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POPSNatural African beauty - the Miss Authentica contest
From the slideshow captions: "African women, don't lighten your skin. It's a gift from God." These lyrics are a line from a song specially commissioned for a beauty competition with a difference in Ivory Coast. Only women with natural, untreated skin - confirmed by skin experts - can enter the competition which goes by the name, Miss Authentica. The organisers hope to encourage women to stop using dangerous skin-bleaching products…and instead celebrate the beauty of their natural skin. Skin-bleaching is big business in much of Africa. Proof of this are the many posters of smiling, fair-skinned women holding up the latest pots and tubes of skin-whitening creams that adorn the continent's cities…75% of women in Ivory Coast use skin-whitening creams of some sort. Many continue to use the bleaching products despite being aware of the dangers. One of the most common ingredients is hydroquinone, which has been banned in some countries because of claims that it is carcinogenic.
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POPSFar Out: NASA's Golden Gift to the Aliens For better or worse, we don't really do things like this anymore. New Horizons, the last spacecraft NASA launched that will eventually pass beyond the edge of the solar system, carries the ashes of the man who discovered Pluto, along with a piece of another spacecraft, an American flag and, for some reason (probably because people paid for the privilege), the names of more than 430,000 people stored on a CD. Apparently we've replaced attempts at interstellar communication with marketing stunts that will seem far kitschier in 30 years than Sagan's Golden Record does today. —Kevin Friedl
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POPSWhen giving gifts, the price is wrong In three different investigations of gift exchanges among adults, the researchers consistently found that givers wrongly assumed that money spent on gifts buys recipients’ appreciation. “I suspect we’d see different results if we studied gift appreciation among children,” Flynn predicts. Kids, more than adults, focus primarily on the nature of a gift rather than its source. Gift givers reported that relatively expensive purchases best conveyed their thoughtfulness and consideration, the Stanford researchers say. Givers apparently spent more on gifts to impress recipients with the givers’ caring, not their cash, the researchers suggest. Yet recipients preferred gifts that they really needed or that had special personal meaning, regardless of price.
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