The Press-Enterprise

Mohamed Mabrouk wears the traditional white robe of an imam. But instead of the foreign-accented English that for decades has been the norm among American Muslim religious leaders, the new 21-year-old leader of a California mosque speaks with the Detroit accent he has carried with him from childhood.

Mabrouk's appointment last month as imam of the Islamic Center of Temecula Valley in California is a sign of a changing Muslim community that is shifting from being almost entirely immigrant-led to one in which young, U.S.-born people are increasingly taking leadership roles.

The membership of mosques is also becoming more American-born, as the children of Muslim immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1970s, '80s and '90s make up a rising percentage of worshippers.

For those of us who can't make a bed without stubbing a toe, and fear things like moldy containers in the back of our refrigerator, Robbie Maddison is hard to fathom.

The 30-year-old stunt motorcyclist actually seeks out tricks that endanger his life -- and performs them, not just because they make him money and get people to mutter admiring swear words, but because they fulfill some core desire in his soul.

History may not be especially kind to Landon Donovan.

Down the road, the world soccer community will likely remember the Galaxy's victory in MLS Cup 2011 Sunday night as "the David Beckham team."

But make no mistake, the Galaxy is Donovan's team, and has been for seven seasons since he arrived in 2005.

When NASA agents swooped into a Denny's restaurant in Lake Elsinore, Calif., earlier this year, authorities said they seized a purported "moon rock" from a woman who had been trying to sell it for $1.7 million.

What they didn't mention: The woman was a 4-foot-11, 74-year-old grandmother who, along with her now-deceased husband, had worked at North American Rockwell, a NASA contractor during the space program's early years.

Catherine Salmon may be the best friend a middle child ever had.

Salmon, 42, is a psychology professor at the University of Redlands in Redlands, Calif., and the author of "The Secret Power of Middle Children," a book about the traits exhibited by those who fall in the center of the sibling order.

Salmon, who grew up as her family's youngest child, said she wrote the book "to dispel the idea that middles are resentful and angry."

Being a middle child, she argues, can have great benefits in the areas of independence, stable relationships and job satisfaction.

In 1991, when Marlene Zuk visited Hawaii, she did what every visitor to the islands wants to do.

"I said, 'I'll see if there are any crickets there that I can dissect for parasites,' " she said. "Doesn't everyone?"

Zuk, a biology professor at the University of California, Riverside, studies crickets along with some other animals. She recently published "Sex on Six Legs," her third book about the sex lives, and other interesting behaviors, of insects.

The book details intriguing elements of the bug world, such as how the genitals of male honeybees explode after they have sex, how mother earwigs care for and feed their young, and how a particular female wasp poisons the brain of a cockroach just enough so that she can use its antennae to steer it to her nest, where it becomes food for her brood.