By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

In the great drama that is medicine, there are obvious villains: cancer, heart disease, trauma. And there are glorious heroes: vaccines, antibiotics, artificial hearts, etc. It’s easy to wax poetic about such august matters. But we prefer the bit players on the medical stage – the unsung, largely forgettable conditions. Of these, nothing is as gloriously mundane as earwax.

Earwax – or cerumen, as it’s known in the biz – is made up of keratin (the stuff of dead skin) along with fatty secretions, a mix that protects the ear canal from water and infection.

There are two types of cerumen: wet and dry. Wet cerumen, which is light or dark brown and sticky, has a relatively high concentration of lipid and pigment granules. Dry cerumen, which is grey or tan and brittle, tends to have less fat and pigment. The wet wax tends to be most frequent in Caucasians and African Americans, while the dry version is found in the ear canals of Asians and Native Americans. (We’re surprised that no enterprising screenwriter has come up with some nightmare, doomsday scenario in which the world is ultimately Balkanized into two warring camps, The Wet Cerumens and The Dry Cerumens, whose internecine battle results in the destruction of the planet.)

By Melissa Dahl

For one 21-year-old muscle man, the quest to build a perfect body ended in grotesque, lifelong scars.

Doctors were shocked when the young man came into their Dusseldorf clinic with one of the worst cases of acne conglobata any of them had ever seen: His chest and upper back were canvassed in craterlike ulcers and abscesses oozing with pus.

“He had these deep, ulcerating lesions with bloody crusts,” says Dr. Peter Arne Gerber, a dermatologist who treated the young man at Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf, Germany. Adding insult to injury, the poor young man’s sperm count had plummeted and his testicles were in a sad little shrunken state.

By Brian Alexander

Imagine you’re watching some incomprehensible kid cartoon on TV with the sound off. But you realize that every time there’s a flash or some character runs across the screen, you hear a loud pop or a whoosh coming from the set. You double-check. Yes, it’s on mute.

You may have a newly defined brain condition called “auditory synesthesia,” a condition described for the first time in the journal Current Biology in August.

Synesthesia is a kind of cross-wiring of the senses. For example, when some synesthetes hear music, they also perceive colors. The most well-known form of synesthesia is called “grapheme” where someone might see, say, the number 5 on a page, but will also the color red in connection to the numeral.

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

What if you could simply swallow a pill and become a buff, shredded, aerobic dynamo all without having to spend one sweaty second in the gym? Wouldn’t an instant fitness drug be great? Maybe not.


A dream for couch potatoes? Watch video

We were both mighty intrigued to learn that scientists had developed not one, but two “Mighty Mouse Drugs” that endow mice with all the benefits of having worked out furiously, without the effort of actual exercise. Researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego reported that a drug called Aicar increased mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment. A second drug with the catchy name “GW1516,” when combined with exercise, boosted the mice’s endurance by a whopping 75 percent!