(Photo: iTunes)

New York City tweens who can't stand the thought of having their gross gym teacher stand in the front of the classroom and explain to them that if they have sex they'll get AIDS and die may breathe a sigh of relief: today the city health department announced the first-ever digital sex ed class packaged into a neat little smartphone app.

The New York Daily News reports that the app, called Teens in NYC Protection+, can help direct teens to city-approved clinics that can provide a variety of health services, including STD screenings and birth control counseling. The app also includes a host of educational resources that can help tweens sort through their complicated feelings about sex.

Of course, city Health Commissioner Thomas Farley actually had to borrow a friend's phone to test out the app, which is available in the iTunes Store and Google Play. "(Like) most people my age, I don't have a smart phone," he said.

Oh.

At least this app is way better than that creepy slut-shaming choose your own adventure one.

CHOMP. (Photo: Wikimedia)

Dear city tweens, we need to have a chat. We thought this was fairly obvious, but considering recent events, apparently we need to reiterate this point: do not, under any circumstances, sink your braces-covered teeth into a school administrator, even if they deprive you of your beloved cell phone. Got it?

Sadly, one Lower East Side tween failed to get the memo, according to the Daily News. A 14-year-old at Seward Park High School was arrested and escorted out in handcuffs for allegedly biting his teacher for attempting to take away his cell phone. Luckily the teacher was not seriously injured.

Tweens, we're not kidding around. If you do this again your father and I will have to seriously revoke your iPhone and getting you a BlackBerry as punishment.

Teen bait. (Photo: Wikipedia)

While we were all losing our shit about teens sexting on Snapchat, those sneaky creatures moved on to a new terrifying trend.  A CBS 2 I-Team investigation breathlessly reported that the newest “growing and disturbing” trend is huffing flowers to get high, and it's ruining more lives than Selena Gomez.

Teens are seeking out flowers in the Datura plant family, which at least means they're paying attention in biology. Because they're FLOWERS, the plants are readily available and--when sniffed--ignite a feeling of hallucination that can last for days. Other spooky side effects include paranoia, vomiting and heart palpitations. (Frankly that sounds our lot like prom night.)

But CBS 2 deserves a purple medal for talking to some teens, who wished to remain anonymous so they're not kicked off the swim team or whatever. One said that he “actually thought” he was going blind, and another scarred user said the sensation lasted for hours, even though it sounds like his mom gave him too much NyQuil:

“My trip lasted over 30 hours. You really can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s a dream,” another user explained.

Thousands of people a year are hospitalized from getting high from Datura plants.

At least no one has been hurt from Snapchatting.

(H/T Gothamist)

(Photo: Instagram)

The Daily Mail's latest troll is a veritable master stroke. British writer Shona Sibary, a true international treasure who has previously written about smacking her kids and admitted that she'd rather play Boggle than have sex with her husband, now tackles modern day culture's most insidious trend: the duckface selfie.

Anti-duckface movements have long existed (does no one remember Mary-kate and Ashley? Or MySpace?), but Ms. Sibary claims that with the proliferation of selfies--and perhaps the fact that apps like Instagram make them more socially acceptable--teenager girls everywhere are indulging in the narcissistic ritual of pouting for the cam.

"It’s as though a whole generation of teenage girls has lost the ability to smile naturally," Ms. Sibary writes, claiming that her computer is full of PhotoBooth pictures of her teenaged daughters pouting, trying to copy their favorite celebrities. There's the pout, the head-tilt, the vacant stare: look no further than Kim Kardashian's Instagram for a plethora of examples.

But like American Eagle, jelly bracelets and an affinity for boy bands, one has to believe that tweens will also grow out of their selfie phase, or at least graduate on to other narcissistic pursuits--like writing endless articles for the Daily Mail about themselves, perhaps.

(Photo: Tumblr)

One foolproof way to avoid getting your phone jacked by a roving band of hoodlum teenagers? Have a really shitty phone.

News.com.au reports that a group of teen robbers approached a man in a Sydney park and demanded he hand over his cell phone. When they saw that it wasn't a smartphone, but more like one of those flip phones your Dad still carries around attached to his belt, the pretentious tweens were all screw that. They let him keep the damn thing.

Although the victim held on to his outdated device, the robbers reportedly stole his sunglasses and sent him to the hospital for injuries to his face. Ugh, youths.

All trying to impress each other right now.

Once upon a time, status-seekers relied on signifiers like nice watches, swanky automobiles and handbags that cost as much as a car. But according to Quartz, times have changed: Now men and women worldwide think it's their cell phones everyone notices first.

BRB, running to the Apple store.

A company called Vuclip surveyed folks in more than a dozen countries, asking them to reveal “The first thing people notice about me.” 61 percent of men said it was their cell phone. 38 percent of women said the same thing, ranking cell phones first but by a narrower margin.

However, the most dedicated device owners were--surprise, surprise!--teenaged girls. A whopping 82 percent of female respondents under 18 put their cells first. Maybe that's why, as the Pew Institute reports today, more teens than ever own smartphones and use them as their primary means of accessing the Internet.

