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Children, especially girls, are reaching puberty at alarmingly younger ages every year. This is a major problem, since with longer lives and more education, most women want to put off having children to a later age than ever before. The sexualizing of children has been blamed on too much sex on TV?but now researchers have found that even watching wholesome family fare can bring on early puberty.

Gaia Vince writes in New Scientist that this is because children who watch a lot of TV produce less melatonin, the sleep hormone that has been linked to the onset of puberty.Scientists at the University of Florence found that when kids were kept away from TV, computers and video games, their melatonin production increased by about 30%.
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A second cow has tested positive for Mad Cow Disease in the U.S.?and only a fraction of cattle are tested, so who knows how many infected cows there really are? However, the USDA says it’s “very likely” that with further testing, the cow will turn out not to have Mad Cow Disease, even though the test they used is wrong only about once in a thousand cases.
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The outing of Valerie Plame in the column of Robert Novak has now led to the resignation of Jim Pavitt from the CIA. Mr. Pavitt was Valerie Plame?s superior. His work has been devastated by this catastrophic security leak, and he has apparently chosen to resign as a result. The announcement of his retirement is the tip of an iceberg of national disaster.
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Archaeologists studying prehistoric stone carvings near Scotland have found an amazing carving of a face that is much more sophisticated than the other primitive stone art in the vicinity. The question is, where did it come from?

Rocks with simpler markings on them are thought to have been made thousands of years ago by Neolithic and Early Bronze Age people. The “face” could be much younger?perhaps only a few hundred years old. But then what is it doing in the midst of so much prehistoric art?
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