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In 2004, Peter Obetz was in the middle of a divorce when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

"Food would get stuck down my throat, and it got worse and worse, so I met with my doctor. I had a tumor on my esophagus wall," says Peter, 48, during a visit to StoryCorps in Kansas City, Mo.

His doctor told him surgery carried a 10 percent risk of death. "I remember telling the doc, 'You mean to tell me like one guy on my softball team isn't going to make it?' There's 10 guys on the team. He said, 'Yeah, that's pretty much it. We can either do the surgery tomorrow or we can wait till Tuesday.' "

That's when he called his best friend, Jeff Jarrett, 52, who told him he needed to get the surgery as soon as possible. "I spent the day with your parents. And the surgeon met with us just after the surgery was completed and drew a graph," Jeff says. The graph showed Peter's percentages of survival over time.

"It started out at 90 percent on the day of the surgery and fell to 15 percent after five years," Jeff says. "That was my scariest moment — that there was only a 15 percent chance that I was going to have my best friend with me five years from now. The next day, you'd caught your mother with that little graph that the doctor had drawn and she wouldn't show it to you. And so I'd come in, and you said, 'I want you to sit down and tell me everything. So I did.' "

"I remember saying, 'I'm toast,' " Peter says.

"Your mom had said that to the surgeon. The surgeon said, 'No, he's lightly brown. He's not toast,' " Jeff says.

Cancer was a wake-up call Peter says he may have needed. "I was in a job where I was miserable, and it gave me the permission to leave," he says. "I went from making a lot of money to making very little and being happier."

He sold his big house and moved to an apartment. Not long after he moved, a unit downstairs opened up and Jeff moved in. "The only time usually that you live right next door to your best friend is when you're a kid because often your next-door neighbor is by default your best friend," Peter says.

"Exactly. Second-graders aren't that picky," Jeff says.

"When I think of every aspect of my life: My marriage has changed, my job has changed, where I live has changed. Our friendship is really the only thing that's constant," Peter says. "That's probably the greatest gift that you could've given me."

"When you were sick, everybody wanted to say, 'Peter, I love you so much, I'm so grateful for our friendship,' " Jeff says. "But I feel so lucky that if anything would have happened to you, there was never any ambiguity about how you feel about me or I feel about you. I love you very, very much."

"I love you too, man."

Peter's been cancer-free since 2009.

Audio produced for Morning Edition by Jud Esty-Kendall.

The Mediterranean diet has long been a darling of nutrition experts as a proven way to prevent some chronic diseases. Heavy on olive oil, vegetables, fruit, nuts and fish, the diet most recently has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes and dying compared with a typical low-fat diet.

But in many regions, including Nordic countries like Denmark and Sweden, it's not easy to go Med. Olive oil, for one, is hard to find. And while obesity rates in the Nordic countries are much lower than in the U.S., there are still plenty of people at risk of diabetes and other chronic diseases who could use some dietary inspiration.

That's why a group of nutrition researchers in Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway set out to design a "healthy" Nordic diet around locally produced food items, like herring, rapeseed oil (also known as canola) and bilberries (a relative of the blueberry). To test whether it was actually healthy, they prescribed the diet to people with metabolic syndrome — a precursor to diabetes — and compared them to others on an "average" Nordic diet higher in red meat and white bread.

The study was randomized and lasted 18 to 24 weeks in 2009 and 2010, with 96 people in the healthy diet group and 70 in the control group. The healthy Nordic diet group ate mostly berries (currants, bilberries and strawberries), canola oil, whole grains, root vegetables and three fish meals (preferably fatty fish like salmon and mackerel) per week, and avoided sugar. The rest of the time, they could eat vegetarian, poultry or game, but no red meat. The researchers provided them with some of the key ingredients for their meals.

The control group, on the other hand, ate butter instead of canola, fewer berries and vegetables, and had no restrictions on red meat, white bread or sugar intake.

While the researchers didn't see changes in blood pressure or insulin sensitivity in the people on the healthy Nordic diet, their bad cholesterol/good cholesterol ratio improved significantly, as did one marker for inflammation, according to Lieselotte Cloetens, a biomedical nutrition researcher at Lund University in Sweden who co-authored the study. In the long run, Cloetens says, the change in the inflammation marker could result in a 20 to 40 percent reduction in the risk of type 2 diabetes for people on the healthy diet.

The results appear this week in a European journal, the Journal of Internal Medicine.

The research coincides with a similar, but distinct movement in the region — "New Nordic" cuisine. Claus Meyer, the owner of the acclaimed Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, boldly defined New Nordic with a manifesto. His aim? To inspire chefs and highlight the culinary wealth of the Nordic region — foods like fungi, beech leaves, birch juice, reindeer, and chick weed. New Nordic has become "a mentality of sort of scientific and creative exploration," Ben Reade, head of culinary research and development at the Nordic Food Lab, told NPR freelancer Sidsel Overgaard last year.

While Meyer has collaborated with researchers at the University of Copenhagen to explore whether a New Nordic diet could help overweight people drop pounds, his diet places a special emphasis on seasonal, local foods, and on foraging. "It is more defined, from a culinary point of view," than the healthy Nordic diet in the recent study, says Cloetens.

