PHASE ONE: PREP 1. SHOWER Always shave in the shower or immediately after one. As with the hot towel, steam is the key—it opens pores, which in turn causes whiskers to rise so they’re easier to lop off. If the bathroom mirror hasn’t fogged up, the shower isn’t hot enough. Join discussion...

Aboriginal Australians have known for hundreds of years about the potent medicinal qualities of the oil of the Melaleuca alternifolia plant, otherwise known as tea tree oil. Derived from the plant's sticky leaves and needles, this "medicine chest in a bottle" is known to cure or quell nearly every common ailment from athlete's foot to headaches to your pet's ear mites. Once available only in health food stores and specialty shops, the growing awareness of tea tree oil's versatility as a healer Join discussion...

Egypt's state-appointed Grand Mufti said on Sunday that female genital cutting was forbidden by Islam after an 11-year-old girl died while undergoing the procedure at a private medical clinic in southern Egypt. Genital cutting of girls, often referred to as female genital mutilation or circumcision, is banned in Egypt although the practice remains widespread as a rite of passage for girls and is often viewed as a way to protect their chastity. Join discussion...

t's an ambitious deadline: By 2009, DARPA hopes to have a mechanical arm whose functionality is on par with a flesh-and-blood limb. A new arm developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) is just as ambitious, allowing its user to actually feel an object in his grasp. Proto 1, the first prototype to come out of DARPA's prosthetic initiative, was tested by Jesse Sullivan, a lineman who lost both of his arms in an accident six years ago. Proto 1 was att Join discussion...

While we’ve discussed the environmental impacts of smoking and programs that some have undertaken to combat those problems before, researchers at the University of Washington have concluded in a recent study that children whose mothers were exposed to second-hand smoke while pregnant have more symptoms of serious psychological problems than the offspring of those women who had no prenatal exposure at all... In the current issue of Child Psychiatry and Human Development, UW psychologists Lisa Ga Join discussion...

Early humans successfully fended off a virus that infected chimpanzees by evolving a protein capable of neutralizing it, according to a new study. But what goes around comes around, evolutionarily speaking: Four million years later, the same protein seems to have left us more vulnerable than other primates to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). When researchers sequenced the chimpanzee genome in 2005, the biggest difference between it and the human genome was the extinct PtERV1 retrovirus, Join discussion...

The use of antibiotics in the first year of life is associated with an increased risk for asthma at age 7, a new study has found, and the reason may be that antibiotics destroy not only disease-causing microbes, but also those that are helpful to the developing immune system. Antibiotic use had a greater impact on children who would otherwise be considered at lower risk — children who lived in rural areas and those whose mothers did not have asthma — than on those who were already at increas Join discussion...

mericans appear to be doing a better job of managing diabetes, with more than half of diabetics reaching recommended targets for controlling blood sugar last year, according to a survey published on Saturday. Just over a third of people had their diabetes well-controlled in 2001, according to a study of lab tests done on more than 4 million people with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Join discussion...

Spices are the basis for flavoring your barbecue. They are many and are everywhere in the world. In days of old they were a sign of wealth. They were traded, and the quest for them has spawned new nations and caused wars. Once you learn how to work with spices, you can make your own spice mixtures, to season your barbecue, and even serve at the table instead of or in addition to, salt and pepper. Join discussion...

Something is wrong when regulatory agencies pretend that vitamins are dangerous, yet ignore published statistics showing that government-sanctioned medicine is the real hazard. Until now, Life Extension could cite only isolated statistics to make its case about the dangers of conventional medicine. No one had ever analyzed and combined ALL of the published literature dealing with injuries and deaths caused by government-protected medicine. That has now changed. A group of researchers meticulou Join discussion...