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General Motors delayed a safety recall of more than 330,000 Saturn cars that have been found to have defective power steering systems, newly released federal documents show. The records also show federal regulators didn't demand a recall of the cars, despite thousands of complaints about them.

The cars' problem is described as "a sudden loss of electric power steering (EPS) assist that could occur at any time while driving" by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Some drivers have complained that those failings came at dangerous times, such as mid-way through a turn.

As NPR's Hansi Lo Wang reports, news of the recall comes after recent criticisms of GM's delayed response to faulty ignition switches that have been blamed for more than a dozen deaths. Here's a report Hansi filed for our Newscast desk today:

"It took General Motors more than a decade to warn the public that more than 2.6 million of its cars had faulty ignition switches.

"Now documents posted on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's website show that GM also waited years to recall more than 300,000 Saturn Ions for power steering failure — despite receiving thousands of consumer complaints and claims for warranty repairs.

"The documents also show that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation about the defective power steering systems more than two years ago.

"But the government regulator did not seek a recall, after finding the problem caused a dozen crashes and two injuries."

In a surprising discovery, scientists have found evidence of a tundra landscape in Greenland that's millions of years old. The revelation goes against widely held ideas about how some glaciers work, and it suggests that at least parts of Greenland's ice sheet had survived periods of global warming intact.

"Glaciers are commonly thought to work like a belt sander," a news release from the University of Vermont says. "As they move over the land they scrape off everything — vegetation, soil, and even the top layer of bedrock."

That's why researchers from several universities and NASA say they were "greatly surprised" to find signs that an ancient tundra had been preserved beneath two miles of ice in Greenland, in a study that was published this week in the journal Science.

"We found organic soil that has been frozen to the bottom of the ice sheet for 2.7 million years," says University of Vermont geologist and lead author Paul Bierman.

The researchers studied 17 "dirty ice" samples from the bottom of an ice core taken in the area of Summit, Greenland, looking for the presence of the isotope beryllium-10, which would signal an exposure to the atmosphere in the 10,019-foot "GISP2" sample that was taken in 1993.

The ice core has been involved in many other studies — but few of those were focused on its very bottom.

"I was asking a really different question than people who look at ice cores," Bierman tells the site LiveScience. "I was looking for a history of landscapes in ancient Greenland, and that mindset wasn't there 20 years ago. It's the evolution of science — you're always coming up with new hypotheses to test," he said.

The scientists believed they would find only trace amounts of beryllium-10. Instead, they found millions of the atoms, LiveScience says.

Bierman says that "we thought we were going looking for a needle in haystack." But, "It turned out that we found an elephant in a haystack."

To put their findings in context, the researchers compared their results with data from a sample they took in the tundra that exists today, in Alaska's Brooks Range. The results were similar to those from the ice core, leading at least one scientists to say they'd found a new rationale for Greenland's name.

"Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago," says co-author Dylan Rood of the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center and the University of California, Santa Barbara. "Greenland looked like the green Alaskan tundra, before it was covered by the second largest body of ice on Earth."

The study gives a sense of the findings' potential wider impact:

"The preservation of this soil implies that the ice has been non-erosive and frozen to the bed for much of that time, that there was no substantial exposure of central Greenland once the ice sheet became fully established, and that preglacial landscapes can remain preserved for long periods under continental ice sheets."

Lisa Robinson has done just about every kind of music writing there is. She's followed Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones on tour, covered the scene around CBGB in the 1970s, been a syndicated newspaper columnist, written live reviews for The New York Post and cover stories for Vanity Fair. In that time –- four decades plus, beginning as a filing clerk for a late-night radio DJ — she got to know everybody, and held her own as a woman in the quintessential boys' club of rock and rock journalism.

Robinson's new memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, is an insider's look at some of the biggest personalities in music, and how their hopes and fears changed as the industry changed around them. She spoke with NPR's Wade Goodwyn; hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

It's sometimes astonishing, and perhaps a little frightening, the age in which our destinies can be set in motion. You write that your destiny began with a transistor radio, listening to Symphony Sid's jazz radio show as a kid in New York City.

Lisa Robinson has done just about every kind of music writing there is. She's followed Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones on tour, covered the scene around CBGB in the 1970s, been a syndicated newspaper columnist, written live reviews for The New York Post and cover stories for Vanity Fair. In that time –- four decades plus, beginning as a filing clerk for a late-night radio DJ — she got to know everybody, and held her own as a woman in the quintessential boys' club of rock and rock journalism.

Robinson's new memoir, There Goes Gravity: A Life in Rock and Roll, is an insider's look at some of the biggest personalities in music, and how their hopes and fears changed as the industry changed around them. She spoke with NPR's Wade Goodwyn; hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.

It's sometimes astonishing, and perhaps a little frightening, the age in which our destinies can be set in motion. You write that your destiny began with a transistor radio, listening to Symphony Sid's jazz radio show as a kid in New York City.