detailed relief map and understanding it by looking at a painting by Cezanne or Van Gogh."

Brown wants to you to feel something looking at these sculptures.

Alaska's Pot Cafes Will Give Patrons A Taste Of Cannabis

"Alaska is about to become the first state to have pot cafes where people can buy and consume marijuana, similar to Amsterdam."

"Right now, that's not legal in other states that have recreational marijuana."

"Brothers James and Giono Barrett, who own a marijuana business, Rainforest Farms, in Juneau, also plan to produce a line of chocolate bars infused with pot. They'll be an alternative to the sugary, processed edibles Giono says he has eaten recently in Colorado."

"'Man, when I was down there there was just a lot of products I didn't want to put in my body at all — not because of the cannabis,' he says. 'I actually got sick off one of them. I got nauseous.'"

Obama Insists Climate Deal Will Outlast GOP Climate Denial

"With a Paris climate agreement just over a week old, President Obama is singling out the GOP on climate change. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, the president lambasted Republicans, whom he views as excessively contrarian on the issue."

"'The Republican Party in the United States is perhaps literally the only major party in the developed world that is still engaging in climate denial,' he said. Here's his explanation for calling the GOP's stance an outlier on climate, even compared with 'far-right' parties in other places."

"The statement echoes comments he made in a Friday press conference."

"Conservatives in other major democracies are often less likely than liberals — sometimes by wide margins — to believe that climate change will harm them personally and that rich countries should do more to stop climate change. The Pew Research Center found these sorts of trends (to varying degrees) in Australia, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, as well as the U.S."

As Aging Brain's Internal Clock Fades, A New Timekeeper May Kick In

"'What we found in this study was that as people get older, they tend to have a loss of rhythmicity in a number of these core clock genes,' she says. It's likely throwing their timing out of whack. That finding was expected."

"But they also found something else: another set of genes that seemed to pick up a rhythm, but only in older brains. That second set of genes, McClung speculates, might be working like a backup clock that starts ticking when the main one becomes less reliable."

"If that's the case, it could be contributing to neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases that tend to set in later in life, many of which involve changes in the sleep-wake cycle."

"'We're particularly interested in a condition called sundowning, where people become agitated and irritable and anxious only in the evening, and this is usually in older people that have dementia,' McClung says. Their backup clock genes might not be kicking in correctly, she says."

Prepare For Takeoff: Smithsonian Celebrates the Art of the Airport Tower

"Just in time for the holiday travel season, the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has an exhibit about one aspect of flying that most of us ignore: airport control towers. Those beacons of the landscape — where landings and takeoffs are orchestrated — are now the stars of some dramatic photographs."

"On their way into or out of the skies, pilots are guided by the calm voices of air traffic controllers coming in over the radio. Inside the tower, controllers are the 24/7 traffic cops of the sky and ground. As you're in the air watching a movie or trying to sleep, men and women are hard at work in their towers. They mostly go unnoticed — but not by photographer Carolyn Russo."

"On flights, Russo sometimes gets into conversations about what she does. 'I'm here to photograph the tower," she'll tell curious passengers. 'And they would just look at me like I was nuts — like, why would you want to do that?" she says."

"Russo's dramatic black and white photographs turn the towers into abstractions. They 'become art,' she says. To her, they are "symbolic objects of beauty."

Kathleen Kennedy From Standing In Line To See Star Wars To Producing It Herself

"Before the new Star Wars movie had its splashy Hollywood premiere, producer Kathleen Kennedy joined the cast onstage. 'It's a real privilege to make movies," she said. "Everyone involved on The Force Awakens knows how lucky we've been to carry on this incredible legacy that George began over 40 years ago.'"

"Kennedy is president of Lucasfilm, handpicked by George Lucas to take over his company and the franchise."

"Like many fans, Kennedy remembers waiting to see the first Star Wars movie, back in 1977."

"'I was actually in college, down in San Diego, and I, too, stood in line,' she recalls. 'That was part of the excitement. You'd be in line for hours, and you didn't care. It would turn into sort of a party atmosphere. We were secretly hoping we could re-create that with this.'"

The Best Case Scenario: Star Wars the Force Awakens

"There was something about finally sitting in front of the new Star Wars movie that felt like enthusiasm, but there was also something that felt like dread. I'm not a Star-Wars-head, particularly, but I have enormous fondness for the original three movies, which I've seen a decent number of times and own on DVD (Regular DVD! Not even Blu-ray! Like I'm a pioneer seeing movies in a covered wagon!) The prequels I don't care about: I saw the first one and skipped the other two on the theory that one bite of a bad peach is enough to know the rest of it isn't for you, particularly if many people you know and trust discuss the entire episode as the Bad Peach Incident."

"But Star Wars: The Force Awakens is, as it turns out, both a worthy companion to that original trilogy and a very good movie on its own. Director J.J. Abrams, who's also been making the current batch ofStar Trek movies and earlier co-wrote Armageddon and co-createdFelicity, has, against rather overwhelming odds, successfully taken the handoff of one of the hottest batons in film history."

Looking At Violence In America With A Financial Lens

"Pain, grief and emotional loss follow mass shootings in America, and there are also other costs that add up to violence's financial toll. It's Ted Miller's job to crunch numbers on social ills like mass shootings. He's a health economist with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation."

"For example, when then-U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in a 2011 incident that left six people dead and 13 injured (including Giffords), her medical costs alone were well over $500,000, he says."

"'I haven't calculated [the incident's cost] totally, but we would figure that each death was worth about $7 million,' Miller tells NPR's David Greene. 'The way we look at that is we have interviews where people have been asked how much they would pay to reduce their chance of being killed or injured in a violent incident. People actually pay that. When you look at housing prices, we pay more for housing in safe neighborhoods.'"

The Rapidly Disappearing Elephants of Tanzania

"Tanzania's Selous Game Reserve is one of the largest wildlife refuges in the world and one of the last great wild places in Africa. The problem is — it's not a refuge from anything. In the past five years, 60 percent of its iconic elephant herds have been machine-gunned or poisoned by poachers for the value of their tusks."

"Photographer Robert Ross spent six years traversing the 17,000 square miles of the Selous, from its miombo woodland to its Borassus palm swamps, and meandering sand rivers."

"In his book, The Selous In Africa: A Long Way From Anywhere, Ross chronicled much more than the elephant slaughter. After all, who really wants a coffee table book of pachyderm carcasses? His stunning images inventory the magnificent biodiversity of the continent's oldest protected wilderness as well as the threats it now faces."