Amid all the economic uncertainty over the credit crisis in Europe and slow job growth in the U.S., one sector may be looking up. The U.S. housing market is finally showing more signs of recovery, according to a report being released Thursday by Harvard University.

Harvard comes out with this study once a year, and this time around, it's painting a much brighter picture.

I was born in 1970, sprung from one of the most aspirational generations America has ever produced: The Hip-Hop Nation. With decades of rap music anthems dedicated to our fantastical transition from poverty to prosperity, we rarely celebrate our wealth without looking back on our meager beginnings. The American Dream, for us, always represents the possibility of success and affluence on our own terms — with a watchful eye toward our hardscrabble origins.

Henry Hill, the mobster whose life became world famous after it was chronicled in the film Goodfellas, has died at a Los Angeles hospital after a long illness.

NPR's Mandalit Del Barco filed this obituary for our Newscast unit:

"The story of Hill — how he worked for a New York mafia family, murdering enemies and burying bodies — was first chronicled in the book Wiseguy.

"The book became a movie in 1990, directed by Martin Scorcese.

Scientists said it was an "unexpected" discovery: There's a liquid methane filled lake near the equator of Saturn's moon Titan.

Scientists had seen lakes on Titan before, but they didn't expect them near the equator because they believed the intensity of the sun at those latitudes would evaporate the liquid.

"This discovery was completely unexpected because lakes are not stable at tropical latitudes," planetary scientist Caitlin Griffith of the University of Arizona, who led the discovery team, told the AP.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I'm Audie Cornish.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

And I'm Melissa Block. There's news today that the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, or USADA, has brought formal doping charges against seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. USADA is the body that fights performance-enhancing drug use in Olympic sports.

On the third day of the trial against former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, jurors heard more graphic testimony.

One of the alleged victims identified as "Victim 10," testified that after Sandusky had sexually abused him when he was in the seventh grade, he threatened him.

MSNBC reports:

Kansas has had more cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, in the first half of this year than in all of last year. Health officials have confirmed 56 cases. Charlie Hunt is with the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.

It’s not something that’s in the environment, so it’s person-to-person transmission,” Hunt says. “It’s trying to survive, just like the rest of us, I suppose.”

Hunt says the highly contagious disease comes in cycles.

“I think that we’re in a cycle right now, with pertussis, where we’re just going to be seeing an increase,” Hunt says.

A NASA mission aimed at surveying black holes and supernovae, among other things, launched successfully today at noon ET from beneath the belly of a wide-body jet flying approximately 40,000 feet above a darkened Pacific Ocean.

The 772-pound NuSTAR X-ray observatory was carried into an equatorial orbit about 400 miles above the Earth by a Pegasus rocket, which fired its three-stage motor for 13 minutes after being dropped by the L-1011 jet.