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A study of more than 85,000 women in Norway found that those who started taking a folic acid supplement four weeks before getting pregnant were about 40 percent less likely to have a child who developed the disorder. Mothers had to continue taking the supplement during the first eight weeks of pregnancy to get the full benefit.

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President Obama is expected to put specifics behind the vision he outlined in his inaugural address a few weeks ago. Get live updates from the speech and join NPR journalists in analyzing what it could mean for the future.

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North Korea's latest nuclear weapons test is much more powerful than the previous two, according to estimates made by instruments that measure seismic waves from the blast. But it's hard to verify North Korea's claim that the test was of a miniaturized nuclear weapon.

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Olympic wrestling’s history goes all the way back to the original games in ancient Greece. But it will end at the 2016 games in Brazil. On Tuesday, the International Olympic Committee moved to drop the sport, a decision that shocked Olympic observers and has drawn heavy criticism. Barring an unexpected shift in the I.O.C.’s position, a storied sport will lose its highest-profile event.

Olympic sports come and go. Baseball’s last medal ceremony was in 2008, but it’s doing fine because of its popular professional leagues. Less-visible sports like wrestling rely on the quadrennial Olympic boost to stay financially healthy. Wrestlers, coaches and fans of the sport are now gravely worried about its future.

This is the worst blow to wrestling, but not the only one. Many American colleges have cut their wrestling programs because of scarce budgets and Title IX requirements to equally support women’s athletics.

“Wrestling unfortunately has become an endangered sport in the last 20 years,” says Mike Finn, editor of Wrestling Insider Newsmagazine.

To compete internationally, wrestlers need sponsors to pay for training and travel. That money will be harder to come by without the power of the Olympics’ global stage.

“If you do not have the Olympics and all you have is the world championships, a lot of those people that have helped support wrestling, those corporations, may not be there.” Finn adds. “That is the biggest concern.”

Wrestling is relatively healthy at the high school level. The National Federation of State High School Associations counts nearly 300,000 American wrestlers in its latest data. That makes it about as popular as swimming and diving. But those numbers could drop if there’s no hope of Olympic glory.

“Every kid who’s ever been an athlete always imagines himself playing in the big game,” says College of the Holy Cross sports economist Victor Matheson. “If you don’t see the great wrestlers standing on the podium, getting that gold medal draped over their necks, it’s hard to imagine yourself being the great star and the great athlete.”

And wrestling fans find it hard to imagine an Olympics without one of its original sports.

Kai Ryssdal: Wrestling is, perhaps, the original sporting event. It goes all the way back to the Olympics in ancient Greece. But it's likely to be down for the count when the flame goes out after the 2016 games in Brazil.

Today, the International Olympic Committee recommended getting rid of wrestling. The criticism has been fast and furious. Truth is, Olympic events come and go. Baseball's last medal ceremony was in 2008, but it's doing fine because of popular professional leagues. Less-visible sports like wrestling rely on the quadrennial boost to stay financially healthy. Marketplace's Mark Garrison reports on what will happen to wrestling after the Olympic mat is pulled out from under it.

Mark Garrison: For Mike Finn, editor of Wrestling Insider Newsmagazine, this is just the latest and greatest blow.

Mike Finn: Wrestling unfortunately has become an endangered sport in the last 20 years.

Many college programs have gotten the ax as schools deal with scarce budgets and legal requirements to equally support women’s athletics.

To compete internationally, wrestlers need sponsors. Finn worries money will dry up without the Olympics’ global stage.

Finn: A lot of those people that have helped support wrestling, those corporations, may not be there.

Nearly 300,000 American high schoolers wrestled last year, making it about as popular as swimming and diving. But that number could drop if there’s no hope of Olympic glory. Victor Matheson is a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross.

Victor Matheson: Every kid who’s ever been an athlete always imagines himself playing in the big game. If you don’t see the great wrestlers standing on the podium, getting that gold medal draped over their necks, it’s hard to imagine yourself being the great star and the great athlete.

And wrestling fans find it hard to imagine the Olympics without one of its original sports. In New York, I'm Mark Garrison, for Marketplace.

When first reported last night, news was that there'd been an earthquake near the Korean peninsula. Then the political scientists took over from the seismologists and the tremor became North Korea's third nuclear test. But given the impoverished state of the country and the fact that building weapons is pretty expensive, how can North Korea afford it?

