A sobering new book, "Why Boys Fail," by Richard Whitmire, cites mountains of evidence to make the point.

Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire analyzed comets passing through the inner solar system, discovering many of them had strange orbits.

The argument Matese and his colleague Dan Whitmire have been making since the late 1990s is that some comets seem to be moving in toward the Sun from a skewed direction.