A face transplant father is closing in on a dream of kissing his three-year-old daughter again.

Dallas Wiens has become the first man in the U.S. to have a full face transplant after a 30-man team of Boston doctors worked for 15 hours to complete an operation on him.

The 25-year-old, of Fort Worth, Texas, had his entire face replaced - including his nose, lips, skin, animation muscles and nerves to power them and give sensations.

Mr Wiens, who will take months to recover, lost most of his face in a disastrous high-voltage incident in November 2008 when his head touched a live power cable.

He was on a lift platform repairing a church window when he lost control of the platform and came into contact with a wire that seared off his face.

Mr Wiens spent the next three months in a medically-induced coma, while doctors performed more than 20 surgeries on him.

They expected him to be paralysed from the neck down and never walk, talk or eat regular food again, but he regained his fitness and now does 15 push-ups daily.

The transplant breakthrough came after a plastic surgery team led by Dr Bohdan Pomahac at Brigham and Women’s Hospital used an anonymous donor on Mr Wiens.

‘I see every day as a challenge, an opportunity for hope and joy,’ Mr Wiens told The Dallas Morning News before surgery. ‘I'm happier now than I think.

‘I'm a little nervous as you can expect with any major procedure like this. I'm extremely excited over the possibility of just having a normal life back.

There's no words to describe what that would be like.’

Mr Wiens's grandfather Del Peterson said today: 'It definitely is a miracle. When I first saw him after the injury I had no idea what was going to follow.

'But he is determined to get well, move on with his life and make something of his life. This is beyond anything I thought could happen after he first received the injury.'

Mr Wiens is said to be doing well, talking and being gradually taken off his medication.

He is the third person in the U.S. to receive a face transplant - after James Maki, at the same hospital in 2009 and Connie Culp at the Cleveland Clinic in 2008.

But he is the first to have a full face transplant in the U.S.

The world's first full face transplant was performed on a 31-year-old man called ‘Oscar’ in Spain last year.

‘Today’s tremendous news marks a new milestone in Brigham and Women’s legacy in transplant surgery,’ Betsy Nabel, president of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said.

‘The pioneering achievement accomplished by the entire transplant team is a gift made possible by the most selfless act one human being can do for another - organ donation.’

‘This remarkable, anonymous gift is another example of the life-affirming power of organ and tissue donation,’ Richard Luskin, CEO of New England Organ Bank, added.

Registering as an organ and tissue donor on a driver’s licence is not accepted as consent for face donation in the U.S. - as family consent is required.

Mr Wiens was selected for the surgery in October after he shot to the front of a long waiting list because of tests revealing his strong mental resolve.

Eleven face transplants have been performed worldwide since 2005 - nine of them successfully.

A recipient in China died after he stopped taking his anti-rejection medicine and a man in France died after developing a massive infection and suffering a heart attack.

It's a good job Vanessa Dualib forgot everything her mom told her about not playing with your food… because its now part of how she makes a living.

The 29-year-old artist and photographer creates amazing animals out of misshapen food and then takes photos of then before then go rotten.

She also create a back story about the fruit animals - like this blowfruit (above) which she says lives in South China but once a year swims to Brazil.

Vanessa has so far created around 70 different fruit animals… and if she doesn't fancy what's for dinner this evening it could be 71.
Speaking of her art Vanessa, from Sao Paolo in Brazil, said: "I love photos, I love food and I hardly can say I take life too serious.. so this is my tribute! To life, to food, to photography and to you!"

This is Gary, a rare species of Snail called a Snana. It's in his nature to 'go bananas'.

Jellyveggies are free-swimming members of the beet family. When attacked, they have many leaf-tentacles that inject a somewhat lively and bitter taste in the mouth of their predators.

She is genius 11 years old and enjoys swimming and playing the recorder. But while Victoria Cowie insists she is just like any other girl her age, in one respect she is very different.

The schoolgirl has just been admitted to Mensa after scoring 162 in an IQ test – better than the 160 thought to have been achieved by Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates.

The result puts her in the top 1 per cent of the British population in terms of intelligence.

Victoria, who has been offered scholarships to four prestigious fee-paying schools, said: ‘When I got the results, I was really surprised.

‘It’s quite daunting to be compared to great minds, but it feels good also to be thought of as that clever.

‘I really enjoy puzzles and working things out and I think I’ll go on to study sciences, especially biology, when I’m older.’

Victoria took the adult admission tests for Mensa, the society for people with a high IQ.

As well as surpassing brilliant scientists and Microsoft founder Mr Gates, her score gives her a higher IQ than Sigmund Freud, who is thought to have had an IQ of 156, Napoleon Bonaparte, with 145, and Hillary Clinton, with 140.

Only those with an IQ of 148 and above – the top 2 per cent of the population – qualify for Mensa. The average IQ is 100.

Victoria, an only child, said she hadn’t yet told her friends about her astonishing results.

She said: ‘I really enjoy science and doing experiments, but I also love acting and dancing and playing musical instruments.

‘I do theatre workshops and loads of sports like swimming and I really enjoy creative subjects.

‘But my favourite subject is biology and I want to be a vet when I’m older because I love animals and I don’t mind blood and things like that.’ Victoria’s parents, who live in Claverley, near Wolverhampton, and run a health and safety consultancy, said they had always known their daughter was bright, but had not quite realised she was at genius level.

Her mother Alison, 44, said she was proud of her daughter. ‘When she was at nursery she had the reading ability of a child twice her age and she won science awards at school,’ Mrs Cowie added.

