More than one in five women has a secret Santa Claus fantasy, according to  dating website  BeNaughty.com.  As you can guess by their URL, their subscribers probably were more inclined to fantasy about numerous holiday icons, so guard your turkeys at Thanksgiving.

Research by the site reveals that women find the chubby, bearded gift-giver very sexy indeed. More than 1,000 women were asked whether they fancied Santa Claus in the poll. 1 in 10 even wear a Santa costume themselves in the bedroom, though a beard and breasts probably says more about the men they are with than it does the women themselves.

A team of scientists from the University of Cambridge and the University of Cukurova in Turkey have taken a major step to understanding how the brain controls the onset of puberty. 

The research, published in this week's Nature Genetics, identified the hormone Neurokinin B as a critical part of the control system that switches on the master regulator of human puberty. Although Neurokinin B was previously known to be present in the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls puberty, its key role was not previously appreciated.

Annemarie Surlykke from the University of Southern Denmark is fascinated by echolocation. She really wants to know how it works. Surlykke equates the ultrasound cries that bats use for echolocation with the beam of light from a torch: you won't see much with the light from a small bulb but you could see several hundred metres with a powerful beam.

Polar lows are small-scale storms that occur in the oceans of the high latitudes and are comparable to a tropical cyclone. The strong winds they produce are rightly feared by seamen. In the course of the last century, North Atlantic polar lows caused 56 shipwrecks with a total of 342 people lost at sea.

Although polar lows do not always produce winds of hurricane force, they are particularly treacherous to shipping because they can develop very suddenly and, on account of their small diameter of only a few hundred kilometres, are very difficult to predict.

Similarly, the lack of meteorological stations in the polar regions further compounds the difficulties of forecasting and documenting these weather systems.

Less experienced prostitutes are more likely to have sexually transmitted infections (STIs). A study of more than a thousand female sex workers in Cambodia, reported in the open access journal BMC Infectious Diseases, has shown that girls who were new to the sex industry were twice as likely to have gonorrhoea or chlamydia.

Not 10 years ago, most doctors agreed that estrogen supplements for post-menopausal women reduced the risk of heart attacks. Millions were paying extravagantly for “hormone replacement therapy”, and drug companies were making a killing. However, a comprehensive study conducted by the Women’s Health Initiative was stopped early, in 2002, because the dangers to healthy women taking estrogen were deemed excessive. Estrogen therapy, it turned out, actually increased the risk of heart attack, strokes, and breast cancer. The medical community was shocked. The Annals of Internal Medicine ran an editorial “How Could We Have Been So Wrong?” The National Institutes of Health hosted a special seminar on “methodology” and “medical evidence”.

FRIMLEY, England, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- Adding Zometa to Chemotherapy Prior to Surgery Led to an Additional 33% Reduction in Tumour Size, Resulting in Fewer Mastectomies

- New Data is First to Demonstrate Direct Effect of Zometa to Help Shrink Primary Tumours; Further Evidence of Zometa as a Potential Anticancer Therapy

New data released today demonstrates that the addition of Zometa(R) (zoledronic acid) infusion to standard chemotherapy before breast cancer surgery reduces the size of breast tumours more effectively than chemotherapy alone in women with early-stage disease.

DALLAS, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- Strategic move enables both companies to sharpen focus on core competencies

BancTec, Inc. a global provider of advanced, high-volume document and payment processing services and solutions, today announced that it has reached an agreement to sell its Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) division to QualxServ, LLC a leading provider of technology deployment and field delivered support services.

BRUSSELS, Belgium, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

- Experienced editorial staff combined with focused circulation meets demand from the European electronics market

TechInsights Europe, the leading dedicated media and marketing services business serving the European electronics market, announces that the Industrial Automation and Test Measurement supplement of its flagship media service EE Times Europe will be published 20 April 2009.