Sixteen-year-old Kiera Wilmot is accused of mixing housing chemicals in a small water bottle at Bartow High School, causing the cap to fly off and produce a bit of smoke. The experiment was conducted outdoors, no property was damaged, and no one was injured.

Not long after Wilmot’s experiment, authorities arrested her and charged her with “possession/discharge of a weapon on school property and discharging a destructive device,” according to WTSP-TV. The school district proceeded to expel Wilmot for handling the “dangerous weapon,” also known as a water bottle. She will have to complete her high school education through an expulsion program.

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Sylvia films her "Super-Awesome Maker Show" with help from her parents, but she is the driving force behind the series, as the Times reports:

The seeds for the show were planted when Sylvia was 5, and she and her father attended the Maker Faire in San Mateo, Calif., an annual event organized by Maker Magazine that celebrates makers and their projects. Two summers ago, Mr. Todd began videotaping Sylvia’s demonstrations, as a summer project. “We just wanted to do something fun,” Sylvia said.

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This is just one scene from several YouTube videos of Stenzel, the same speaker behind a recent controversy over abstinence-only education. After Stenzel gave a lecture at George Washington High School, 17-year-old Katelyn Campbell took to the national media to complain about being subjected to the activist's "slut-shaming" message. Campbell's bravery didn't stop there: As a result of exercising her right to free speech, her principal allegedly threatened to contact Wellesley College, where she had already been accepted, to complain about her "bad character" -- so, Campbell quickly lawyered up and filed an injunction against him. (Wellesley's official Twitter account soon sent out the following tweet: "Katelyn Campbell, #Wellesley is excited to welcome you this fall" -- and the Internet rejoiced at perhaps the only bit of sunny news this week.)

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I flew across the country and found her in what had once been called the music room, where she started sleeping once it became too difficult to climb the stairs. The cocktail bar was filled with her clothes and other necessities — diapers, a walker, a bedpan. The bed was where the piano used to be. I went over and took her hand. The skin on her face was sunken down around the bones and the skin on her arms fell off her in loose folds. “You look so thin,” I said.

“I know, darling,” she said, breathing raggedly. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * *

I was 19 when I started associating my worth with weight. It was summer, and I was living in my grandparents’ rickety beach house in Cape Cod.

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Awful. All of it.

But there are good stories out there, too. Young people who are doing amazing things in the world, supporting one another, challenging injustice and generally proving that the violent, hateful assholes grabbing headlines right now don't represent their generation. (Assholes rarely do.)

A roundup of some stories that more people should be talking about this week.

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Back at home, youth group was a place to meet friends and participate in community service. There were beach parties and Christmas caroling. I met my first boyfriend.

Steubenville was Christianity ratcheted up, with the sort of weeping adoration one usually sees at concerts of preteen idols. At Steubenville, we were zealots. A team. We had our chants, our cheers, our rallying call. I can still summon the refrain of the evangelical anthem "Refiner's Fire," although I wouldn't be able to recall my high school's fight song even if someone handed me the lyrics. I've been imprinted. I consented to going without realizing what I was getting into, and once I knew, I went still. It was one of the few times each year I could step away from the confines of my conservative Catholic upbringing. I stepped deeper into that world, and the rules that governed it, without even noticing.

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Children are not sex objects; children are not things. Middle schoolers are not old enough to make responsible, safe decisions about sex. This marketing sends the message, ‘the younger, the better,’ which harms young girls’ self-esteem and pressures them into engaging in risky sexual behavior before they are ready to make informed, consenting decisions about sex and their bodies.

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I never called it sexual abuse, because it felt like an overly dramatic Oprah-ization of what happened. The word "abuse" seems to imply victimization and has always made me uncomfortable in this instance. Until now, I have been far too politicized to admit the chief reason I never called it sexual abuse in spite of the fact that it would be considered as much from both a criminal and a clinical perspective. The real reason is because I believed I asked for it.

The summer I turned 12, I went to sleepaway camp. I shaved my legs for the first time, dumped Sun-In in my hair and tanned with baby oil. I had my first boyfriend -- a skinny, freckly arrogant kid a year my senior who took me for two paddle boat rides and then broke up with me, declaring me a prude and, I was sure, ruining my romantic life forever.

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This is bad news for Teen Mom producers, but probably good news for everyone else.

Women in their 20s were also less likely to have babies than in previous years, and the birthrate among women in their their late 30s and early 40s actually increased, according to the report.

