The word alone can cause a girl to giggle. But Kegels are no laughing matter. These exercises effectively strengthen the pelvic floor and the benefits are far reaching. After all, this is one muscle you want to give a workout, especially if you want to keep certain bodily functions under control.

Benefits of Kegel Exercises

Many factors, such as pregnancy, childbirth, being overweight and aging, can weaken the pelvic muscles and cause health problems. Kegel exercises help prevent your pelvic organs from bulging into your vagina, which can cause pelvic pressure and urine leakage.

Giving birth to a baby, especially vaginally, can take its toll on your sex life because of all the stretching your vagina had to do. However, Kegels can get your body feeling better than ever. In fact many women report an even better sex life after they start doing Kegel exercises.

Best of all, Kegel exercises can be done anywhere – while you’re at work, watching TV, on the computer, eating dinner or even while driving to work. You can do them discreetly without anyone knowing.

You don’t need any equipment at all. Of course, there are devices called Kegel exercisers available on the market that claim to make your exercises […]

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The role that genetically modified (GM) food should play in our food chain is a highly contested political issues. One interesting facet of the debate in the past year has been the pro-GM lobby’s interest in staking the ‘scientific high-ground’; simultaneously positioning itself as the voice of reason and progress, while painting its opponents as unsophisticated ‘anti-science’ luddites, whose arguments are full of dogma and emotion, but lack scientific rigour. In this essay Peter Melchett explores how such crude characterisations are themselves based on logic that is itself profoundly damaging to the concept and representation of ‘science’ in our national culture.

Powerful forces in Western society have been promoting genetic engineering (now usually genetic modification – GM) in agricultural crops since the mid-1990s. They have included many governments, in particular those of the USA and UK, powerful individual politicians like George Bush and Tony Blair, scientific bodies like the UK’s Royal Society, research councils, successive UK Government chief scientists, many individual scientists, and companies selling GM products. They have ignored the views of citizens, and most sales of GM food have relied on secrecy – denying consumers information on what they are buying (20 US States are currently embroiled in fierce […]

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Democrats in Virginia are accusing state Republicans of taking advantage of a prominent civil rights leader’s trip to Washington for the presidential inauguration to pull a ‘dirty trick

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Present-day Asians and Native Americans are descended from a group of people who were already in China 40,000 years ago, according to an analysis of fossil DNA published this week.

The genetic analysis showed that the early modern humans in Beijing had already diverged genetically from the ancestors of modern-day Europeans.

The researchers took nuclear and mitochondrial DNA from a leg bone found in the Tianyuan Cave in China in 2003.

Using this, they reconstructed the genetic profile of the leg’s owner, a person who lived at a very interesting time in the history of modern humans, the researchers said in a statement Monday.

‘This individual lived during an important evolutionary transition when early modern humans, who shared certain features with earlier forms such as Neanderthals, were replacing Neanderthals and Denisovans, who later became extinct,’ said lead author Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The genetic analysis from the ancient bone showed similarities to genetic profiles from modern-day Asians and Native Americans, the researchers explained.

But the analysis showed that the early modern human near Beijing had already diverged, genetically, from the ancestors of modern Europeans.

In addition, the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan-DNA was no higher than that of modern-day humans in […]

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The FBI had to rewrite the book on its domestic surveillance activities in the wake of last January’s landmark Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones. In Jones, a unanimous court held that federal agents must get a warrant to attach a GPS device to a car to track a suspect for long periods of time. But if you want to see the two memos describing how the FBI has reacted to Jones – and the new surveillance techniques the FBI is using beyond GPS trackers – you’re out of luck. The FBI says that information is ‘private and confidential.’

Yes, now that the Supreme Court ruled the government must get a warrant to use its previous go-to surveillance technique, it has now apparently decided that it’s easier to just keep everything secret. The ACLU requested the memos under the Freedom of Information Act – which you can see FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann waving around in public here – and the FBI redacted them almost entirely.

Though the FBI won’t release the memos, we do have some information from other sources on the surveillance techniques federal agents are already using. And for the most part the FBI contends they do […]

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