A variety of hair-straightening products used in professional salons can expose both hairdressers and their customers to formaldehyde, an independent study finds. And the chemical can be really irritating, literally.

The spectacular collapse of the brokerage unit at MF Global has now cost all 1,066 employees their jobs.

Regional news from the KBIA newsroom.

Russians are feeling pretty gloomy after spending days trying to contact a spacecraft aimlessly orbiting Earth.

The Phobos-Grunt spacecraft was destined for one of Mars' moons. As we reported earlier this week, it was supposed to scoop up some rocks and return home with its specimens, but one of its boosters failed to ignite and now its stuck.

By Jeremy Bernfeld (Harvest Public Media)

WANTED: A dedicated worker familiar with intense physical labor. Must possess the ability to organize, anticipate pitfalls and plan ahead. Only those comfortable with individual responsibility and leadership skills need apply.

A want-ad for a farmer or a member of the military? 

This interview was originally broadcast on October 13, 2011.

Improvements in medical care and equipment mean fewer troops are dying on the battlefield. But more troops are returning home severely wounded, with injuries that require lifelong care and cost millions of dollars in medical bills.

For the many Americans who have been following the story of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as she recovers from being shot in the head last January, there's now a chance to briefly hear her voice.

She feels "pretty good," Giffords has told ABC News' Diane Sawyer, although things are still "difficult."

Missouri state senators listened to over 3 hours of impassioned testimony on health care reform yesterday. The hearing was supposed to be on the rather mundane question of whether Missouri should set up an online health care exchange starting in 2014, or let the federal government do so. But the hearing quickly became a forum for debating the merits of health reform itself. After the jump, two interviews with senators on the committee: a Democrat representing one of the state's most liberal districts, and a Republican who has been at the forefront of Missouri's pushback against "Obamacare."

"Volatile" is one of the words that probably best describes the race for the Republican presidential nomination and a new CBS News poll captures that flux. The national poll indicates a three-way tie, showing Herman Cain at 18 percent and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich at 15 percent each.

That's essentially a tie since the margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.

When young children get ear infections, parents face an unpleasant choice: dose them with antibiotics and pain relievers, or tough it out.

But certain kinds of chewing gum may help reduce the number of ear infections children get in the first place.

That's chewing gum with xylitol, a natural form of sugar sometimes used in gum and candies because it has fewer calories for its sweetness than table sugar, or sucrose.