On Sunday night, while the rest of us were ooohing and aaahing over gymnastics, a bunch of propeller heads at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were flawlessly steering a billion-dollar robotic space laboratory the size of a minivan to a landing on Mars.

Missions engineers Bobak Ferdowsi and Adam Steltzner — whose hairstyles have led them to be nicknamed "Mokawk guy" and "Elvis guy," respectively — are two of the guys behind the landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, and very well might be the Sexiest Nerds Ever.

Carmelita Jeter made sure everyone understood what Team USA had just accomplished. She pointed toward the digital clock with the baton as it flashed a time of 40.82 seconds.

Jeter, Tianna Madison, Allyson Felix and Bianca Knight had just gotten a gold medal in the 4 X 100m relay and they did so while shattering the world record by a little more than half a second.

The London Summer Olympics are winding down, and by most accounts, the games have been a success. There were plenty of "thrill of victory, agony of defeat" moments; big, enthusiastic crowds — although there were too many blocks of empty seats; and for those who like a helping of scandal served up at their Olympics, there was that, too.

It wasn't the usual scourge of doping. Instead, the London Olympics had incidents of bending the rules and ethics of sport.

After serving as speaker of the House, publishing several historical novels and running for president, what's next for Newt Gingrich?

One possible third act, Gingrich told NPR staffers on Friday, could be sharing a television studio with his wife, Callista.

"We're kind of intrigued with the idea of doing a daily show, which would change our lives pretty dramatically," Gingrich said. "But if we do it, we want it to be closer to Regis and Kathie Lee than to Bill O'Reilly or Hardball."

A little more than a week after a major plagiarism scandal brought down science wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, Time magazine said it was suspending Fareed Zakaria's column for a month.

Zakaria is an influential and respected commentator on foreign policy and also hosts a show on CNN called Fareed Zakaria GPS.

When writer David Rakoff died Thursday at the age 47, he was barely the age he said he was always "meant" to be. In his 2010 memoir, Half Empty, he wrote, "Everyone has an internal age, a time in life when one is, if not one's best, then at very least one's most authentic self. I always felt that my internal clock was calibrated somewhere between 47 and 53 years old."

Rakoff died in New York City after a long struggle with cancer — an ordeal that he wrote about with sobering honesty and biting wit.