So will the Nordic diet be competing with the Mediterranean diet in far-flung countries seeking to emulate svelte Europeans? Cloetens is confident in its healthfulness, but warns, "since it contains many local produced food items, it might not be easy to consume by people outside the Nordic countries."

And, she says, next she and her colleagues need to investigate whether the healthy Nordic diet can also help people lose weight and keep it off.

Syria's government appears to be making gains this week in a battle against rebel forces in the key city of Qusair, along the border with Lebanon. NPR's Steve Inskeep traveled to the edge of the city, and we hear from him first, followed by Kelly McEvers, who reports from just across the frontier in Lebanon.

A Syrian provincial governor told us this week that the government army has largely retaken Qusair, though a battle continues for the airport. We asked to see for ourselves.

So the governor appointed two men to lead us to the city, which holds great importance because it is a busy crossing point with Lebanon. The drive proved to be revealing. Miles before reaching Qusair, we saw towers of smoke in the air.

From across a lake we made out Qusair's airfield, the scene of the heavy fighting this week. It should have been a short drive to the city, but we took a roundabout route.

Our guides, members of Syria's Alawite religious group, explained this was for security. President Bashar Assad is Alawite and depends on the group for his firmest support, though they make up just a little more than 10 percent of the population.

The guides were taking us from one Alawite village to another, fearing violence if they drove through villages of the majority Sunni Muslims, many of whom support the rebellion.

As we drew closer, we heard the thud of Syrian artillery, pounding Qusair. We also heard fighter jets overhead, and occasionally heard small arms fire. And yet even when the gunshots sounded as if they were close by, we would still see children sitting casually on the side of the street.

Blocked From The City

We were finally stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint, and they said we could not enter Qusair, telling us that rebel snipers were on the road ahead.

Unable to get closer, we knocked on the door of a nearby house, and the residents let us climb on the roof. We had a panoramic view of the landscape.

It did not look like Qusair was entirely under control. We saw smoke rising up from the city, suggesting the fighting was still going on.

The rebels have said they're still fighting in the city, though spokesmen for both sides say the Syrian army has captured most of the region.

In this battle, the government has supplemented its heavy weapons with help from the outside. Fighters from the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah joined the battle from across the border with Lebanon.

It's a sensitive topic here to discuss Hezbollah's involvement in the war.

The government has insisted it's the rebels, not the Syrian army, that rely on foreigners. But Hezbollah's involvement has become more open in recent days, and Qusair is especially well-placed for the Lebanese militia to play a role.

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Scientists in Siberia say they've extracted blood samples from the carcass of a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth, leading to speculation that a clone of the extinct animal might someday walk the earth. But researchers say the find, which also included well-preserved muscle tissue, must be studied further to know its potential.

The female mammoth's carcass was found "in good preservation on Lyakhovsky Islands of Novosibirsk archipelago," according to a news release about the discovery by North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Siberia.

"The fragments of muscle tissues, which we've found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat," said lead researcher Semyon Grigoriev of the Museum of Mammoths. "The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of tundra."

"The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out," Grigoriev said. " Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to –10C. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties."

The Siberian scientists say they want to work with Canadian professor Kevin Campbell, who has written in the journal Nature Genetics that mammoths' blood may have had special properties that allowed its hemoglobin to deliver oxygen to the body tissues even in extreme cold.

Campbell is also famous for "resurrecting this red blood cell protein hemoglobin from a woolly mammoth," as he told the CBC last year.

Asked about the new Siberian discovery by Scientific American, Campbell says he has no way of knowing whether what "appears to be a remarkable finding" is genuine — but he also said he wants to study the specimens. And he offered some ideas about why the sample was in a liquid state, even at temperatures such as minus 17 degrees Celsius.

"For instance, maybe they did have some sort of cryoprotectant (arctic ground squirrels certainly seem to), and this became concentrated during the long period of preservation," he tells Scientific American's Kate Wong. "Conversely, maybe they had absolutely no 'antifreezes' and instead most of the water in the sample was taken up by the surrounding ice, such that the remaining 'blood' became extremely concentrated–which would lower its freezing point."

Another explanation, he says, could be that the sample contains ice-living bacteria, which might have lent their cryoprotective properties to the pooled blood.

The North-Eastern Federal University says that some samples will also go to its "Mammoth rebirth" project, between the school and South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, with the goal of cloning a mammoth.

As our colleagues at the TED blog remind us, humans have a special fascination with wooly mammoths.

"Woollys are a quintessential image of the Ice Age ... We seem to have a deep connection with them as we do with elephants," DNA specialist Hendrik Poinar says in a TED talk. "I have to admit there's a part of the child in me that wants to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the North."

And for some folks, that fascination is joined by a desire to make money.

"Today, the hunt is on for woolly mammoth tusks in the Arctic Siberia," writes TED's Becky Chung. "Due to global warming, the melting permafrost has begun revealing these hidden ivory treasures for a group of local tusk-hunters to find and sell. A tusk can range from 10-13 foot in length and a top-grade mammoth tusk is worth around $400 per pound. Mammoth ivory, unlike elephant ivory, is legal."

As for cloning the extinct animals, not everyone is convinced it's a good idea to try to bring them back.

As scientist Daniel Fisher tells Kate Wong at Scientific American, "I have more confidence in our ability to generate new knowledge from the fossil record than in our ability to learn from cloned mammoths."