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If you listen closely to giggles, guffaws, and polite chuckles, you can discern a huge amount of information about people and their relationships with each other. This week, we talk with neuroscientist Sophie Scott about the many shades of laughter, from cackles of delight among close friends to the "canned" mirth of TV laugh tracks.

In 2020, when Angela Zhao was just 10, she played in her first piano competition. As she waited to go onstage, a competitor did something small that gave her courage.

Not long after chemotherapy for ovarian cancer, Mary Fran Lyons was walking through a mall, self-conscious about losing her hair. Then a stranger came up to her and gave her hope.

A life jacket worn by a passenger on the RMS Titanic has sold at auction for 670,000 pounds, which is more than $900,000.

If the mayor and City Council can't agree on a plan to reduce the budget deficit, state officials are poised to take away their power over Detroit's purse strings. The mayor and the council blame each other for the impasse. And with the deficit deepening, residents' frustration continues to mount.

Guest host Viviana Hurtado and editor Ammad Omar open the mailbox for listener feedback. They check the status of two immigration laws in the Deep South. And after many listener requests, they recap NPR Africa correspondent Ofeibea Quist-Arcton's playlist of her favorite tunes.

A report by the non-governmental organization Global Witness says more than 60 percent of the West African nation's rainforests have been granted to logging companies in the past six years. The group has found evidence of fraud and misconduct within Liberia's logging sector.

In Michigan, voters will decide whether to force the state's utilities get at least 25 percent of their annual retail sales from renewable sources by 2025. There have been many competing claims about costs, jobs and spinoff issues.

The White House is asking Congress for $100 million to develop new tools for "eavesdropping" on millions of cellular conversations, as individual neurons interact to form thoughts or create memories. The goal is more ambitious than the Human Genome Project, researchers say.

David Esterly's life was changed in the 1970s when he came across wood carvings done by Grinling Gibbons more than 300 years earlier. Esterly became a wood carver, and even re-created one of Gibbons' pieces that was destroyed in a fire.