‘We always knew she was clever – she was always in the top sets and her teachers always praised her – but we never quite thought she’d be in Mensa.

‘She’s just a normal child to us. She likes acting, dancing and singing and she’s not the kind to always have her head stuck in a book.’

Victoria, who plays the piano, cello and saxophone as well as the recorder, hopes eventually to do a veterinary science degree.

But her parents aren’t quite sure where she gets her intelligence from.

Her father David, 42, said: ‘We think she was just born this way. Although myself and my wife are both clever, neither of us are in Mensa.

‘So when we got the results through, we were quite surprised but incredibly proud.’

Mrs Cowie added: ‘We’ve never pushed her or put pressure on her – we’re definitely not pushy parents.

‘Victoria does what she wants to do and we just give her the option. I just wish she’d tidy her room more.’

In a bid to celebrate Pancake Day in the only way they know how, staff from TV channel Food Network UK have created the world's tallest stack of pancakes. And why not.

The impressive pancake tower took over 13 hours to produce and required a whopping 253 eggs, 11lbs of flour and over 26 pints of milk.

After the hours of hard work they were lest with 725 pancakes which were stacked into a 32 inch high tower to break the current record.

Should you fancy setting pancake-based record yourself when you get home, the highest pancake flip currently stands at 9.17m, the largest pancake measured 15m long and the most pancakes eaten in 1 hour by an individual is 855. Good luck.

Nick Thorogood, of Food Network UK said: "One of the greatest aspects of British Food is its tradition and the celebration of events such as Pancake Day.

"We wanted to celebrate this year’s Pancake Day with something a little different and what better way than to create a giant stack of pancakes!

"Needless to say the team at the Food Network UK headquarters are going to have their fill by the end of the day!"

Well this is the project of Andreas Schweiger who dissected letters of typography. What's inside that if these letters were the bodies? The creative work is just crazy, fine detail bluffing.

A letter, a sign suggesting a sound and thus in combination suggesting a world, has to be of organic origin. In this belief I continued to dissect further letters. In some of them, to my utmost surprise, I discovered calcium carbonate skeletons, similar to sea corals. It is only the beginning of my journey into the evolution of letters but I dare to assume conform evolution to mammals at this stage






































































Source :- Grafisches Labor

Jinks Kunst, a Swiss street-artist known for his beautiful stencil artworks, has created a portrait of legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg, out of over 20,000 cigarette filters.

These days, France celebrates twenty years since the death of one of its greatest-ever artists, singer and song writer Serge Gainsbourg. In Paris, the city where he was born and where he died, artists are showcasing a series of unpublished photos of Gainsbourg, but Kunst wanted to make something truly special for this occasion.

A big fan of the singer, the Swiss street-artist spent the last three years collecting cigarette butts off the streets and used them to create a unique portrait. His one-of-a-kind depiction of Serge Gainsbourg numbers an impressive 20, 394 used cigarette filters he gathered himself, since March 2008. The legendary Gainsbourg, author of “Je t’aime moi non plus”, had a passion for cigarettes and alcohol, so Jinks Kunst choice of cigarette filters as a medium makes perfect sense.

The cigarette butt portrait of Serge Gainsbourg is currently on display in Nantes.

Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart decided the real world needed its own Hogwarts school of magic, so he established the Grey School of Wizardry – the world’s first registered magic academy.

the 68-year-old master from Catoti, California, has dedicated his life to studying the dark arts, and decided to create a recognized academic establishment where he could share his knowledge with anyone willing to learn (and pay the admission fee). Just like the famous Hogwarts imagined by author J.K. Rowling, the Grey School of Wizardry teaches 16 different magic disciplines, including spell-casting, beastmastery, alchemy, wand-making and horse whispering. Students are split into four ancient houses – Winds, Undines, Gnomes and Salamanders and just like Harry Potter and his friends, they must all learn to defend themselves against the Dark Arts.

While Oberon admits people call him “the real Dumbledore” and that he loves Harry Potter because it increased interest in wizardry (and the numbers of paying students of his school, of course), the popular saga didn’t inspire him to become a wizard. In fact, he was practicing magic long before J.K. Rowling wrote her successful novels. The former teacher and counselor first rose to fame during the 1980s, when he claimed he and his wife – a witch named Morning Glory – had created the world’s first unicorn. Remarkably enough, they actually had managed to create a single-horned creature by performing minor surgery on a goat. It caused quite a stir and ended up touring America with a famous circus.



Oberon and Morning Glory live in a house just north of San Francisco, from which they run their special academy. That’s also where he writes his textbooks on magic, many of which are regarded as “bibles of wizardry” by the wizard community.



Head wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart, often referred to as Merlin or Gandalf, claims that other wizard schools you might encounter are rip-offs, but his Grey School of Wizardry offers a “serious qualification”. We teach advanced ‘Mathemagicks’, Quantum entanglement, Cosmology & Metaphysics, Lore, Wortcunning [herbal medicine] and all the ancient sciences,” he says about his online school. Yes, for the time being at least, Grey School of Wizardry is an online learning institution that holds regular summer camps where young wizards can learn new practical things and show off their skills.



It might sound like one big joke to us muggies, but the Grey School of Wizardry currently has 735 students, 100 of which are under 18 years old. They all pay an annual tuition of $30, which really isn’t very much considering we’re talking real wizardry…And to think they can graduate with a journeyman degree in Wizardry, after just seven years of study.