Hypomelanosis conditions are known since ancient times. The most ancient names to describe these pictures were "Shwetakustha" and "Suitra".

An investigative piece so explosive, no book company marketing hyperbole can be left out.

"After reading BIG FAT LIES you will never trust the government again - Dr John Briffa"

Hannah Sutter says she has used the analytical eyes of a lawyer to look at the facts and myths of obesity, health and diet and says the proportion of men and women classed as obese has risen steeply in recent years, though there has been no particular increase in the number of people who are overweight, and calorie intake has generally decreased. So we are eating less but obesity has increased. What's going on?

The criteria used to assign patients to specific psychiatric disease categories are set out in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association. (There is also a World Health Organisation equivalent, the International Classification of Disease). Every so often, these criteria are revised to reflect new research and changing concepts of disease. The APA has just released a draft of preliminary revisions to the current diagnostic criteria (available at http://www.dsm5.org/) as part of the preparations for the fifth release (DSM-5), due out in 2013.

You may think this is an odd claim from Think Training Development Limited, a company that specializes in Leadership Training, but it got them on a site with a million readers so, like a magician exposing trade secrets in a tell-all book, it may just work out.

Picture the scene: your company is not doing as well as it could, your people need some direction; some motivation and you're the person to deliver it. If only you knew how.

You need some help, so you book yourself on to an expensive Leadership Training Course.

Vigorous two-party competition and modest salaries for lawmkaers are key to preventing pork barrel legislation and other bills that benefit only one lawmaker's constituents, finds a new study of state lawmaking published in the American Political Science Review.

the study examined every piece of legislation, a total of 165,284 bills, introduced during seven legislative sessions between 1880 and 1997 in the lower house of 13 state legislatures: Alabama, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New York, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.

Primitive stars are thought to have formed from material forged shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago and are mainly observed in the Milky Way. But now researchers are reporting that they have uncovered more primitive stars located in neighboring dwarf galaxies. The discovery was made possible by much more detailed spectra obtained with the UVES instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope.

"We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead researcher on the project. "Our improved approach allows us to uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars."

The southern limit of permafrost in the James Bay Region in northern Quebec, Canada is now 130 kilometers further north than it was 50 years ago, according to two researchers from the Department of Biology at Université Laval. A lack of long term climatic data for the area makes it impossible for the researchers to confirm the cause, but If the trend continues, permafrost in the region will completely disappear in the near future. The results of the new study appear in Permafrost and Periglacial Processes.

An analysis of the skeletal remains found in Carthaginian burial urns could finally lay to rest the millennia-old conjecture that the ancient empire of Carthage regularly sacrificed its youngest citizens. An examination of the remains of Carthaginian children revealed that most infants perished prenatally or very shortly after birth and were unlikely to have lived long enough to be sacrificed.

The findings, published this week in PLoS ONE, refute claims from as early as the 3rd century BCE of systematic infant sacrifice at Carthage that remain a subject of debate among biblical scholars and archaeologists. Authors of the new study say it's more likely that very young Punic children were cremated and interred in burial urns regardless of how they died.

Natural selection – the force that drives evolution – acts not only on whole organisms and individual genes, but also on gene networks, according to a new study appearing in Nature this week.The finding suggests that natural selection is both more powerful and more complex than scientists recognized.

Biologists have struggled for many years to explain how it is possible that some people who carry a mutated gene don't express the trait or condition associated with the mutation. This common but poorly understood phenomenon, known as incomplete penetrance,  may be partially due to environmental factors and the influence of other genes, but scientists say other forces are likely at work here as well.

The authors of a new study in Nature say that some cases of incomplete penetrance may be controlled by random fluctuations in gene expression.

In a study of intestinal development of C. elegans, a small worm, the team was able to pinpoint specific fluctuations that appear to determine whether the mutant trait is expressed or not.