How to Teach Kids About Puberty

This is fabulous: a video from the NEMO Science Center's "Teen Facts" exhibit ... it is, as the website says, an "animated educative film showing a scientific experiment. For three minutes two kids are exposed to ten years of puberty." The narrator is a riot. The thing I find most interesting, culturally speaking, is that this video openly embraces the sexuality of teenagers. Naturally, it's from the Netherlands, not America, where many teaching teens about puberty like to pretend the sex portion of the lesson is optional. (Thanks once again, Marc)

On Science: The Faulty Logic of Religious Meningitis

According to a new study, teenagers who French kiss multiple partners nearly quadruple their risk of getting meningitis. Fine. This makes scientific sense: You can get meningitis by kissing people, you kiss more people, you increase you risk of getting it. But they also found that attending religious ceremonies decreases the risk of getting meningitis. Come now: Religious ceremonies don't protect them. What protects them is (a) meningitis vaccines and (b) kissing fewer (or healthier) people. Saying church has anything to do with it reads like a perfectly incorrect answer on an SAT test: Bacterium is to Brain Infection as Atheism is to ... Meningitis?? I don't think so.