Over the past several years several experiments announced the observation of temporal modulations in the nuclear recoil rates in experiments looking for dark matter in the laboratory. I will review the different experiments and the various claims. In particular I will discuss the results of the DAMA and CoGeNT experiments including a careful analysis of the observed modulation and a comparison with other known temporally modulated phenomena. At least a portion of the talk will involve an introduction to the various statistical tools used in the analysis, which might be of interest to astronomers as well.