Researchers say that women in their 20s delaying motherhood, and the parallel trend of more women having kids in their 30s and 40s could be the result of a long-struggling economy. "The economy has declined, and that certainly is a factor that goes into people's decisions about having a child," CDC statistician Brady Hamilton, lead author of the new report, told Reuters Health.

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This is the phrase that sears through me as I stare at the rabbi who’s been hired to preside over my cousin’s small, graveside funeral. Minus the gray hair, he looks exactly the same as he did two decades ago, when he wasn’t a rabbi and we lay together partially clothed one late summer night in a neighborhood playground that I had loved as a child.

“Give me head,” he had said after about 20 minutes of making out in the playground’s sand pit underneath the swings.

“You want me to give you head?” I was a barely 19-year-old, conflicted Orthodox Jewish girl, the type who wore long skirts for synagogue and short ones for drinking at bars that let me get away with my fake ID. I was also a virgin who hadn’t yet solved the problem of branching out sexually while keeping what I would later recognize to be a rather idiosyncratic covenant with God.

He undid his belt, clearly disregarding the question mark at the end of my sentence. “That would be nice.”

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In a recent interview, the teenagers insisted that they didn't want to be viewed as fodder for a media narrative about “Muslim girls who break down conservative barriers." Really, they just want to play music, they said.

Citing influences like Metallica, Cradle of Filth and Green Day, Pragassh ("fist light" in Kashmiri) first came to national attention after placing third in Srinagar’s battle of the bands. “It was awesome and overwhelming. We were getting all this attention and a standing ovation. Then we got other offers to play,” said Aneeqa Khalid, Pragassh's 15-year-old bass player.

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Researchers found that nearly a third of all teenage girls had met people offline after becoming online friends. And alarmingly, 1 in 10 experienced some kind of exploitation -- ranging from unwanted sexual advances to rape -- during that offline interaction.

Jennie Noll, a psychology professor at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, had been studying abused teens when she began noticing their online profiles were different. "They would, more often than some other kids, post racy photos of themselves or sexual utterances," Noll told LiveScience.

As reported by LiveScience:

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Both of my parents were shrinks, and even though I was generally comfortable talking about sex in my household, porn — especially the porn I was watching — just had to be taboo. It was inexplicably gross, divorced from the concept of sex as it had been explained to me. If sex was a man inserting his penis into a woman’s vagina, then how did girls drinking cum out of champagne glasses fit into that picture? Because of its unspeakable nature, Internet porn became inextricably linked with the anxiety of being caught.

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Public policy leaders have somewhat higher hopes, of course. They’d like to use Facebook to encourage organ donation, charity in the wake of disaster, even voter participation.

Sheana Bull would like to use it to promote safer sex.

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This popular conception of young men is the subject of Smiler's new book, "Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male." This stereotype "tells us that guys are primarily interested in sex, not relationships," he writes. "This contributes to the notion that guys are emotional clods who are incapable of connecting with their partners because, hey, they're just guys, and guys are only interested in sex. " The result is the belief that "guys shouldn't be expected to achieve any type of 'real' emotional intimacy with their partners."

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Q: What do you think Paul Ryan's obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?

Obama: Well, you'd have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a "you're on your own" society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party

h/t Buzzfeed

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But, dude. It's just not true.

Contrary to the headlines, the study in question looked specifically at teenagers' self-made sexual content that was posted online. Researchers from Britain's Internet Watch Foundation found that 88 percent of the "self-generated, sexually explicit online images and videos of young people" encountered by researchers "had been taken from their original location and uploaded onto other websites," which are referred to as "parasite websites." That's very different from saying that 88 percent of private, self-made porn unwittingly ends up online. As IWF notes in a press release, "a parasite website is defined as a website created for the purpose of displaying sexual content ... which have apparently been taken/harvested from the website to which they were originally uploaded" -- typically a social networking or webcam site.

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Steven Matthew Fernandes, who claimed to be a member of the Southern Nevada Militia, was arrested by FBI agents last month after three separate informants provided information about the teenager building and exploding bombs, amassing “an arsenal of weapons” and boasting of his killing prowess.

After a mass shooting spree at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater in July that left 12 people dead and 58 others injured, Fernandes boasted, “I’ll beat that record,’’ federal court documents say.

At the recommendation of federal prosecutors, he was ordered detained as a flight risk and danger to the community at a hearing Wednesday before a U.S. magistrate judge, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported.

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