The Huffington Post

The most thrilling new iPhone feature unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday wasn’t thefancy schmancy new Maps app, the long-awaited integration with Facebook, or even Siri’s new mastery of sports trivia.

It’s a feature that will actually get you off your iPhone: Do Not Disturb.

The Do Not Disturb tool marks a refreshing admission by a tech company that we actually have a life beyond our gadgets, and for all the good it does them to be wedded to our devices, every now and again we need to trade FaceTime for face-to-face time.

When Do Not Disturb is activated, a user’s phone can still receive incoming calls, messages and other notifications, but won’t alert her until later, keeping the iPhone’s screen dark, its vibrations still and its tones silent.

Is it a gamechanger that will send Apple’s stock price soaring past $1,000 a share and leave Google quaking in its boots? Certainly not. Is it something that will make life a little more peaceful, our conversations a little more focused, and our rest a bit more restful? Definitely.

I, for one, hope this will eradicate the annoying habit I have of sneaking a glance at my phone under the dinner table, or spending the final half of a play wondering why my phone keeps vibrating (Text message from a mystery number? Emergency work email? Family crisis?). Hopefully the tool will also help restore the sanctity of sleep and keep me from reaching for the phone, blurry eyed, at all hours of the night.

The U.S. Constitution says only “a natural born citizen” may serve as president. The challengers allege that Obama, whose father was Kenyan, was born in that African country, rather than in Hawaii. They claim his Hawaii birth certificate is a forgery. Hawaii officials have repeatedly verified Obama’s citizenship.

The cases came up from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, whose judges at times have been openly contemptuous of the Supreme Court’s June 2008 ruling in Boumediene v. Bush. The D.C. Circuit judges have refused to order the release of a single detainee brought to Guantanamo in the months and years following al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

In one decision from April 2011, Judge Laurence Silberman, a prominent conservative on the D.C. Circuit, blasted the justices for their “defiant — if only theoretical — assertion of judicial supremacy” over the executive branch in Boumediene. In the latter case, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for himself and the court’s four liberals, had guaranteed detainees access to the writ of habeas corpus to obtain “meaningful review of both the cause for detention and the Executive’s power to detain.”

“I doubt any of my colleagues will vote to grant a petition if he or she believes that it is somewhat likely that the petitioner is an al Qaeda adherent or an active supporter” unless the Supreme Court were to demand otherwise, Silberman wrote last year. That, he said, the Supreme Court is “unlikely to do — taking a case might obligate it to assume direct responsibility for the consequences of Boumediene v. Bush.”

According to Azure, the infant, whose umbilical cord had been poorly cut and was suffering from an infection, had likely been the child of a teenage mother.

The 154 suicides for active-duty troops in the first 155 days of the year far outdistance the U.S. forces killed in action in Afghanistan – about 50 percent more – according to Pentagon statistics obtained by The Associated Press.

The numbers reflect a military burdened with wartime demands from Iraq and Afghanistan that have taken a greater toll than foreseen a decade ago. The military also is struggling with increased sexual assaults, alcohol abuse, domestic violence and other misbehavior.

Because suicides had leveled off in 2010 and 2011, this year’s upswing has caught some officials by surprise.

The reasons for the increase are not fully understood. Among explanations, studies have pointed to combat exposure, post-traumatic stress, misuse of prescription medications and personal financial problems. Army data suggest soldiers with multiple combat tours are at greater risk of committing suicide, although a substantial proportion of Army suicides are committed by soldiers who never deployed.

Shoplifting is on the rise in the U.S.—we’ve created a slideshow of the items that are shoplifted the most. The answers may surprise you! Or they may not—only one way to find out, though.

The researchers wanted to find how other emotions impact facial temperature, so they took heat-showing pictures of two groups of young heterosexual women during a standard interaction with an experimenter, which included touching the arm, palm, face and chest (using a light probe that they were told measures skin color).

When an experimenter (of either gender) touched a participant, the participant’s average skin temperature jumped about a tenth of a degree Celsius. The effect wasn’t as large when considering only touches to the participant’s arm or palm, and the skin of the face and chest regions changed the most.