One day 24-year-old Kristin Manigault noticed the skin on her
legs had become irritated. "It started looking really funny.
Then I kind of overlooked it," Manigault said. "It started to
spread, and of course that made me really nervous." When she
went to the doctors, they gave her a shock: She was diagnosed
with erythema ab igne, otherwise known as toasted skin syndrome.
The reputed culprit? Her laptop. Manigault uses her laptop as
many as seven hours a day -- enough to apparently cause the rare
condition. "It can get pretty hot," she said. "It would hurt
once the laptop got really hot, and I sat it there and it kind
of got really tingly." Before central heating was common, people
suffered similar effects from sitting too close to the
fireplace. But now technology has brought toasted leg syndrome
back. In a recent case, a 12-year-old boy who used his laptop to
play games became the 10th reported case in the past six years.
"There are some reports of skin cancer developing within this
eruption, although that is