I learned a long time ago that hanging around toxic people was damaging and that no matter how it seemed, I always had a choice.

"I believe much trouble and blood would be saved if we opened our hearts more." --Chief Joseph, NEZ PERCE

We are as sick as our secrets. Our ego takes over control of our lives and when that happens our minds get very sick. Then we hurt people and our minds will always justify our actions. Our minds will give us rationalization and excuses that we are justified in doing what we are doing.

My Creator, Let me live today with an open heart. Let me realize to be vulnerable is a strength, not a weakness. Let me realize the power of an open heart. Let me be available to truth. If I get into trouble, let me hear the whisper of your guidance. Let me make heart decisions and let my head catch up to that decision.

While NASA engineers have grown fish tissue in lab dishes, no one has seriously proposed a way to grow meat on commercial levels.

But a new study conducted by University of Maryland doctoral student Jason Matheny and his colleagues describe two possible ways to do it.

"Just imagine how good it would feel if we all got together once in a while in large public gatherings and admitted that we don't know why we are alive, that nobody knows for sure if there's a higher being who created us, and that nobody really knows what the hell's going on here." -- Wes Nisker, meditation teacher, Inquiring Mind (Spring 2005)

A new study by the city of Austin and the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that coal-tar sealant, the shiny black stuff that goes on parking lots to protect asphalt from the elements, may be a major source of water pollution in Austin.

Scientists from the city's Watershed Protection and Development Review Department had been studying PAH hot spots since the late 1990s, but it wasn't until 2001 that they started collaborating with the USGS. The partnership began, Van Metre recalled, when city scientists approached the USGS with sediment from local waterways showing levels of PAH contamination that Van Metre found literally unbelievable.

"Our first reaction was we thought their data were wrong," he said. "We thought there must be a lab problem, the numbers were so high."

Your argument for remaining beard-free is unimpeachable. But you must stop using disposable plastic razors. I don't need to spell out the reasons: the source of plastic, the likely distant country of origin, the effect on the waste stream. Here in the U.S., 2 billion disposable razors are purchased annually. That's a lot of space in the landfill.

Besides the environmental concern, David, there's, well, the dorkiness. You want a date, you want the date to lead to something, and at some point the date might see you shave. Shaving is sexy, and a choice opportunity to impress that special man or woman with your suave masculinity. Plastic disposables say, "I think little about personal grooming" -- not to mention, "I'm cheap" -- and you have little margin for this type of drastic error.

If moral behavior were simply following rules, we could program a computer to be moral. -- Samuel P. Ginder, US navy captain

The first two enumerated rights, life and liberty, are straightforward enough, but this business about the pursuit of Happiness is more complex. Note that it is a right to the pursuit of Happiness, not to Happiness itself, and that despite the messages of our consumer culture, Happiness is not always the same thing as Fun. And nothing makes some people unHappier than the prospect of other people being Happy in a way that does not suit them. Yet this right to a personal definition of Happiness, and the right to pursue it, remains at the core of what Americans want their country to be. It is the Declaration's most profound idea.