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Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. A leading theory points to changes in energy balance as children eat more and move less.

Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship. What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. In a recent study by the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, teenagers did a simulated high-risk driving task while they were lying in an fMRI brain-imaging machine. The reward system of their brains lighted up much more when they thought another teenager was watching what they did—and they took more risks.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.

StatPlanet Map Maker has been used for a wide range of purposes, such as for monitoring HIV & AIDS at country level, mapping human development trends, visualizing global marketing data, and analyzing the implementation of national programs.

Some education experts and policymakers argue that if the U.S. does not boost the number of workers in those jobs, that America will lose its competitive edge as a global innovator. But others say that there is no STEM crisis at all, that this is actually a myth and that colleges should integrate STEM and the humanities into a broader education.

You have to remember that STEM makes up only about 7 percent of the jobs in the American economy. On the other hand, we know that anybody who majors in STEM often doesn't stay in STEM. For instance, by the time most STEM majors are 35 years old, they're in management. They leave. They no longer work on the bench in the lab. So we need to produce a lot more STEM workers than we actually use initially because we lose so many of them along the way because their careers are relatively successful.

That is, a technical education now allows you to do anything. And anything, for most workers, means having a job that's fairly focused as a STEM worker, but then moving on to management or into a regulatory roll or into a government job. So STEM has become the place where you go if you want to have a lot of alternatives 10 years down the road.

has left our school districts impotent and, worse, has robbed millions of children of a real future

District leaders also need the authority to use financial incentives to attract and retain the best teachers.

but let's stop pretending that everyone who goes into the classroom has the ability and temperament to lift our children to excellence.

To me, the issue of information literacy could be even more important than the health or education of some individuals. Fundamental aspects of democracy, economic production, the discovery and use of knowledge might be at stake. Some of the biggest problems facing the world today seem to be far beyond the ability of any individual or community, or even the whole human race, to tackle.