"The economy is certainly a decrepit economy but it is in the range of $1 billion in terms of annual production," says Georgetown Asian studies professor Victor Cha. "In addition, they devote about 30 percent of the entire nation's resources to the military and to the development of weapons systems."

"So," he adds, "their people are starving, but they are able to do this."

North Korea gets its money by selling minerals to the Chinese but, says Cha, a lot of its financing comes from "front businesses" run by the military that are both legal and illegal, including the sales of black market pharmaceuticals and cigarettes.

More economic sanctions are expected from the United Nations.

When NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro posed that question to his 125,000 Facebook followers, plenty of people jumped at the chance for a show of wit. Let the bon mots roll!

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In New Orleans today, one thing was made clear: Revelry doesn't stop for dark clouds. While the crowds were thinner than usual, many thought the weather was perfect for Fat Tuesday.

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The late civil rights icon's statue will join those in the National Statuary Hall Collection. The dedication is set for Feb. 27.

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The magazine argues that the care veterans do receive is bare bones and insufficient. A story about the bin Laden "shooter" asserted that the elite service member would get no benefits from the military.

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A new smartphone app allows users to document falling precipitation in their location. The mPING app aims to help weather officials program radar to determine exactly what's falling near you. For example, is it hail or mixed rain?

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The restaurant's slogan is "taste worth dying for!" Its menu includes "Flatliner Fries" and a burger that packs about 10,000 calories. John Alleman had been its "unofficial spokesman" for more than a year.

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Survivalist used to be just another way of saying right-wing extremist who either hated the government, thought the world would end...or both.

But then Hurricane Katrina hit, the economy collapsed, and Superstorm Sandy devastated New York City and New Jersey.

“People are feeling anxiety about the economy, the threat of pandemics, you name it," says Jim Rawles who runs the website SurvivalBlog. “Preparedness has become big business.”

Sales have only continued to grow at the Ready Store, an online firm that sells emergency preparedness supplies.

“The most expensive thing we sell is a year supply of food. It’s about $3,500,” says marketing director Jonathan Dick.

Dick estimates consumers spend half a billion dollars a year on things like water storage tanks, shelters, battery-powered radios and of course food rations.

And then there are all the trade shows, like the Self Reliance Expo, run by Ron Douglas, an entrepreneur in Colorado. Douglas says visitors can attend a broad array of classes.

“Soap-making, candle-making, I think we have bread-baking...full-on gardening classes. Raising rabbits,” he says.

Douglas -- who charges $10 for a two-day pass to the Expo -- says he’s seen his crowds swell from several thousand a few years ago, to more than 10,000 these days. You don’t have to tell him that this self-reliance industry is becoming more mainstream, he sees it.

“You’ll see a guy sitting three in dreadlocks and flip-flops and two seats down is a camoed-out guy, and two seats down from him is a mother with a stroller,” he says.

When it comes to marketing though, Jonathan Dick at the Ready Store says the industry still has some work to do.

“If you start shopping around, you’ll notice there is a lot of doom and gloom out there. And frankly, I think it’s a lot of people trying to get people to buy stuff by making them afraid,” he says.

Dick says in a way, loading up on solar panels, extra food and equipment isn’t much different than an insurance policy that customers -- hopefully -- won’t ever need.

But if they do...

Thank goodness I got married in olden times -- when the big decision was not whether to make your wedding website password-protected. When the words "page view" and "unique visitors" were not wedding lingo. When you didn't have to brand your own love story.

Have you clicked on one of these sites? Forgive me, but some are more entertaining than the wedding itself. There are polls asking guests to vote on the first dance; pop-up tabs making it easy to pin photos on Pinterest; credits naming the bride's hairstylist; links to PayPal for "honeyfund" contributions; and breaking news tidbits from the couple's trip to register at Target, perhaps, or a dress update.

And pity the couple who didn't "meet cute," as they say in Hollywood. Because the centerpiece is almost always the blow-by-blow account -- or in some cases, the blow-by-blow video -- detailing the proposal or the "how we met" story.

The sites are so popular that a new form of wedding entertainment has emerged: mocking others' websites. As one 30-something on the wedding circuit told me, "if I don't already know how you met, why am I going to your wedding?"

Here's another issue not faced by the mother-of-the-bride generation: what to name the website. With more than two million weddings a year, not every Michael and Jessica (the most popular names of the 1980s) can get their top choice.

