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Let's pay a visit now to one of the crucial parts of our country's ecosystem. Along U.S. coastlines, there are salt marshes that serve as nurseries for fish, crabs and other shellfish. They also protect coastal areas against flooding. Scientists warn that some salt marshes are disintegrating, and researchers have a pretty surprising theory about why that is. Here's NPR's Christopher Joyce.

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And let's turn now to Pakistan, where an international effort is underway to eradicate polio. Some 34 million children need to be inoculated multiple times in order to wipe out the virus, and making that happen in Pakistan is daunting. Here's why. There's a Taliban insurgency and religious extremism. The population of Pakistan is highly mobile and there is no shortage of rumors. For our series Chasing Down Polio, NPR's Jackie Northam travelled to the eastern city of Lahore.

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Earlier this week, a Japanese company announced a $20 billion bid for a majority stake in Sprint-Nextel, America's third-largest mobile carrier. The deal was launched by the CEO of Softbank - an executive who says he has a 300-year business plan and who is fond of making investments his peers call crazy.

Lucy Craft has this profile.

LUCY CRAFT, BYLINE: In a society where conformity, conservatism and harmony are virtues, CEO Masayoshi Son breaks all the rules, says his biographer, Shinichi Sano.

Israel's newsstands are looking noticeably less crowded these days, as a crisis in the Israeli press threatens several of the country's oldest publications. Media experts in Israel say that market competition and a tendency to buy political influence through media ownership have crippled Israel's once-thriving newspaper market.

Watching a presidential campaign, it's easy to think that the nation is deeply divided over how to fix the economy. But when you talk to economists, it turns out they agree on an enormous number of issues.

So we brought together five economists from across the political spectrum and had them create their dream presidential candidate. Over the next few days, we'll have a series of stories on our economists' dream candidate. We start this morning with some changes to the tax code.

Former Maine Gov. Angus King is convinced that if the math works out he could be the power broker in the U.S. Senate, the independent candidate whose vote will break the political gridlock in Washington. But first he has some explaining to do.

Everywhere you look right now, it seems like American symphony orchestras are fighting for their lives — strikes, lockouts, bankruptcy. Perhaps the biggest example is the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra, which is just coming out of its own bankruptcy. Tonight, its new 37-year-old music director takes the podium as the venerable orchestra begins a reboot.

A man has been arrested in an alleged terror plot to blow up the Federal Reserve building in New York City. Federal authorities and the New York Police Department collaborated to foil the plot apparently conceived by a Bangladeshi man, Quazi Mohammd Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis. Nafis is said to have conceived the plot. However, authorities learned of the plot and actually provided what appeared to be the bomb. It was inert and there was no threat to the public.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been firmly anti-abortion during this campaign.

But during Tuesday's debate on Long Island, N.Y., Romney charged that President Obama misrepresented his position on birth control. Here's what Obama said, during what began as a discussion of pay equity for women:

Treatment for Alzheimer's probably needs to begin years or even decades before symptoms of the disease start to appear, scientists reported at this week's Society for Neuroscience meeting in New Orleans.

"By the time an Alzheimer's patient is diagnosed even with mild or moderate Alzheimer's there is very, very extensive neuron death," said John Morrison of Mount Sinai Medical School in New York. "And the neurons that die are precisely those neurons that allow you to navigate the world and make sense of the world."

It's midday in the cafeteria of the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, and legislators and their aides are busy wheeling and dealing over lunch.

Gil Hoffman, political analyst for The Jerusalem Post newspaper, surveys the cafeteria floor with an expert's eye.

"Never a dull moment in election season," he says. "This is where the politicians, when there is something really important to get across to the press, this is where they do it; this is where they meet and make whatever political deals they need to get ahead."

Though she's dipped her toe into the world of TV journalism, we don't hear a lot from Chelsea Clinton about whether she might one day get into the family business.

But now the BBC has posted an interview in which the daughter of former President Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton doesn't rule out getting into politics herself.

Just days after Rev. Billy Graham endorsed Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's bid for the White House, the website of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association has stopped overtly listing the candidate's religion among what it says are "cults."

It is now clear that we are living in a world of viral memes that take no sides when it comes to spoofing politicians or debate moderators.

So what's a politician to do as the target of a social media parody?

Run with it.

"By kind of winking along with the electorate, you're humanizing, personalizing yourself, authenticating yourself," says Rory O'Connor, author of Friends, Followers and the Future. O'Connor argues that social media will be critical to deciding who is elected as the next president.