In the city of Nagpur, India, Sanju Bhagat’s stomach was once so swollen he looked nine months pregnant and could barely breathe.
Bhagat felt self-conscious his whole life about his big belly. But his problem erupted into something much larger than cosmetic one night in June 1999.
An ambulance rushed the 36 year-old farmer to the hospital. [...]

Two rare and related diseases leave their sufferers with no fingerprints. Now scientists may have cracked the genetic code behind the inherited ailments.
Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia report that defects in the protein keratin 14 may be responsible for both diseases, known as Naegeli syndrome [...]

Although Kenadie Jourdin-Bromley is 3½ years old, she is only 27 inches tall and weighs about 10 pounds, the same as a 1-month-old infant.
Kenadie is a primordial dwarf.
“They are the smallest children in the world, and it is a big mystery as to why they are so small. We just don’t know,” said Dr. Charles [...]

Sitting on Iraq’s death row is a 25-year-old woman convicted in the slayings of three relatives. She says her husband carried out the killings and fled. She confessed to being an accomplice, she says, only after being tortured in police custody.
Despite lingering questions about the case, the fate of Samar Saed Abdullah remains the gallows.
“I [...]

Gretchen Miller and Sarah Hendrickson celebrated their first and 25th anniversaries on the same day in 2005. The anniversaries celebrated one year of marriage and 25 years of being a couple. Now they have another anniversary to celebrate, the legal recognition of being in a domestic partnership.
After 24 years of being a couple, the pair [...]