Clearly, times have changed since those dumb Burberry mini-purses were the ne plus ultra of high school queen bees.

(Photo: India Current Affairs)

Back in the early aughts, when this reporter's parents were fast asleep, we'd take one of those 500 Free Hours of AOL CDs received in the mail every other day, unplug the phone line in our bedroom, and hook it up to our laptop so we could log on to saucy chat rooms and browse AOL Teen. Our parents, competent as they were, had no idea we spent half the night surfing a sluggish, largely harmless web.

We assumed teens these days–born with a smartphone glued to their mutant flesh–have it much easier, especially without having to muffle the sounds of dial-up. We were wrong.

CBS News reports that when the parents of a teenage girl in Sacramento told her she couldn't go on the Internet after 10 p.m., she crushed up sleeping pills and put them in milkshakes she bought them. Her parents were initially skeptical as to why the teen would buy something for them when usually all teens do is take, take, take and I never hear a thank you.

They also noted that the milkshakes tasted weird and only drank a quarter of them. But that was enough to get the teen what she wanted: her precious Internet time. Her parents conked out within the hour and she was free to Tumbl her little heart out.

“Drugging your parents so you can use the internet, never heard of that,” a neighbor told CBS. “That’s crazy.”

This isn't the first time the girl has resorted to the drugging tactic; her mother says she's in fact done it before, though perhaps not just to get online. Maybe the girl has been watching too much Twin Peaks on Netflix?

2013 is off to a great start!

(Photo: Apocalypse.net)

Though NASA has already gone to great lengths to assure adults everywhere that rumors of the world's supposed impending demise are in fact false, the government has now turned its focus to precocious teens who have traded in anxiety about what to wear for class picture day for soul-crushing fear of the apocalypse.

On USA.gov, which is apparently "the U.S. government's official web portal," some enterprising government intern wrote a short blog post meant to assuage the worries of America's angst-ridden tweens. No comets or stray planets are coming to collide with our own, we promise!

NASA has received thousands of letters concerned about the end of the world. David Morrison, a planetary astronomer and senior scientist for NASA who answers questions from the public about astrobiology, says, “At least a once a week I get a message from a young person ― as young as 11 ― who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday.”

Young people, always remember that if you're feeling upset about doomsday rumors, Neil Degrasse Tyson has your back.

(h/t NYMag)

Artist's rendering. (Photo: gifmethegif.tumblr.com)

If you're less than observant, you might have missed a little announcement at the top of the Tumblr Dashboard, containing some "bittersweet news" from VP of engineering Blake Matheny.

Okay, you might want to sit down for this.

Are you sitting down?

Okay, while the Tumblr team has been hard at work scaling up to meet the scads of impressions per day, there's one final step left in the process. Just one! However, that one final step has an unfortunate side effect: 

all traffic to blogs and the Dashboard will be suspended during the operation — returning a simple “we’ll be right back” message.

We are preparing for any issues that may arise and want you to expect your blogs to be unavailable starting at 4:00am EDT this Saturday (Oct 6th), and to come back online slowly over the next few hours.

Mr. Matheny closes with the promise that this temporary outage will ensure that Tumblr remains shipshape in the years to come and the company's "deepest apologies for the inconvenience."

OMG!! (Photo: Family.go.com)

In the mid-90s, when this reporter was in elementary school, we developed a code for AOL instant messenger to alert our chat buddies whenever our parents had entered the room or were looking over our shoulders. "1," we would type, when they were lurking around, to let our buddies know not to type anything inappropriate, and "11" when they eventually left.

We were rarely actually talking about anything that could get us into real trouble--back then "inappropriate" meant the boys we had crushes on and articles about the Spice Girls that we weren't technically allowed to read because they were in grownup magazines like Vogue. But we enjoyed the conspiratorial feeling of having a secret language, of having something that belonged to us and only us. It was a treasured part of being young--and it is apparently something that teens today don't get to enjoy.

According to an article in the New York Times, parents are using our quantitative obsession to track their teens' every move. And it's not just online, but on their phones, in the car and when they're out and about, too.

Writes the Times:

If, a few years ago, the emphasis was on blocking children from going to inappropriate sites on the family computer, today’s technologies promise to embed Mom and Dad — and occasionally Grandma — inside every device that children are using, and gather intelligence on them wherever they go.

Uh, yikes. We hate to invoke the old "back in my day" argument, but if you thought deleting your cookies after every browsing session was annoying, can you imagine how much it must suck to be a teen today? Cell phones grant them the illusion of freedom, but with parents tracking their every text, email, Facebook post and YouTube view, it's like having a Weibo account--feel free to sign up, but watch what you say.

Granted, some of the efforts to protect children online are definitely reasonable, particularly in our age of cyberbullying. The Times mentions the flirting app Skout, which has had several minors report sexual assault by people they met on the service. But there has to be a better balance between Big Brother surveillance and basic parental protection. Perhaps try talking to your kids about digital safety instead of spying on them?

Years later, after AIM's popularity had run its course, we discovered that our parents knew what the "1" and "11" code meant all along. But it was nice to think we had our own language, if only for a little while.