But if you choose a URL that celebrates your special love and doesn't include your names, forgetful guests may end up at the site of some other Mike and Jessica, reading their adorable story -- or even worse, clicking the link for their Bed, Bath & Beyond registry.

Sure, some sites are tacky. But they do cut down on calls. As one bride confessed, before she got her site running, her aunts called endlessly with questions. Now? She simply directs them to her FAQ page.

The rebels say they captured war planes and bombs in taking the air base. The rebels have been targeting the bases in an attempt to prevent the Syrian army from resupplying troops in the north.

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Netflix is teaming up with DreamWorks to create its first original cartoon series. The new Netflix cartoon will be based on the DreamWorks movie, Turbo, about a snail who becomes super fast through a freak accident, and dreams of becoming a race car driver.

Netflix spokesman Joris Evers says, with the Turbo series, Netflix is shifting more of its focus to kids.

“Last year alone our members streamed more than two billion hours of kids content," says Evers.

Why is kids programming so attractive? It might have something to do with monster hits like Sponge Bob, which generates billions -- making money on and off the screen.

Stuart Levine, TV and features editor at Variety, says a popular show can spawn its own product line.

“You know, the DVD's and the toys and the pillows," he explains,  "and that’s what makes it such a huge hit for both the network and the studio.”

Plus, Levine says, children's shows don’t cost much to make, and a hit like Sponge Bob, can run forever.  

There's a certain magic that comes with reading a good story. Even one that's not about a magical time. Which is to say, the last five years in this economy.

Novelist Jess Walter has a new collection of short stories out about people and the lives they've lived the past five years. "We Live in Water," it's called.

"We are in the midst of a recovery but when I look around my neighborhood I see what I think are yard sales, and then I look closely and I see it's everyone's funiture on the lawn because they have been evicted," says Walter. "So I do think we have left a lot of people underwater as we come out of this -- more than we even realize."

His collection is full of tragic characters -- the homeless, the drug-addicted and those who have lost everything to gambling debts. But it is not without humor. "I look in those lives for moments of redemption and light and humor," he says. "That's the thing that always draws me to a story is humor and, thankfully, you don't need to make $80,000 a year to have a sense of humor."

Stations in at least two states had their emergency broadcast systems broken into. "Bodies of the dead" were said to be rising from their graves. Funny? Dangerous? Both?

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Consumers are increasingly being marketed seafood with labels that are supposed to certify that it's good for the environment. We asked about consumers' seafood eating habits and whether they prefer to buy "sustainably caught" fish.

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Consumers are increasingly being marketed seafood with labels that are supposed to certify that it's good for the environment. We asked about consumers' seafood eating habits and whether they prefer to buy "sustainably caught" fish.

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President Obama called for stronger gun control laws last night in his State of the Union address -- and one of the big ideas being talked about is closing what's called the "gun show loophole."

In many states, it's completely legal for a private seller -- you or me -- to sell a gun to someone without running a background check. Garen Wintemute, who heads the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, explains:

"No identification. No waiting period. No record. Cash on the table, and you're gone with the gun."

That kind of transaction does happen at gun shows, but it also happens outside them. It is easy to find buyers and sellers online, for instance.

Daniel Webster, who directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy Research, says, for that reason, he avoids the term "gun show loophole."

"'Loophole makes it sound like it is a tiny, little exception," he says. "The reality is it is a huge gap in the law."

Last weekend, I attended a big gun show in Chantilly, Virginia. An ad read, "Get Your Guns While You Still Can!"

Jerry Cochran, a federally licensed firearms dealer who owns two gun shops, had a big booth there. Cochran said he avoids the term "gun show loophole," but for a different reason: It doesn't exist.

"People listen to the television and the radio, and they think that there's not a background check here, at the gun show. But there is. We've never sold a gun in the 34 years I've been in business without a background check," said Cochran.

Licensed dealers have to do that. But I spotted someone wandering the aisles with a handwritten "for sale" sign -- they were selling their own guns. What bothered Cochran was that many of them weren't licensed.

"If you're going to set up here on a weekly basis, and you're going to sell guns, you ought to have a license and do it the proper way," he said.

But the thing is, under current law, you can't get a federal firearms license if you only do business at gun shows. And if you don't have a license, you can't access the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.