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NPR's Uri Berliner is taking $5,000 of his own savings and putting it to work. Though he's no financial whiz or guru, he's exploring different types of investments — alternatives that may fare better than staying in a savings account that's not keeping up with inflation.

Reckless bets on real estate can cause trouble. They can, for example, help to bring down the global economy. But many financial advisers say including some real estate in an investment or retirement portfolio is a good idea. It adds diversification.

And real estate prices are rising. Here's one way to tell: The house-flipping shows are back on cable. Buy, remodel, sell, repeat. We've been there before, and it didn't end happily. And yet prices fell so hard during the crash — 50 percent or more in some parts of the country — that a rebound just makes sense. Real estate watchers are divided on whether fundamentals justify further price increases or whether the market is getting too frothy again.

Josh Dorkin runs a real estate investment website called Bigger Pockets. I asked him what kind of real estate bet I can make for $1,000. His advice: Be careful.

"We're kind of in a bubble once again," he says. "We've got these low interest rates; we've got the big money funds coming into the market. And of course if you're savvy and know what you're doing, there's always going to be an opportunity."

Dorkin runs me through my options.

"You could go and flip a house. Of course, you'd need to go out and take out a high-risk loan more likely than not to do that and of course doing that is really kind of like running a job in itself."

Range of REITs

Curious about some of Uri's other REIT holdings?

Storage units: When the housing market picks up, people move more often. They need someplace to stash their stuff for a while. They want more space, and they rent it from storage unit companies that are REITs.

Data centers: Data centers are like unfurnished apartments for digital information. They're secure and climate controlled with plenty of reliable power. With more companies using the cloud, demand for these digital apartments is growing.

Parents steer their kids to media for all kinds of things: as a distraction so they can make dinner, to teach letters and numbers, and for pure entertainment. There are also times when parents rely on books, TV, museums and other media when they aren't quite sure how to approach a difficult topic by themselves.

Linda Ellerbee is the queen of hard subjects. Domestic abuse, Sept. 11, alcoholism and living with HIV are among the many tough issues she's covered in the 22 years since she's hosted NickNews on Nickelodeon. The show is written for 9- to 13-year-olds, and Ellerbee says her one rule of thumb is don't dumb it down.

"Our viewers are smart people," she says. "They are merely younger, less experienced and shorter." They also possess a more limited vocabulary, but Ellerbee she still uses words they might not know, like "intervention" or "hijacking."

"If I'm going to use a word that I think a 10-year-old might not understand," she says, "I either explain what the word means or use it in such a way that it's absolutely clear what the word means. I don't change the word."

NickNews is also known for letting kids do the talking: Children who've experienced all kinds of difficulties go on air to explain what their lives are like and how they're coping. Ellerbee says it's an effective way to explain a hard subject to young people. But, she cautions, don't do it too soon.

"That's why we haven't gone to Newtown yet to do a show with those kids or, you know, about what happened," she says. "It's about timing. You need to sort of let some things settle."

For the producers of Glee, meanwhile, the right time was four months after Newtown. Last April, the Fox series did an episode in which the high school goes on lockdown when a student's gun goes off. Some Newtown, Conn., residents urged people in the community to boycott the show.

“ The way adolescent brain works is such that 'bad things happen to other people' ... So what I think ['Glee'] did was to strike empathy and understanding amongst that age group.

A federal appeals court slapped down a quixotic legal campaign against Monsanto's biotech patents this week.

Organic farmers had gone to court to declare those patents invalid. The farmers, according to their lawyers, were "forced to sue preemptively to protect themselves from being accused of patent infringement" if their field became contaminated by Monsanto's genetically modified seed.

Instead, the judges — echoing the ruling of a lower court — told the farmers that they were imagining a threat that doesn't exist.

"There is no justiciable case or controversy," they wrote. Monsanto says that it won't sue anyone for accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops, and the organic farmers couldn't come up with any cases in which this had happened.

The organic farmers, however, declared partial victory, because the court's decision binds Monsanto to this promise. Up to now, it was just a statement on the company's website. Now, it's enshrined in the legal record.

In fact, according to the judges, since the decision to reject the organic farmers' claims relies explicitly on Monsanto's policy statements, "those representations are binding."

The reason is something called "judicial estoppel" — the common-law principle that someone can't use an argument to win one case and then turn around and argue the opposite in a different case.

The day we arrived in Iran's capital, Tehran, billboards along the drive from the airport to the city center were already telling us something about what's happening in the country as it prepared for Friday's presidential elections.

We see typical highway signs for Sony Ericsson, but also billboards featuring the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic. We also see and drive under giant signs that are from Iran's current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, urging people to vote.

Iran's supreme leader has predicted his country will produce an "epic" turnout, a big endorsement of the Islamic Republic.

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