Ready for some creative competition? Weekends on All Things Considered is launching Round 8 of its Three-Minute Fiction contest. Here's what we look for: original, short fiction that can be read in less than three minutes — that's no more than 600 words.

The famous pack mules that carry supplies and people in and out of the Grand Canyon have back pain, as you might imagine. One man is on a mission to make the lives of these beasts of burden a little less painful.

When Rene Noriega retired a few years ago after a long career as a Border Patrol agent, he took what — for him — was the next natural step.

Today, The Huffington Post released what it says is a never-before-seen video of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Famously, Harold Camping, the founder of Family Radio, blanketed the country last year with warnings on bilboards and pamphlets that the world would end on May 21.

Campaigning in Mississippi on Friday, Mitt Romney took a pre-emptive swipe at a new 17-minute video about President Obama to be distributed next week by Obama's re-election campaign.

"The Road We've Traveled" was created by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, who won an Academy Award for the 2006 Al Gore climate-change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Robert Siegel talks with 80-year-old director Mike Nichols, whose Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman premieres March 15. Over his more than 60-year career, Nichols has directed, written and produced for Broadway, TV and film.

The question hanging over Washington for months has been this: Will Israel strike the Iranian nuclear program?

The Obama administration seems to have bought some time this week after rounds of meetings and speeches with Israeli officials in Washington.

Still, the president assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the U.S. will do all in its power to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

So the military option is still on the table.

You might be tempted to chuckle about some Norwegian researchers peering back at experiments done during the '60s and '70s with LSD as a treatment for alcoholism.

But don't.

Their rigorous analysis, combining data from six different studies, concludes that one dose of the hallucinogenic drug might just help.

Anthony Hopkins has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and has played Richard I, Richard Nixon, monarchs, statesmen, geniuses and heroes. He won an Academy Award playing one of the most notorious movie villains in history: Hannibal Lecter, the criminal cannibal with an affinity for Bach. Now, Hopkins is making his own music.