[Cheers jailbase.com]

Except for the brain, all of the skull’s soft tissue was gone when the skull was pulled from a muddy Iron Age pit, which leaves the question – how could such a fragile organ survive so long and how the hell did this bizarre preservation take place…Zombified!

How did I come to this conclusion you ask? According to Sonia O’Connor, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bradford, when the skull was found, itwas accompanied by a jaw and two neck vertebrae, bearing evidence of hanging and then decapitation. Cut marks on the inside of the neck indicate that the head was severed while there was still flesh on the bones.

There is, however, no indication of why he was hanged, and the rest of his remains have yet to be found.

A more realistic explanation for the preservation probably has something to do with water. Scientists believe that after being soaked in a water –logged pit, the brain began to change chemically, developing into a durable material and shrinking to a quarter of its size. However, the chemical details of the new material are still under investigation.

Is anybody else hungry?

After 15 hours of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, the Texas man received the nation’s full face transplant. The surgery happened last week, but the team of 30 doctors led by plastic surgeon Dr. Bohdan Pomahac are only beginning to talk about it today.

Wiens, suffered an electrical accident in November 2008, when the left side of his head came in contact with an electrical wire, that left him blind and without lips, a nose or eyebrows. In Boston, doctors transplanted an entire new face, including a nose, lips, skin and muscles and nerves that animate the skin and give sensation. The donor’s identity was not disclosed.

Dallas Wiens and family

In an Associated Press story and a YouTube video last fall, Wiens spoke poignantly about why he wanted a transplant and how he wanted to smile again and feel kisses from his 3-year-old daughter. Face transplants give horribly disfigured people hope of a new option “rather than looking in the mirror and hating what they see,” he said.

This was the second face transplant the Boston hospital has performed; the previous one was in April 2009 — the partial replacement of the face of a man who suffered traumatic facial injuries from a freak accident.

UPDATE: The final results.

Dallas Wiens new face

The Ophiocardyceps unilateralis is a fungus that contains four distinct species, all of which can “mind control” ants and other insects. All four known fungi species live in Brazil’s Atlantic rain forest, which is rapidly changing due to climate change and deforestation, said study leader David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University.

“This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery,” he said. “We need to ramp up sampling—especially given the perilous state of the environment.”

Lodged in a zombie ant’s brain, the fungi species “direct” the dying ants to anchor themselves to leaves or other stable places,providing a stable “nursery” for the fungus. Once the insect dies, the fungus rapidly spreads through the body.

During later stages of Ophiocordyceps camponoti-rufipedis infection, the fungus rapidly consumes the nutrients inside a zombie ant and begins to colonize the outside of the ant’s body, as pictured bellow. The fungus stalk growing from the back of the head also becomes longer and more noticeable.

Unlike ants, many insect species that fall victim to zombie fungi are very difficult to identify after the fungus has spread around their bodies—as with this fly.

Crickets too can fall prey to zombie fungi (as pictured bellow), though little is known about the fungus species that brought this insect to its horrific end.

A wasp is infected by a Cordyceps fungus species that hasn’t yet been named or formally documented. Fungi of the Cordyceps genus are the products of a tightly evolved arms race between hosts and parasites, which means the fungi are often locked into one type of host—a specialization that might spell doom for fungi species as host species die out.

According to Hughs, “This is only the tip,” he said, “of what will be a very large iceberg.”

If you think about it, all it takes is for one of these host insects to crawl in your ear for you to become under control of a zombie fungus…think about that.

[Cheers nationalgeographic.com]

It yet another bizarre tale out of China, Li Fuyan was robbed then stabbed in the head on the right side of his jaw nearly four years ago, but failed to realize the blade broke off and remained in his skull.

“As time passed, I used injections to kill the pain in my head and ears,” Li, 30, told Chinese state TV. “It has been four years already.”

Unable to take the pain any longer, Fuyan finally went to the hospital where surgeons worked cautiously to remove the badly-corroded blade without shattering it.

“We checked his mouth, but no wound or scar has been found. It is very strange as to how the blade got into his head,” Xu Wen, deputy director of the hospital’s stomatology department, told state broadcaster CCTV.

