Nell Greenfield Boyce

When raw slabs of quartz material get cut to fit kitchens, many businesses don't adequately control the hazardous silica dust that can be released.

Rebecca Schult is a lawyer for Minnesota-based Cambria, the major U.S.

manufacturer of the raw slabs.

In a hearing on Capitol Hill, she asked for a ban on lawsuits against manufacturers and distributors of Ross Labs.

But David Michaels, a former director of the safety agency OSHA, said these companies should take responsibility for the products they sell.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

NASA officials have stressed that the unidentified astronaut is stable, but say they need to do the kind of full diagnostic workup that's only possible on the ground.

In a video beamed down from the station earlier this week,

Everyone on board spoke on camera, and none appeared obviously ill.

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman is on the four-person crew coming home early.

The crew's SpaceX capsule should splash down off the coast of California early Thursday morning.

Nell Greenfield-Boyce, NPR News.

The dogs in this study are super learners that know the names of dozens, even hundreds of toys.

Shani Dror is with the Veterinary University in Vienna and ELTE University in Budapest.

She says after years of searching, researchers have only found about 45 of these gifted dogs.

This is a really, really rare ability.

Her team had the dog's owners talk about a brand new toy with another person while the dog was in the same room.

None of the speech was directed at the dog.

Nonetheless, in later tests, when owners asked the dog to retrieve this particular toy out of a pile of toys in another room, the dogs almost always grabbed the right one.

When typical pet dogs were tested in the same way, they didn't get it.