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Lashkar Gah is the capital of the volatile province that alone grows half of Afghanistan's opium poppy. Cultivation here grew by 34 percent over last year.

On Fridays, hundreds of men gather at the bazaar along the Helmand River, the lifeblood of this arid province. Vendors sell everything from livestock to boxes of artisanal medicine.

There's no sign of poppy here. In fact, the farmers we talk to like 26-year-old Khairullah, who goes by one name, say they are actually too poor to grow it.

"It requires a lot of effort to grow, and you have to wait a long time to harvest," he says.

Khariullah says he barely gets by growing legal crops and he can't afford the extra labor and risk to cultivate poppy. Others here agree, adding that poppy is the main source of insecurity. But, it's not hard to find farmers who do grow it.

We drive across the city and down a quiet residential street of tan brick compounds. We stop and 27-year-old Abdullah hops in the car. It's not safe to visit his village, so he came to the city to meet us.

Abdullah says his family has been farming opium poppies for more than 20 years. He says they can't make a living any other way.

"The major source of income for people in Helmand is opium," he says.

Abdullah says his family grows about 150 pounds and make about $9,000 a year, which is four times what they can make from any other crop.

"We understand that opium is bad," he says. "All drugs are bad. But, it's difficult for us seeing a neighbor with a new car when we are riding bicycles. So, we have to do this to have a better life."

Abdullah admits it's a gamble. One year, he had a crop that was chest-high and ready for harvesting. He went to town one morning, and when he came home, the field had been leveled by the government workers eradicating opium poppies.

Abdullah, who is attending law school and hopes to someday get out of the poppy business, says this year's harvest was excellent.

A United Nations report released Wednesday confirms Abdullah's assessment. The report said opium poppy cultivation hit a record level this year despite the ongoing efforts by Western countries and the Afghan government to reduce production and find alternatives for farmers.

Few Options For Farmers

About six miles outside of Lashkar Gah, past brown fields and mud houses, is the government compound of Nad Ali district.

Fifteen Afghan farmers with creased, leathery faces sit in the meeting hall. Sharifullah, who also gives only one name, says that in addition to corn, cotton, and potatoes, they also grow opium, which the farmers don't hesitate to admit in front of government officials.

"That is because for the rest of our product we have no market," he says. "We can't export [our crops] and get a good price for them. We can't even sustain our families."

Sharifullah says they don't grow opium in the district, but rather on the outskirts in the desert.

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More than 106,000 Americans selected health plans in the first reporting period of open enrollment for the new health insurance marketplace, according to data released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services.

That number is only "about 20 percent of the government's October target," as NPR's Scott Horsley reports for our Newscast unit.

Less than 27,000 people used the federal HealthCare.gov site to select a plan. The overall number includes enrollments made via federal and state marketplaces from Oct. 1 to Nov. 2, the agency says.

"To date, 106,185 persons have selected a Marketplace plan — this includes 79,391 in [state-based marketplaces] and 26,794 in [federally facilitated marketplaces]," according to the report. "An additional 975,407 persons who have been determined eligible have not yet selected a plan through the Marketplace."

The means less than a quarter of those who chose plans did so through the federal site. But Health and Human Services officials say they're optimistic about future growth.

"The promise of quality, affordable coverage is increasingly becoming reality for this first wave of applicants to the Health Insurance Marketplaces," HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement accompanying the release of the data.

"We expect enrollment will grow substantially throughout the next five months," she added, noting strong interest in the plans and promising more improvements to the federal HealthCare.gov website.

The report highlights four numbers:

846,184 applications have been completed.

1,509,883 people are included in those completed applications.

396,261 individuals have been determined or assessed eligible for Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program.

106,185 people have selected insurance plans for 2014.

The timing of the data's release came as something of a surprise; officials had said they would not be released until later this week. It came on the same day Rep. Darrell Issa led a House oversight committee hearing on the problems that plagued the HealthCare.gov site and the effort to improve it.

At that hearing, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park said that "the system has been comfortably handling, at present," about 20,000 to 25,000 current users.

The HHS report also included broad statistics on traffic to marketplace websites, citing 26,876,527 unique visitors to state and federal websites. And 3,158,436 people got in touch with state and federal call centers that were set up to help people navigate the system created by the Affordable Care Act, according to the report.

The agency notes that the 106,185 figure "is 1.5 percent of the estimated enrollees at the end of the 2014 open enrollment period," citing a Congressional Budget Office estimate from May.

Scotland Yard says it believes a British spy whose naked, decomposing body was found padlocked inside a gym bag in a bathtub three years ago, probably died accidentally.

Gareth Williams, 31, was working for Britain's MI6 spy agency when his body was found at his home in August 2010.

Last May, a coroner concluded that Williams was probably murdered, but on Wednesday London Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner Martin Hewitt told reporters that the death was "most probably ... an accident."

"I'm convinced that Gareth's death was in no way linked to his work," Hewitt said.

Reuters says that at the time his death was revealed, Williams' "spy background and the fact that expensive, unworn women's clothes were found at his flat provoked a wide range of 'weird and wonderful' theories."

The news agency says:

"The remains of the maths prodigy were found curled up inside a zipped and padlocked red hold-all at the London flat — an intelligence service 'safe house' — close to MI6's headquarters."

Hunger can make people emotional, that's for sure. Some people get "hangry" when their blood sugar levels drop and their irritability rises. Others get greedy.

But new research suggests that we may have another, innate response to hunger: a desire to share what we have with others.

Researchers Lene Aarw and Michael Bang Petersen, both in the department of political science and government at Aarhus University in Denmark, wanted to explore the possibility that we are evolutionarily wired to want to share food. Their logic? Back in the days before we had a reliable food supply, communities often shared food in situations of temporary hunger.

The researchers also had a hunch that biological impulses — like hunger — may influence our political opinions.

So in a recent study published in the journal Psychological Science, they tested these ideas with an experiment involving 104 university students in Denmark. The students refrained from eating or drinking for four hours. They then were given soft drinks to drink: Half got soft drinks with carbohydrates, while the other half got drinks with an artificial sweetener. After that, the researchers asked the students six questions about social welfare.

They found that the students who had gotten the artificial sweeteners — and thus had lower blood glucose levels and more hunger — expressed stronger support for social welfare.

But when they gave the hungry people actual money, they did not share more — apparently, the researchers concluded, hunger increased people's sense of moral obligation, but it didn't necessarily spur them on to concrete action.

Now to be clear, Aarw and Petersen's intention was to explore the biological basis of how political attitudes are formed.

"There's so much focus on traditional forms of rationality, and mainly, economic incentives," Aarw tells The Salt. "Our findings provide a new understanding of how there are biological impulses underlying our opinions."

So does this suggest that affluent countries, where people are more likely to be overfed than underfed, are less likely to support social welfare? No, says Aarw.

"I don't think we can really say something about that," she says. "But it would be highly relevant to look more into it."

Indeed, this is a new area of evolutionary psychology that Aarw and Petersen have helped to crack open, but there's a whole lot more to learn about how hunger affects our emotions and our actions.