Mr Yohei Sasakawa, WHO Goodwill Ambassador for the Elimination of Leprosy and Japanese Government Goodwill Ambassador for the Human Rights of People Affected by Leprosy, has called for an end to the common use of the word leper.

Speaking at the launch in London of the fourth Global Appeal to End Stigma and Discrimination Against People Affected by Leprosy, held to coincide with World Leprosy Day, he said that the word carries the meaning of a pariah, or social outcast.

Mr Sasakawa said that people affected by leprosy have demanded that the term not be used.

Despite the fact that most of us see our four-legged friends walking around every day, most people (including many experts in natural history museums and illustrators for veterinary anatomy text books) apparently still don't know how they do it.

A new study in Current Biology  shows that anatomists, taxidermists, and toy designers get the walking gait of horses and other quadruped animals wrong about half the time, despite the fact that their correct walking behavior was described and published more than 120 years ago.

Who says football is dangerous only to the people who have 320 lb. linemen that can do a 4.4 second 40-yard dash flying at them?    We can get hurt too, namely by choking on a chicken wing.   Or getting a tummy ache from too much Bratwurst.

Super Bowl game day is actually pretty dangerous.   People get up and cheer too quickly and pull a muscle, there are drunken driving accidents and people who drink too much and fail to get up and go to the bathroom can also develop a problem called urinary retention, a condition where the bladder gets so full that the muscles are not strong enough to generate a stream.

Can't help being the life of the party?   Us either.  

Maybe we were just born that way.

Researchers from Harvard University and the University of California, San Diego have found that our place in a social network is influenced in part by our genes, according to new findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.   This is the first study to examine the inherited characteristics of social networks and to establish a genetic role in the formation and configuration of these networks. 

While it might be expected that genes affect personality, these findings go further and illustrate a genetic influence on the structure and formation of an individual's social group. 

Why have some of our genes evolved rapidly? It is widely believed that Darwinian natural selection is responsible, but research led by a group at Uppsala University suggests that a separate neutral (nonadaptive) process has made a significant contribution to human evolution. 

Some men are Baptists, others Catholics; my father was an Oldsmobile man - Jean Shepherd, "A Christmas Story"

Do you have brand loyalty?   Some of it may be historical ideas of quality, to be sure - if you bought a Mercedes-Benz this decade it was likely because it used to be that you paid more for better quality - but some of it is just materialism - if you bought a Mercedes-Benz this decade you also discovered that marketing people figure that if you were dumb enough to pay double for basically Hyundai quality you will be dumb enough to pay $1000 for the CD player they didn't include - but you may have bought it anyway.

It turns out it may also be 'death anxiety', according to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health have released findings identifying factors that affected evacuation from the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. A research methodology known as participatory action research (PAR) was used to identify individual, organizational, and structural/environmental barriers to safe and rapid evacuation. 

The only thing that gets less respect than ethanol these days are batteries -  having to replace batteries in a Prius and the acid rain that comes from manufacturing them is why the Prius was always destined to just annoy everyone in the HOV lane and not actually help the enviroment.

Likewise, ethanol's mandates and subsidies seem to mean it will never get more efficient, but it currently creates more greenhouse gases in manufacturing and usage than it saves.   

People have found plenty to criticize in the last year but if we look at the last few decades, there is actually a lot more American equality - in overall happiness.   Which is really looking at the glass half full.

That's not to say there are more happy people - it's about the same as 1970 - but it instead means that the 'happiness' gap, the levels of discontent between unhappy and happy people, has become smaller.   The research published by University of Pennsylvania economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers in the Journal of Legal Studies says that the American population as a whole is no happier than it was three decades ago. But happiness inequality, the gap between the happy and the not-so-happy, has narrowed significantly.

A study published in Journal of the American Geriatrics Society suggests that the use of certain medications in elderly populations may be associated with cognitive decline. The study examined the effects of exposure to anticholinergic medications, a type of drug used to treat a variety of disorders that include respiratory and gastrointestinal problems, on over 500 relatively healthy men aged 65 years or older with high blood pressure.