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...That obstacle was overcome in 1995 when astronomers Michael Mayor and Didier Queloz discovered the planet 51 Pegasus b orbiting the eponymous star 51 Pegasus. The astronomers made their find not by spotting the planet directly but by measuring the minute gravitational wobbles it causes in its parent star as it orbits. With those scraps of data, they could calculate the planet's mass, velocity, orbital altitude and more...
Unfortunately it's too late to legislate that no one should be allowed a cell phone until he or she is at least 18 and fully licensed to use it. Every parent understands that handing over the car keys marks a fateful passage, so much more freedom and possibility, so much more risk and temptation. But cell phones took us by surprise: so small, so innocent, so powerful in the hands of a bored or twisted teen who now has an extremely efficient tool for wasting time, cheating on tests, organizing fights, bullying classmates, phoning in bomb threats, arranging drug...
...rush of prosecutions, however, just reminds us that the law makes a lousy parent. A legal system naturally depends on deterrence; you make an example of those you manage to catch, so that potential offenders think twice. But to many a teen, danger is as likely to feed desire as to frustrate it. The qualities required to shape their behavior, the humor and patience mixed just a certain way with clarity and resolve, are too much to expect from laws written to apply equally to everyone. Don't we need to exempt them from prosecution for being idiots...
...life in comfort. The catch is that she has to stand up in court and say, "If I had known that Willow was going to have this disease, I would have terminated the pregnancy." And that's a very real part of a wrongful birth suit. No parent I interviewed for this book who had sued for wrongful birth actually ever felt that way. They love their kids to death, but they really need a way to pay for their existence and, even more importantly, to take care of their children after they themselves are gone. (See the best...
...than those who watched less. But once Schmidt and her team controlled for other factors - the mother's educational status and household income - the relationship between TV-viewing and cognitive development disappeared. That means that TV-viewing alone did not appear to influence babies' brain development; a parent's education and finances mattered more. "Initially it looked like TV-viewing was associated with cognitive development," says Schmidt, "but in fact TV-viewing is an outgrowth of other characteristics of the home environment that lead to lower test scores." (Read "Are We Failing Our Geniuses...