The new face of bullying in schools is real. Last week, officials and parents at Beverly Vista Middle School in Beverly Hills were shocked by reports that fake images were circulating online that put real students' faces on artificially generated nude bodies. According to the Beverly Hills Unified School District, the images were created and shared by other students at Beverly Vista, the district's sole school for sixth to eighth grades. About 750 students are enrolled there, according to the latest count. The district, which is investigating, joined a growing number of educational institutions around the world dealing with fake pictures, video and audio.

No matter how conscientious the consumer, by the time the material gets to the end of the conveyor belt at the recycling plant, most plastics end up mixed together. Due to the rather rudimentary sorting techniques in use, only a small percentage of the plastic we try to recycle ends up getting recycled. "The ordinary consumer, with the best intentions--and also the correct procedure--puts everything in the plastic bin. We get it all," said Mogens Hinge, an associate professor in the department of biological and chemical engineering and process and materials engineering at Denmark's Aarhus University, and co-author of the paper "Plastic classification via in-line hyperspectral camera analysis and unsupervised machine learning," which appeared in Vibrational Spectroscopy this year. "Now we have a problem: we can wash it, but we can't unmix it. And plastic is not just plastic."

"She was like, 'You're not your normal, cheery, bubbly self,' " Mr. Witkowski said. " 'You're not using exclamation points.' " She told him she felt his emails came off as more demanding than usual. "I didn't really know how to react," he said. Exclamation points are stressing people out. Years of rampant use have both diluted the punctuation mark's meaning and inflated its significance.