In Marseille, France, a 44-year-old man went to the hospital. His left leg felt weak, he said. Doctors ordered a CT scan and almost fainted at the result: The patient had almost no brain.

The story was published in Lancet this week, and the accompanying picture (available at http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070716/full/070716-15.html) is horrifying. The center of the man’s head is a gaping dark hole. His brain matter is squeezed in a thin film coating the inside of his skull.

The patient’s condition was cause by hydrocephalus, sometimes called “water on the brain.” Normally, fluid swirls around inside the skull and is drained back into the circulatory system. With hydrocephalus, the drainage system gets backed up, and the resulting flood swells the skull and squishes brain tissue. In childhood, the patient was treated with a shunt, a special tube inserted in the brain to release the trapped fluid. The treatment kept him alive and healthy, and the dramatic nature of his true condition went unnoticed until the recent brain scan.

What’s most surprising about the case is how little the man’s condition affected him. His IQ was tested at 75 — which is on the low end, but nowhere close to dooming someone to a life spent drooling in a wheelchair. The man was married with two kids, and worked as a civil servant. By all accounts, he was living a very normal life.

This case embodies my greatest fear that there is something horribly wrong with my body and I am just prancing around, totally oblivious. One time, I had a bizarre dream that my bones were secretly made of cheese, and I couldn’t calm down for a week. This story doesn’t exactly assuage my fears. The man has an orange peel for a brain, when most people have the whole orange. And he had no idea until his leg started hurting. It’s enough to make me sign up for a MRI today.

Prurient news from Down Under: Australian koalas are in trouble. The fuzzy animals are showing up everywhere with bladder infections, respiratory ailments, and pinkeye. The cause of these koala woes? Chlamydia. The sexually transmitted disease can blind the animals, leave them infertile, and even kill them outright. But there’s new hope for koalas this week, because scientists just announced that trials for a chlamydia vaccine will begin soon.

Researchers plan to give the vaccine to a small number of koalas, monitoring them for the effectiveness of the shot and any adverse reactions. If the vaccine works well, wild koalas could be rounded up and injected.

Vaccines for sexually transmitted diseases are controversial. Religious conservatives were in a tizzy this year about Gardasil, the vaccine that protects women against genital warts and cervical cancer. So far, no one seems upset about vaccinating koalas. However, the koala vaccine was developed using research done towards a chlamydia vaccine for humans. Maybe the protesters will hit the streets if the drug comes out for people.

From STDs to monarchs: Queen bees exert impressive control over their subjects. The workers feed their queen and groom her, bravely die for her in battles with neighboring hives, and even stamp out their own childbearing aspirations to care for her brood. To keep her underlings in check, the queen emits a bouquet of powerful pheromones. Researchers announced this week that the queen’s chemical cocktail keeps worker bees from becoming disgruntled.

To study the insects, researchers made use of electric shocks and itty-bitty bee handcuffs. They strapped the bees down, and sent a puff of a particular odor along with a mild electric shock. The agitated bees extended their stingers. After a few repetitions, the bees brandished their stingers at the smell alone.

But bees exposed to the queen’s pheromones behaved differently. They never learned to associate the shock with the odor, and they wouldn’t extrude their stingers in response to the smell alone. The bees could still associate smells with food, showing that the queen’s pheromones specifically blocked the bees from forming negative associations. The queen is actually chemically preventing the workers from learning to hate her! A lot of company bosses might enjoy that ability.