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Bears are in the news again.

Tuesday, there was the guy in Los Angeles who was texting-while-walking and almost bumped into a 400-pound black bear. The close encounter with an ursine was caught on video.

Now there's this:

The two suspects in last Friday's killings in Tulsa of three African-Americans and wounding of two others were formally charged today with "three counts each of first-degree murder, two counts of shooting with intent to kill and five counts of malicious intimidation or harassment," the Tulsa World repo

After saying Thursday morning on The Today Show that she thought her son's death "was an accident," Trayvon Martin's mother went on other news broadcasts later in the day to say she only thinks the encounter between her son and George Zimmerman was accidental.

How do astronauts take a bath in space? What happens to their sense of smell in a weightless environment? Two NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station discuss the challenges of life in low Earth orbit and how their research is a stepping stone for future space exploration.

In a new book, To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure, engineer Henry Petroski chronicles disasters from the sinking of the Titanic to the destruction of space shuttles Challenger and Columbia. Petroski discusses why these accidents are often caused by factors other than a design flaw.

From farting fish, to the laws of stupidity, Marc Abrahams (editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research) has a knack for finding science that "makes you laugh, and then makes you think." Abrahams discusses some improbable research, and why science that might at first seem absurd, matters.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. It's easy to assume that we humans rule the Earth. After all, we can clear-cut forests, we can chop the tops off mountains. We can harvest anything we want from the land or the sea. But before we get too cocky, let's not forget about those other titans of the Earth, the bugs.

Days after it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, reports have emerged that Instagram now has more than 40 million users in its photo-sharing community. The gain, which was derived from the service's API, represents a spike of 10 million Instagram users added in the past 10 days, according to Venture Beat.

Still haven't filed your federal income tax return?

Since you may be a procrastinator, you may not have looked at the calendar lately. So we want to make sure you know that Sunday is April 15th.

But you also might not have realized that this year the deadline is the 17th.

Why?

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Switching gears now, often, stories about politicians in their off hours take on kind of a scandalous turn. Not this one. When Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker went home last night, his neighbor's house was on fire. A woman who had escaped the inferno told him that her daughter was trapped inside and what happened next is something really out of an action movie, with Cory Booker in the starring role.

Here's Newark Fire Director Fateen Ziyad describing the scene to New York station WABC.

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MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin. Coming up, we will hear the latest entry in our Muses and Metaphor series for National Poetry Month. Those are our tweet-length poems. We'll have another one in just a few minutes.

But first, we turn to election news and a controversy that's keeping the battle for women voters in the spotlight. Polls show women voters strongly favor President Barack Obama over presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

See our earlier entries in this series: What America Sells To The World, What America Does For Work and What America Buys

The White House just posted word that President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama filed 2011 tax returns showing an "adjusted gross income of $789,674" and that they paid "$162,074 in total [federal] tax." That works out to about 20.5 percent of the AGI.

About half of the first family's income was from the president's salary. The rest came from royalties generated by his books. According to the White House:

One week from today, Chief Michael Maloney was due to retire from the Greenland, N.H., police department.

Thursday night, he was killed during a drug bust in which four officers were also wounded. The man authorities were trying to arrest, and a female acquaintance, were later found dead inside the home where the raid took place. Authorities believe they may have died in a murder-suicide.

This Sunday, HBO premieres a new comedy series that's written and directed by Lena Dunham, who grabbed the media spotlight in 2010 with her film Tiny Furniture. She's 25 years old now, and stars in this new TV series as well.

I died on the Titanic — in the musical, that is. Titanic opened on Broadway in 1997 and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

My small California middle school performed the show in grand fashion. Goodness knows why it hadn't been done before at the school, but the curtains rose on our stage in February 2002.

Good morning.

Our early headlines:

-- Failed Missile Test May Make North Korea More Belligerent.

-- Syrian Activists Claim Regime Is Using Force To Break Up Demonstrations.

"When Chuck Norris has nightmares, Cory Booker turns on the light & sits with him until he falls back asleep."

That's just one of many funny tweets showing up this morning attached to the hashtag #corybookerstories.

The news that consumer prices rose a relatively modest 0.3 percent in March from February supports "the view the U.S. Federal Reserve has room to provide more support for the economy if needed," Reuters concludes. It adds that:

This interview was originally broadcast on October 20, 2011.

A few years after her younger brother John died from AIDS-related complications in 1989, poet Marie Howe wrote him a poem in the form of a letter. Called "What the Living Do," the poem is an elegiac description of loss, and of living beyond loss.

You can't say we haven't warned you about Friday the 13ths, and offered a tip for how to get over any fear of such supposedly scary days.

On Day Two of the fragile ceasefire in Syria, activists say that government forces have fired on some anti-Assad regime demonstrators in various parts of the nation.

Reporting from Beirut, NPR's Grant Clark tells our Newscast Desk that activists say security forces began massing outside mosques during Friday prayers, just before the start of protests.

Jeff Jensen got interested in the Titanic when he was just nine years old. Later, his father bought him a replica of the ship that was made from 50,000 matchsticks.

Boudin is a Cajun specialty — sausage filled with rice, pork and herbs. And since Scott, La., is starting a Boudin festival, the state legislature crowned it the "Boudin Capital of the World." Nevermind there are two other Boudin capitals of the world. But Jennings, La., trumps them all. Years ago, it was crowned the "Boudin Capital of the Universe."

The disintegration of North Korea's latest long-range missile shortly after liftoff today may just make that communist nation even more belligerent and more likely to test a nuclear weapon or take other provocative actions, NPR's Louisa Lim reports from Seoul.

Throughout the GOP primary season, Mitt Romney struggled among voters who make up many of the party's key constituencies, including Southerners, evangelicals, those living in rural areas and members of the white working class.

Now that he has the Republican presidential nomination all but sewn up, such voters are the least of Romney's worries.

In fact, the type of Republican voters who were most skeptical about the former Massachusetts governor may end up being among his most certain supporters.

Every year, millions of Americans scramble to file their income taxes before the filing deadline — ordinarily April 15.

But procrastinators get a reprieve this year: The 2012 deadline falls on Tuesday, April 17.

This year, April 15 falls on a Sunday. One might expect that would make Monday, April 16, the 2012 filing deadline.

But not so this year. Monday is the District of Columbia's Emancipation Day — a local holiday unfamiliar to most Americans.

A scandal in China has led to the ouster of a powerful political player, who was once a rising star in the Communist Party. Richard MacGregor, a former China bureau chief for the Financial Times, talks to Renee Montagne about the scandal. MacGregor also authored The Party, a book about China's political system.