The term "dirty money" is for real. In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue. Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine. "When I was ...

Some are refugees from sad countries torn apart by war. Others are children of the stable middle class whose parents came to the U.S. in search of a better life. Some came with nothing, not even the rudiments of English. Others came with skills and affluence. Many were born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. No matter what their route, young Asian Americans, largely those with Chinese, Korean and Indochinese backgrounds, are setting the educational pace for the ...

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and a champion of the disabled who founded the Special Olympics, died Tuesday, the Special Olympics said. She was 88. Born on July 10, 1921, in Brookline, Massachusetts, Shriver was the fifth of nine children to Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She emerged from the long shadow of siblings John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy as the founder of the Special Olympics, which started ...

Relatives of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of President Kennedy, were summoned Monday to a hospital on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a source close to the family told CNN. "It's minute to minute right now," the source said. Shriver, 88, founder of the Special Olympics, has been in the hospital for several days, her family said, and her relatives were summoned after she suffered a setback, the source said. Some members of the family flew in to Cape Cod Hospital last ...

NASA's Kepler space telescope has already made a discovery, and its science operations aren't even officially under way yet. NASA scientists who put the telescope through a 10-day test after its March 6 launch said this week that Kepler is working well. Its ability to detect minute changes in light has enabled scientists to determine that a planet orbiting a distant star has an atmosphere, shows only one side to its sun and is so hot it glows. Kepler's ability ...

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President Kennedy, is in critical but stable condition in a Massachusetts hospital with her family at her side, her family said Friday. Members of her family flew in to Cape Cod Hospital to be with the 88-year-old, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the husband of her daughter, Maria Shriver, a source told CNN. No further information on her condition was immediately available. The sister of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy, ...

Even 6-year-olds at Hamilton Central School in central New York came to school prepared for swine flu. Jessica Poyer, a first-grade teacher, noticed in the spring that kids had begun bringing their own hand sanitizer, tissues and water bottles. Poyer, also the mother of two young children, thinks about swine flu, also known as influenza A H1N1, every day, both at school and at home. She knows that some schools nationwide have had to close because the disease was ...

Nathan Wolfe is a hunter, but he doesn't carry a gun. His prey are invisible to the naked eye. Wolfe leads expeditions into the mysterious world of viruses and pathogens. "They are everywhere," said Wolfe, a microbiologist who speaks of his targets -- infectious organisms -- with the giddy lilt of a teenager on a first date. "We have the potential to explore a completely new biological world and go out and really find new things all the time." One ...

The woman who made the 911 call that led to Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates' controversial arrest wasn't present at the so-called beer summit. But she got a shot of kindness and a taste of gratitude from Gates himself. Lucia Whalen received a bouquet of flowers at her office from Gates, according to Whalen's attorney, Wendy Murphy. "She described them as amazing, and appreciated them very much," Murphy said of the bouquet. The attorney described the flowers as being ...

One of the most telling, and overlooked, aspects of the brouhaha over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the particular cast of Gates' defenders. There was Deval Patrick, the fresh-faced black governor of Massachusetts, who called the arrest "every black man's nightmare." There was Vernon Jordan, noting that the event "tells us that the election of Barack Obama did not automatically erase racism." There was former Congressman Harold Ford, moderate to a fault, passionately insisting that once ...