Weekend Edition

In the torrent of news this week, one line especially pierced me: "Interactions may be less positive when they become artificial."

It comes from researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna and the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, who compared the vital signs of 28 cows as they were petted while listening to a live human voice, and those same cows being petted while they heard merely a recording. They published their findings in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

StoryCorps' Military Voices Initiative records stories from members of the U.S. military and their families.

A true reporter knows you don't have to venture to the other side of the world to find great stories. Look right in front of you.

Jim Dwyer was 19, and a Fordham student, when he saw a man on the ground, shaking on a sidewalk in the Bronx. He was having an epileptic seizure. Jim was among the strangers who stopped to try to help. But there were also people who passed by and muttered, "'junkie, 'scumbag,' that sort of thing," he later wrote for the student newspaper, The Fordham Ram.