Can spending time outdoors make you a calmer, smarter person? What about classrooms – should they include time outside? According to this article on Science Daily’s website, yes. They say that there’s a bacteria that there is a bacteria commonly found in soil that people often breathe in or ingest, and that when this bacteria was tested on lab rats, it produced rats that were able to act faster than others and show fewer signs of anxiety. Who knew?

Anyone out there who was a bit older than I am might remember an oil spill in 1979. Here Rachel Maddow compares that spill with our current situation. I can’t help but wonder why we haven’t learned or developed more effective ways of dealing with these problems.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Now this is just creepy. A man has demonstrated human infection by a computer virus. While this may sound sci-fi to many of us, there are plenty of scientists devoted to studying the future and future technology. A quick skim of a book by one of the field’s most visible authors, Ray Kurzweil, will familiarize anyone with some more ideas that send chills up spines similarly.

Crackpots? You be the judge. I can understand predicting more economic troubles for America this year – it’s not like people are spending less and saving more on a wide scale. But these claims, including the collapse of the FDIC and martial law, sound incredibly far-fetched. I, personally, will believe it when I see it.

With Memorial Day behind us now, we might be ready to read about something other than our veterans and their contributions to our present state of being. I urge you, however, to read this article, written by a veteran, about what it means to be American and what our veterans fought to secure. It’s more the acknowledgment that we’re all human and we all deserve the same rights, but we seem to keep trying to deny rights to others. I’m guessing it’s all about power. When a group of people has more rights (or freedom) than another, it has a greater amount of power than the smaller group – maybe even power over that group. These things are not what America was meant to be.