Professor of Afro-American studies Neal Lester has started a campaign against hair straightening for blacks. After marrying a white woman from Argentina and having a baby girl, Lester began to realize that chemical hair straightening was in his young daughter’s future?unless he did something about it.
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New studies are underway to develop a universal flu vaccine designed to protect against all potential varieties of influenza virus, including swine flu and bird flu. This research is especially important as health workers try to figure out how to get the new avian flu vaccine to everyone who may be exposed to the virus in the future.
Researchers plan to incorporate elements that are identical in all human virus strains, which should make the vaccine effective against all future flu variants. This would avoid the problem of having to create new flu vaccines every year, as the viruses mutate.
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When we want to lose weight and think about starting an exercise program, we usually think of something aerobic, that burns calories. Yoga, with its slow movements and intricate positions, is about the last type of exercise we consider. But it turns out that yoga not only helps people lose weight, it helps keep it off.
Researchers questioned 15,500 men and woman between the ages of 45 and 55 and asked them if they took yoga and if so, how long they?d been practicing it. Yoga practice was defined as doing yoga for at least half an hour once a week for four or more years.
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Coal miners used to take canaries in cages down into the pit with them. If the birds expired, they would know that oxygen was short and it was time to return to the surface. Alaska seems to be the place in the US that is the global warming canary in the coal mine, because the signs of warming weather are showing up there first.
Kate Bissell writes in bbcnews.com that climatologists have discovered oral history weather records from native peoples that go back decades. For instance, 92-year-old Bertha Leavitt, the oldest inhabitant of Barrow, the most northerly town in the US, says that winters there used to be much colder.
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