Eguchi Aimi is your typical Japanese pop star: perfect skin, high-pitched girlish voice, lithe figure, and a team of computer designers, photographers, and other pop stars artificially constructing her every movement. You read that correctly. Aimi does not exist — at least not in the traditional sense. But this drawback has not stopped the girl, who was announced as the newest member of all-girl supergroup AKB 48 earlier this month, has already graced the cover of Japan's Weekly ...

It happens to every medical student sooner or later. You get a cough that persists for a while or feel a funny pain in the stomach or notice a tiny lump under the skin. Ordinarily, you would just ignore it — but now, armed with your rapidly growing store of medical knowledge, you can't help worrying. The cough could mean just a cold, but it could also be a sign of lung cancer. A ...

The annual monsoon transforms Bali. Rain sweeps across slumbering volcanoes. Moss thickens on ancient temple walls. Rivers swell and flush their trash and frothing human waste into the sea off Kuta Beach, the island's most famous tourist attraction, where bacteria bloom and the water turns muddy with dead plankton. "It happens every year," shrugs Wayan Sumerta, a Kuta lifeguard, who sits with his love-struck Japanese girlfriend amid dunes of surf-tossed garbage. So why, in early March, did the Bali authorities warn tourists that swimming ...

A new drug for melanoma has been shown to rapidly shrink malignant tumors in an early trial at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York. Among 27 patients whom the experimental new drug was tested on, "19 showed a 30 percent or greater reduction in tumor size," Dr. Paul Chapman, the lead researcher told CNN from a cancer conference in Berlin. Melanoma develops in cells that produce melanin, the pigment that gives skin its color, and is the most serious ...

Cosmetic adverts in Asia are targeting men with blunt campaigns aimed at skin color that one lawmaker labels racist. In one TV commercial, two men, one with dark skin, the other with light skin; stand on a balcony overlooking a neighborhood. The dark skin guy turns to his friend and says in Hindi, "I am unlucky because of my face." His light skin friend replies, "Not because of your face, because of the color of your face." Suddenly the light ...

You know that fat in your body you wish you didn't have? It turns out those cells could be used to create stem cells that one day may be able to cure disease. Scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that the millions of fat cells removed during liposuction can be easily and quickly turned into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, more easily than the skin cells that researchers used when the first iPS cells were ...

The world has a new alliance to save vanishing frogs, toads and salamanders. A coalition of organizations established the Amphibian Survival Alliance this month to conserve species threatened by deadly fungus, habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and climate change. The scientists said amphibians are the world's most threatened group of animals. Though they thrived on Earth for more than 360 million years, one in three of the 6,000 recognized amphibian species are now at risk of extinction and as ...

If you could snap your fingers and make your allergies disappear, you'd probably do it in a second. But what if your pet is the cause of your watery eyes, sneezing, and runny nose? Suddenly that oh-so-simple decision becomes a much tougher call. For some, the psychological misery of giving up a pet may outweigh the everyday misery of allergy symptoms. That was true for John Ceballos, 43, who kept his cat, Suki, after an allergist told him the ...

It's no secret that stress isn't good for you. But what's less clear is how social stressors like a high-pressure job or a failing marriage affect your physical well-being. Researchers at Wake Forest University who study stress in monkeys think they may have discovered a clue: fat. More specifically, the particular form of fat called visceral fat that tends to build up in the abdomen . Researchers believe this abdominal fat lodges deep within visceral organs, such as ...

Mice are bred all the time in laboratories around the world. So, generally speaking, the birth of a couple dozen more lab mice isn't worth noting. But this week, two groups of scientists in China separately reported that they had created a new kind of mouse — grown entirely from a type of stem cell that originated from already mature cells, instead of from embryos. Researchers took skin cells from donor mice, reprogrammed them to revert back to ...