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While bone-chilling temperatures remain across much of the nation, there are some fun (and safe) things to do. Morning Edition is asking for photos about what some very cool folks are up to.

Mark Brown's raccoon Rebekah was confiscated after he posted videos of him dancing and showering with his pet. Tenn. law prohibits keeping native animals captured in the wild as pets. Brown tried but failed to get the law changed.

Could a little red circle help you skip the comfort food this winter and maybe drop a few pounds? Doctors from Massachusetts General Hospital think so. They put traffic-light labels on their cafeteria's menu to signal the healthfulness of dishes. The colorful cues helped improve eating habits even two years later.

A dominant downhill skier, Vonn has been trying to recover from a knee injury. "But the reality has sunk in that my knee is just too unstable to compete at this level," she announced Tuesday.

This super cold air is usually whirling around the Arctic. But a big piece has plunged further south than normal. One way to think about what's happening: If a spinning ice skater extends her arms, she slows down. Sometimes, she wobbles and falls. The polar vortex has sort of stretched out an arm.

The world's largest hog and pork buyer wants its contract farmers to move pregnant sows out of constrictive crates and into group houses, generally considered more humane, by 2022. The move is significant because independent farmers supply about 40 percent of the company's sows.

A new California law allows transgender students to choose restrooms and sport teams based on the gender they identify with. Host Michel Martin speaks with a parenting roundtable about the pros and cons.

In Little Failure, the novelist recounts his emigration from the USSR to the U.S. when he was 7. For the first few years, he says, he would sit alone in the school cafeteria, talking to himself in Russian "in this gigantic fur hat and fur coat." It wasn't long before a teacher advised, "Children won't play with you if you have that much fur on."

Alcohol uses causes a lot of health problems, and most of the trouble strikes drinkers who aren't alcoholics. Something as simple as a five-question screening test and a brief chat about cutting back can help people change course. But more than 80 percent of adults say they've never discussed alcohol use with a health professional.

Keep the dog away when you're shoveling snow. Some can't resist jumping toward the flying flakes, and a dog is no match for a shovel blade. The sweet taste of antifreeze can be enticing for pets, but ethylene glycol, the main antifreeze, is also quite toxic. Clean up spills and drips.