The Gateway

Local biologists are studying populations of venomous snakes that live in the St. Louis area, including copperheads. With the help of surgeons at the St. Louis Zoo, they're implanting tiny radio transmitters into the snakes and tracking their movements. The goal is to better understand where these elusive creatures live and hibernate.

The Midwest is tops in field corn production, but it does not stand out when it comes to national production of sweet corn. But for many in the Midwest, nothing says summer quite like a fresh hot ear of sweet corn — plain, buttered or salted.

The Rep's new artistic director, Hana Sharif, is the first black woman to hold that job at a member of the League of Resident Theatres. That is the nation’s largest professional regional theater organization. She is part of a wave of women taking artistic control of theaters in the past few years.

Veteran Erica Camp began adopting chickens that have been discarded from factory farms as a way of addressing her PTSD. She started an organization, Second Hen'd, focused on helping others adopt post-productive chickens. This summer, she started bringing her hens to a school for autistic children, to educate the kids about chickens.

Missouri resident Fidencio Fifield-Perez will premiere a new visual fiber design exhibit based on his time as a member of the DACA program. In his work, the artist from Oaxaca, Mexico, focuses on his experience as an immigrant.

More than 120,000 people, most of them children, have been dropped from Missouri's Medicaid rolls since the beginning of 2018. They've been dropped by the state or did not re-enroll. State officials say fewer people are using the program because they don't need it. But many families say they have unfairly and unwittingly lost coverage.

Tiny plant-eating insects known as treehoppers serenade each other during mating using vibrational songs. They can change depending on the temperature of the environment, which means climate change might disrupt treehopper mating in the future. SLU researchers have found that although the songs changed, female treehoppers still responded to them.

Children’s mental health is a big concern as the risk of suicide and opioid addiction rates rise among teens. But in rural areas, where mental health providers are scarce, spotting problems falls to teachers. Now a new national research center is looking to help rural schools.

Every September, former residents of Times Beach gather at Route 66 State Park near Eureka to remember their old town. It was once home to several thousand people but was so contaminated by dioxin in the 1970s that the EPA bought it out, tore it down and burned the earth in an incinerator. Former residents say Times Beach is a cautionary environmental lesson that should not be forgotten.

Democrats in Missouri have endured three bruising election cycles in a row, resulting in Republican dominance in the state's politics. The party's stalwarts are looking to state Auditor Nicole Galloway to engineer a comeback.