Holding a part-time job during high school was thought by many adults to build character.
But a study of more than 4,000 adolescents in Wisconsin and California found that working too many hours may dramatically reduce a student`s academic performance.
Compared with their classmates who didn`t work or who worked less than 10 hours a week, the students who worked longer hours had poorer grades, did less homework, were less attentive in class, cut classes more and were less involved in school, said psychologist Laurence Steinberg of Temple University and sociologist Sanford Dornbusch of Stanford University.
``Contrary to the popular belief that working during adolescence is beneficial to young people`s development, the findings presented here indicate that the correlates of school year employment are generally negative,`` they reported in the journal Developmental Psychology.
`BUCKYBALLS` 50 PERCENT HARDER THAN DIAMONDS
Buckyballs, synthetic crystals made up of 60 carbon atoms, are 50 percent harder than diamonds, a father-and-son research team has found.
Buckyballs or buckminsterfullerene, which look like tiny soccer balls, were named for the late architect Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome. Compression tests show that buckyballs are at least 50 percent harder than diamonds and that they could possibly be made a lot harder with the addition of xenon to their structure, said Arthur Ruoff, a Cornell University materials scientist and his son, Rodney Ruoff of IBM`s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
With its super hardness, buckyballs could lead to a new class of tough materials that can be used in electronics, structural materials and lubricants, they said.
SURVEY: 97 PERCENT OF ADULTS AREN`T VIRGINS
A nationwide sexual behavior survey of more than 1,400 Americans has found that few adults are virgins. Ninety-seven percent of American adults have had intercourse since age 18, the average adult in the U.S. has intercourse 57 times a year, and he or she has had an average of seven partners since age 18, said Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey Project of the University of Chicago`s National Opinion Research Center.
During the year preceding the survey, only 1.5 percent of married people reported having sex with someone other than their spouses, and 2 percent of adults said they were exclusively homosexual or bisexual during that period, Smith reported in Family Planning Perspectives, a journal published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute.