Darryl St. George has served his country both in and out of uniform. He left his high school teaching job on Long Island in 2010 to become a U.S. Navy corpsman, a medic for the U.S. Marines.

"I loved teaching. It was a great job, but I felt like something was missing. I kind of — I felt compelled to serve," he told NPR's Tom Bowman in July.

At the time, he was at a dusty combat outpost in southern Afghanistan. St. George had one month left in his deployment to Afghanistan, and said that when he came home, he planned to visit the school where he had taught.

In downtown Cape Town, worshippers gathered Friday for a morning Mass at St. George's Cathedral. During apartheid, the massive stone church was an epicenter of resistance against the South African government. On Friday, a service was held to honor the man who led that resistance, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu.

Veterans and the general public have different views on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the value of military service, and even the subject of patriotism, according to a new survey by the Pew Research Center.

The United States has never seen a moment like this one, the Pew Center says. Sustained combat for a decade, and a small fraction of American men and women in uniform.

For its popular "photo of the day" feature, NASA gives us a look at the center of the galaxy, in the form of an infrared image — because as I'm sure you already know, infrared can penetrate the dust clouds that obscure the core in the visible spectrum.

This is the area that NASA uses to form ideas about how massive stars are formed, and how they influence other objects.

The image above, taken by the Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer, has a "false color," NASA says, in order to show "the glow of hot hydrogen in space."

Let's say you have people using computers to control unmanned aircraft that are useful for both gathering information and destroying targets on other continents. If you had a choice, those would probably not be the computers you'd like to see infected by a virus — but that's what has happened to some U.S. systems that control Predator and Reaper drones, according to Wired's Danger Room blog.

Cue Tom Petty because this could be California's last (legal) dance with Mary Jane.

Federal prosecutors turned up the heat on owners of medical-marijuana dispensaries in California by issuing them a 45-day deadline to shut down their shops or face criminal charges or seizure of assets. The crackdown, announced Friday in Sacramento, Calif., comes 15 years after the Golden State started allowing marijuana as a doctor-prescribed treatment for a variety of illnesses.

In other men's health news today, the Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Cialis as a once-a-day treatment for symptoms caused by an enlarged prostate.

There is a tradition of Republican presidential candidates laying out their foreign-policy views at The Citadel.

John McCain did it four years ago; George W. Bush did it eight years before that. On Friday, it was Mitt Romney's turn to speak at the South Carolina military academy.

Performance artist Aman Mojedidi moved from the U.S. to Afghanistan in 2003, as one of what he says were many Afghan-Americans and Afghan-Europeans who thought their homeland was finally on the mend.

"It was really part of that wave of hyphenated Afghans and internationals wanting to come to Afghanistan, post-Taliban, [to] do something, rebuild, reconstruct, that kind of thing," he says.