As mind baffling as not knowing there is a rusty knife stuck in your head is, this is not the first bizarre incident of strange weapons embedded into people’s bodies. In fact, one of Li’s countrymen once had to have a pair of scissors removed from his esophagus two years ago.

In April 2009, a Colorado man coughed up a nail that had been stuck up his nose for three decades. Also in 2009, a 2-year-old Brazilian boy was found living with 50 sewing needles lodged throughout his body. And back in 2004, doctors in France found 350 coins in a man’s stomach.

[Cheers aolnews.com]

Why you would need a device that attempts to convince you that your canned liquid gold was some sort of draught beer is beyond me.  However, the folks at Takara Tomy have just introduced the Beer Hour at this year’s Tokyo International Gift Show.

Rather than use carbon dioxide as most traditional kegs use, Beer Hour stirs the beer at an ultra-high speed forming a cacophony of bubbles. When the leaver is down, only liquid flows, by turning the lever up, you get the head.

The Beer Hour will be released in May 2011, priced at about $23 (1,900 yen).

The ski has a wood core, with layers of aluminum and titanium, topped off with carbon. The lightweight construction gives it the impressively low 960 grams per ski, which is about 200 grams lighter than comparable models.

The reason for using carbon in the skis is that it allows engineers to achieve optimal stiffness while also minimizing torsion, which is the twisting of the ski along its longitudinal axis.

You can expect a hefty price tag when the skis are finally made available to the masses in the winter of 2011/2012.

These skis are cool enough to make me forget about snowboarding, unless of course they make a snowboard version.

[Cheers dezeen.com]

A company called Bottoms Up Beer designed a beer dispenser that fills up cups from the bottom. This idea not only gets rid of the cumbersome long beer taps that we are so used to seeing liquid gold stream from,  it  also allows you to inject multiple beers at once, while keeping the bartenders hands free to do something else (like take your money).

Each cup has a small circular magnet that sits on the bottom of the cup, once popped onto the receptacle, beer flows into the cup giving you more beer for your money, as head is kept to a minimum. When the cup is lifted, the magnet covers the hole to a water (beer) type seal, so no beer is spilt or leaked.

The only problem I can see is how much extra coin these ‘special’ cups are going to cost the consumer, do you just throw them away when you’re done or bring them back for a refill.

At least you get a free magnet with your $12 beer.

The first video shows the machine in use, the second shows exactly how its done.

MMMMM BEER!

[Cheers dvice.com]

Say hello to Professor Cyborg Bilal whose new implanted camera will start snapping photos every minute, 24 hours a day, and then transmit them via the Internet to a new museum in Qatar.

The camera is not really surgically implanted into his head it is similar to getting a piercing, in fact the ‘operation’ wasn’t even done in a hospital, but instead at a piercing studio that specializes in body modification.

Following an incision, three titanium plates, each with a post attached, were inserted underneath a large flap of skin on the back of Mr. Bilal’s skull. The skin was then reattached, concealing the plates but not the posts.

The base for the 10-megapixel camera, which is just less than two inches in diameter and features automatic adjustment and color, was then screwed onto the posts. Though Mr. Bilal received local anaesthesia, he described the procedure as painful, and said he remains unable to bring himself to watch a video recording of the implantation.

Bilal reached an agreement with NYU to put a lens cap over the camera when he’s on school grounds, so as not to disturb the notoriously private college kids at NYU. But once he’s off campus, the lens cap comes off too, and it’s snap snap time.

So you can pretty much bet that Cyborg Bilal won’t be invited to any parties, who would want a freak in their house snapping pictures of your every move. You really find out who your friends are when you implant a camera in your head.

Not only did Mother Nature make chickens so delicious to eat, she also implanted an image stabilizer in their necks which allows them to keep their head perfectly still no matter how much you shake them.

Don’t worry no chickens get hurt during the video, but it is quite comical to watch and makes you wonder why the camera industry hasn’t figured a way to incorporate this kind of technology into their products.

Chicken technology…I am getting hungry, lunch time!