It's lunchtime at Shelbyville High School, 30 miles southeast of Indianapolis, Ind., and more than 100 teenagers are buzzing over trays in the cafeteria. Like high schoolers everywhere, they have arranged themselves by type: jocks, preps, cheerleaders, dorks, punks and gamers, all with tables of their own. But when they are finished chugging the milk and throwing Tater Tots at one another, they will drift out to their classes and slouch together through lessons on Edgar Allan Poe and Pythagoras. ...

When the Portland, Maine, School Committee voted 7-2 Wednesday night to make birth control pills available to middle school girls as young as 11, the response provided the latest evidence that adults still have trouble talking about sex with each other, much less with our kids. The debate was passionate, as you'd expect over an issue that touches so deeply our concerns about what our kids know and do — and when — and the messages we send ...

Listen to a successful woman discuss her failure to bear a child, and the grief comes in layers of bitterness and regret. This was supposed to be the easy part, right? Not like getting into Harvard. Not like making partner. The baby was to be Mother Nature's gift. Anyone can do it; high school dropouts stroll through the mall with their babies in a Snugli. What can be so hard, especially for a Mistress of the Universe, with modern medical ...

In many ways, Claire was a typical 14-year-old. Her favorite store was Forever 21, her favorite food was macaroni and cheese, and her favorite TV show was Bad Girls Club. As a ninth-grader living in St. Louis, she was a member of her school dance team, and she was on Facebook. A pretty and stylish girl, Claire was a strong student whose long-term goal was to become a lawyer. In other ways, however, Claire's life was decidedly not ...

If they held a convention for racial purity, I would never make the guest list. Like most other Latin American families, mine is a multiethnic stew that has left me with the generic black-eyed and olive-skinned look typical of large swaths of the world's population. My father's family is from Peru, my mother's from Chile. Their parents were born and reared in South America. Beyond that, I know nothing about my ancestors. That was fine by me--until the new and growing ...

Think of a green businessman and Ray Anderson isn't likely to be the first to come to mind. He's not a fresh-out-of-business-school, Silicon Valley visionary — he's well over 70 years old, and his accent marks him as a lifelong Georgian. He doesn't make solar panels or wind turbines or cellulosic biofuel. His company, Interface, manufactures carpet tiles, which is about as ordinary as you can get. But Fortune has described Anderson as "America's greenest CEO," and ...

The first morning of the 2005 school year held more than the typical jitters for Toni Kay Scott. One moment, the seventh-grader, known as T.K., was stepping from her mom's Ford pickup to join friends in front of Redwood Middle School in Napa, Calif. Minutes later, the police officer assigned to watch arriving students was steering her toward the principal's office. Scott, an impish brunet with a tiny nostril stud, had violated Redwood's dress code. The code aimed to squelch ...

The baby hake on the menu at El Rodat in Javea, Spain, is a marvel of equilibrium. At once intensely flavorful and delicately light, it is the sort of exquisite dish you would expect from a chef who began his education at Barcelona's top culinary school and later apprenticed with Alain Ducasse in Paris. But the secret to Sergio Torres' fish lies less with the young // -- set up global variables var used = new Array i = 0 // ...

You've heard or read the headlines: that methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus is deadlier than AIDS; that the killer bug is alarmingly more widespread than anyone thought; that it's in your kids' locker rooms and at your gym. Stories abound of young high-school athletes becoming infected with MRSA and dying within weeks, and you're starting to worry about whether that nick or scrape you just got could be your last. So here's what you really need to know. Yes, ...

Treating cancer is a bit like shooting in the dark. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. There's no way to predict. That's because while scientists have some crude ideas about how to disable cancer cells, the inner workings of cancer are a mystery for the most part. Perhaps not for long. Researchers have just sequenced the entire DNA code of one type of breast-cancer tumor. The team, led by scientists at Washington University School of Medicine, began the project using ...