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Kayla Williams and Brian McGough met in Iraq in 2003, when they were serving in the 101st Airborne Division. She was an Arabic linguist; he was a staff sergeant who had earned a Bronze Star. In October of that year, at a time when they were becoming close but not yet seeing each other, McGough was on a bus in a military convoy when an IED went off, blowing out the front door and window.

"Essentially a piece of shrapnel went through the back of my head, burrowed the skull from the back of my head past my ear, out through where my eye is, and while doing this it also ripped some brain matter out," McGough tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

He was left with physical and cognitive problems he's still recovering from, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. He has experienced periods of depression, paranoia and rage.

Williams and McGough started seeing each other early in his recovery, after they had returned to the U.S. They've stayed together in spite of the obstacles, including the rages that he directed at her. They married in 2005, just days before she went on a book tour to promote her memoir, Love My Rifle More Than You, about being a young woman in the Army serving in Iraq. Now she has a new memoir about her relationship with her husband, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War.

Dr. Kevin Fong works on "the edges" of medicine — researching how humans survive extremes of heat, cold, trauma, outer space and deep sea. "We're still exploring the human body and what medicine can do in the same way that the great explorers of the 20th century and every age before them explored the world," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In his book Extreme Medicine, Fong describes how avant garde medicine is challenging our understanding of how our bodies work and the boundary between life and death.

"You're taking this headlong plunge into the unknown hoping only that good fortune and survival might lie in wait," he says.

Fong is an anesthesiologist who is also trained in intensive care medicine. He's the founder of The Center for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine, at the University College London, where he's also a professor of physiology.

In the heart of New York City's Spanish Harlem, women from Morocco to Mexico arrive before dawn to crank up the ovens at Hot Bread Kitchen.

Despite their different cultures and languages, this non-profit training bakery says most of its participants have one thing in common: they all grew up learning how to bake traditional breads.

To work at HBK, women and men have to be foreign-born and low-income. And they have to want to become financially independent through a baking career. At the kitchen, they have the chance to take what they know and blend it with language lessons and commercial baking and management to shape their futures.

HBK is one of a growing number of non-profit kitchens which double as training centers and commercial businesses — like La Cocina in San Francisco and Hope & Main in Rhode Island. The trend has been spurred by a growing awareness of business opportunities for local food entrepreneurs and donors' willingness to give the less-advantaged a better shot at tapping those opportunities.

The Salt

San Francisco Kitchen Lends Low-Income Food Entrepreneurs A Hand

Wednesday, the American women's hockey team meets its arch rival Canada on the ice in Sochi at the Winter Olympics. It's an early round game, but when it comes to these two teams, which are expected to meet in the gold medal game, there's no such thing as a low-stakes match.

When they meet on the ice, things get heated: A match between the two teams in late December turned into a brawl. After the "melee," the referees handed out 10 fighting majors and other infractions.