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veloping projects ranging from augmented reality eyewear to laser communications systems. This spring, his mom, Penny Mills, let him drop out of 11th grade. She says she "could see how much of the work he was doing at school wasn't relevant to what he wanted to learn."
• On Monday, Thomas and his mom learned that he is in esteemed company as a high-school dropout with a knack for computers: David Karp, 26, sold Tumblr, the online blogging forum he created, to Yahoo for $1.1 billion.
• Examples of tech geniuses who lack college degrees are well-known -- Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg among them. But Karp left high school after his freshman year, with his mother's blessing, at the tender age of 14.
• Critics say dropping out of school to pursue a dream is a terrible idea. Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford Law School who teaches and advises startup companies, says it's like "buying a lottery ticket -- that's how good your odds are here. More likely than not, you will become unemployed. For every success, there are 100,000 failures."
• But what about kids who are so good at computer programming that schools can't teach them what they need to know? "That's what internships are for; that's what extracurricular activities are for," says Wadhwa, who has founded two companies.
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• QUINCY, Mass. (AP) -- Two endangered sea turtles that are shells of their former selves after getting stranded on Cape Cod during a cold spell are getting some help easing back into the wild -- from an acupuncturist.
• Dexter and Fletcher Moon, juvenile Kemp's Ridley sea turtles, remained calm as acupuncturist Claire McManus gently tapped more than a dozen needles into their grayish-green, leathery skin during a therapy session intended to decrease inflammation and swelling on their front flippers, restore a full range of motion on those limbs and help the animals regain their appetites.
• "There aren't a lot of people doing sea turtle acupuncture," said McManus, who works alongside a vet to find parts of the marine mammals' bodies corresponding to locations where acupuncturists put needles to treat front limbs. "There is not a whole lot of literature out there on turtle acupuncture, so I'm basing it on how we treat other animals and humans."
• McManus uses particularly thin needles for sea turtle acupuncture.

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