Most board games (like Monopoly) we are familiar with rely far too heavily on luck instead of skill, and many have other marks against them as well, such as a far too long playing time or rulesets that make it clear from fairly early who is going to win. Here are fifteen of the greatest board games of all time; while they aren't all flawless we feel like they are vastly superior to traditional board games

The winners of the 2009 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition have been announced.

The best photographs from the competition are on show at the Natural History Museum, London, from tomorrow

Andy Golub, 43, specialises in daubing exotic designs onto female skin, covering groups of girls from top-to-toe in his vivid designs.

He exhibits his group paintings in local galleries, but also works on individual women on a commission basis.

And sometimes he just takes his brushes to the street in search of willing 'canvases' to paint for parades and parties.

He said: "I've been bodypainting for four years and I've been a professional artist for 10 years.

I wanted to let you know we’ll soon be looking for beta testers to help us develop a unique new way to play Civilization. Ever since we finished Civilization Revolution last year, I’ve been looking at ways of expanding the Civ gameplay experience to include solo, competitive and cooperative play to take advantage of the uniqueness of social networks. We’re calling this project Civilization Network and the full game will be available next year on Facebook.

"If you have been puzzled by Mona Lisa's smile – how she's radiant one moment and serious the next instant – then your worries are over. It happens because our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain about her smile.

Different cells in the retina transmit different categories of information or "channels" to the brain. These channels encode data about an object's size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field.

"Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don't see the smile," says Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablos."

"Checking in with NASA's Cassini spacecraft, our current emissary to Saturn, some 1.5 billion kilometers (932 million miles) distant from Earth, we find it recently gathering images of the Saturnian system at equinox. During the equinox, the sunlight casts long shadows across Saturn's rings, highlighting previously known phenomena and revealing a few never-before seen images. Cassini continues to orbit Saturn, part of its extended Equinox Mission, funded through through September 2010. A proposal for a further extension is under consideration, one that would keep Cassini in orbit until 2017, ending with a spectacular series of orbits inside the rings followed by a suicide plunge into Saturn on Sept. 15, 2017. (previously: 1, 2, 3). (23 photos total)"

"This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, just so long as it’s change for the better. "