Steve Chawkins

Nobody thought much about the locked metal cabinet in the medical school at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. It was another forgotten fixture in the anatomy department -- until a researcher last year found seven skulls with yellowing labels indicating the remains were those of Native Americans from California's Central Coast.

GOLETA, Calif. -- It was lunch hour and hundreds of Dos Pueblos High School students surged onto the bleachers at the school's outdoor Greek Theater. The crowd was cheering, the music was thumping and a student-built robot named Penguinbot IV was wheeling and pivoting, sucking up dozens of lightweight balls and shooting them at the young athletes who had ventured onstage.

From a console to one side, teenagers in black, NASA-style jumpsuits guided the 150-pound machine as it weaved and dodged. When the robot and star basketball player Jay Larinan began pelting each other, a girl in the stands screamed, "I believe in you, Jay!" The crowd went wild.

It was the kind of free-spirited scene that gladdens the heart of Amir Abo-Shaeer, the 39-year-old physics teacher who each year leads the school's robotics team into a rigorous national competition that requires months of preparation and a season's worth of intense face-offs.

LOS ANGELES -- It was strange enough last month when an 85-year-old retired farmer in Iowa received a letter his brother had sent in 1943 when he was stationed at California's Camp Roberts. It was stranger still when, a few weeks later, Camp Roberts got a letter sent in 1944 to a woman who had worked at the Red Cross hospital there.

The hospital was leveled decades ago.

Postal authorities are mystified.