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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.

stories make up at least 65% of the content of the most successful TED presentations.

Most leaders who make pitches and presentations take the opposite approach, filling their content with mind-numbing and unemotional statistics and data. But as another popular TED speaker, Brené Brown, has noted, “Stories are just data with a soul.”

Science has also shown that stories connect us in extraordinary ways. Researchers at Princeton University have found that a remarkable thing happens to your mind when you hear a story. Personal stories actually cause the brains of both storyteller and listener to exhibit what the researchers call “brain to brain coupling.” To put it simply, telling personal stories will put you in sync with your listener.

Seton Hill University plans to give every first year undergraduate student a 13" MacBook and an iPad. Just last month, George Fox University in Oregon also announced that it plans to give its new students a choice between a MacBook or an iPad.

The problem of why good classes fail has become a bit of an obsession for me lately. I visit several colleges and universities every semester to talk to faculty about teaching and learning, and everywhere I go I try to sneak away for just a bit and slip into the back of an unsuspecting class just to see how things are going.

Soon after receiving a Kindle DX, however, something unexpected happened. Roesner began to miss thumbing through the pages of a printed textbook for the answer to a homework questio

At the University of Virginia, as many as 80 percent of MBA students who participated in Amazon's pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading

Technology has enabled inexpensive reproduction of a wide variety of media, which has in turn radically transformed the structures of a number of industries.

It's hard to dispute the hypothesis that the higher instructor quality would likely overcome the modest benefits of face-to-face instruction, and I would be willing to bet that this form of virtual instruction would come as a welcome change for those students taught by instructors who are teaching merely to fulfill university requirements, are using courses to push their own agendas, or just plain don't speak English

The traditional model of education is not altogether different from the old-time theater or concert model. On the up side, customers enjoy a live experience where they can potentially interact with the performer or instructor. On the down side, this model is limited in its scalability (especially where simply increasing venue or classroom size is not reasonable) and thus more expensive than its virtual counterpart. Given the skyrocketing cost of college education, the potential appeal of virtual instruction is becoming quite significant.