When restaurant manager Eric Moger surprised his girlfriend by proposing over Christmas dinner, he could have no idea that less than a year later his life and appearance would be changed beyond recognition.
As he started to make plans for his wedding to Karen Hunger four years ago, doctors discovered an aggressive tumour the size of a tennis ball growing beneath the skin of his face.
During the emergency surgery to remove the cancer, Mr Moger lost almost the entire left side of his face, including his eye, his cheek bone and most of his jaw, leaving a gaping hole where his features had once been.
Now, after years of having people stare and recoil at his disfigurement, surgeons have used pioneering three-dimensional printing technology to create a prosthetic face for Mr Moger, 60, in what is thought to be the first procedure of its kind in the UK.
By creating scans of what was left of his skull and using computers to recreate what his face would look like, they were able to use a new type of printer that builds up layer upon layer of nylon plastic to produce the exact components they would need.
It has transformed the father-of-two’s life, allowing him to drink his first glass of water and taste food for the first time since he underwent surgery to remove the tumour. Until now he has had to feed and drink through a tube directly into his stomach.
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Dr Dawood used detailed scans to build up a 3D image of the bone left in Mr Moger’s skull and of his facial features.
Dr Dawood said: “We put the CT scan and facial scan together and used software to plan what we wanted him to look like.”
The scans allowed Dr Dawood to design a scaffold to replace the missing bone, creating from titanium using a technique known as 3D milling, where a piece of metal is ground into shape by a computer.
Screw-like rods around two inches long were also made in a similar way before being surgically implanted into the remaining bone on the right side of Mr Moger’s face, allowing the scaffold to be secured in place.
A plastic plate was also created using a printed model of Mr Moger’s skull to help form a seal at the top of his mouth, allowing him to eat and drink again.
Computer software allowed Dr Dawood to create a mirror image of the right hand side of the father-of-two’s face and using 3D printing he recreated a facial shell made of toughened nylon.
This was used to mould the new silicon mask that would cover the hole in Mr Moger’s face, using magnets so it can be secured in place and removed easily when Mr Moger goes to bed.
Dr Dawood now hopes to develop new techniques to allow them to print the silicon mask, which would help speed up the process and allow patients to have access to replacements rapidly.
Casey Research - 'Preparing For Inflationary Times';
Zero Hedge - 'How Cyprus Exposed The Fundamental Flaw Of Fractional Reserve Banking' (this is a very important article);
Zero Hedge again - '25 Lessons From The Cyprus Deal';
David A. Stockman - 'State-Wrecked: The Corruption of Capitalism in America'.
Just before their departure for the Suomussalmi campaign, the soldiers of the Soviet Forty-Fourth Division were issued thousands of brand new manuals on the subject of ski warfare. What good this was supposed to do is unfathomable, since the Forty-Fourth Division had not been given any skis. Nor would the manuals have done the Russians much good if they had been so equipped. The diagrams in the manuals showed skis attached to the common soldiers' feet by means of conventional civilian bindings, with tight, secure heel straps. The Finns, however, knew that the cardinal rule of ski fighting is never to fight on skis if you can possibly avoid it. Finnish ski boots, pieksu, had turned-up toes and no heel straps so that a man could hop out of his skis, or back into them, in a matter of seconds.
Other worse-than-useless schematics in the Soviet ski combat manual showed men attempting to throw hand grenades in the conventional overhanded manner while still strapped in their skis. The Finns had perfected a method of dropping down into a tight crouch and hurling their grenades with a side-arm pitch. Anyone following the diagram in the Russian manual could expect his grenade to land anywhere except the intended target.
Quite the silliest series of drawings in the Russian booklet depicted the 'proper' technique for bayonet fighting on skis. In order to bayonet an opponent, a soldier must work up a high coefficient of friction between his feet and the ground beneath them. Since skis are designed for the express purpose of eliminating such friction, the very idea of bayonet fighting on skis quickly reduces itself to an absurdity.
A list of companies and politicians that had loans written off by banks at the heart of Cyprus' bailout crisis has been published in Greece.
There is already anger on the island that loans with the Bank of Cyprus, Laiki Bank and Hellenic Bank often running into the hundreds of thousands – and, in one case, millions of euros – have allegedly been wiped out.
The list, reported in Friday's Ethnos newspaper and which has been handed to the Cypriot parliament's ethics committee, includes the names of politicians from Cyprus' biggest parties (excluding the socialist EDEK and the Greens).
Questions are being asked as to why banks at which – in the case of Bank of Cyprus and Laiki – deposits of above €100,000 face a levy of an estimated 40% apparently forgave the loans of politicians and other senior figures in the country's public adminstration.
"Please don't try this at home—we are fully trained idiots."
So went the disclaimer back in October 2010 as British pepper aficionado Leo Scott and his friend Lok Chi uploaded a video of themselves eating a new variety, the Naga Viper, developed by fellow grower Gerald Fowler. The warning was warranted as the two very experienced chiliheads sweated, writhed in pain and briefly lost the ability to speak after each chewing and swallowing one of the bright-red capsicums.
A month later, the Guinness Book of World Records certified what Mr. Scott found out the hard way: The Naga Viper was the hottest pepper ever grown, measuring 1.382 million Scoville Heat Units, the standard measure of heat. That is 225 times as hot as a jalapeño can sometimes be.
Unfortunately for Mr. Fowler, his record wouldn't stand for long. Four months later, the Naga was dethroned by the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, the current record holder, at 1.464 million Scovilles.
"I was shocked," says Mr. Scott, who lives near Bristol, England. "You've got this global community of chili growers who are competing ruthlessly with each other."
The Naga itself had just surpassed the Infinity Chili, which held the official record for a mere eight months.
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... sauce producers haven't bothered to wait for Mother Nature to deliver hotter concoctions by adding potent extracts ... Nick Moore, proprietor of Dr. Burnörium's Hot Sauce Emporium in Bristol, is about to launch one called Psycho Serum weighing in at a scorching 6.4 million Scovilles. He compares its kick to "licking the surface of the sun."
The undisputed king of the hot sauce world though is Blair Lazar, a New Jersey entrepreneur who achieved a Guinness record of 16 million Scovilles—the scientific maximum. He required customers to sign a waiver before buying his "Blair's 16 Million Reserve." It consists of individual crystals of pure capsaicin produced in a laboratory.
Sea hares possess a weapon that even the best comic book writers couldn’t have dreamed up: an inky mucus-like substance that, when squirted at enemies, prevents them from smelling.
The discovery, reported in The Journal of Experimental Biology, reveals how complex and effective some natural chemical defenses can be.
Sea hares are a type of sea slug that has head appendages resembling rabbit ears (or at least someone thought that), hence the name. In Australia, they’re called “beach blobbies.”
Many marine inhabitants steer clear of them, and it’s easy now to understand why.
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The lobsters [that hunt sea hares] are usually left in dismay, preening and cleaning themselves while the sea hare slithers away.
If you've heard the phrase, "You mess with the bull, you get the horns," it also apparently applies to bison.
A man learned that lesson the hard way on Antelope Island Saturday.
Witnesses said it appeared the man provoked the beast, and it promptly rammed him into a fence.
"This person is very, very, very lucky that he wasn't killed," said assistant park manager John Sullivan.
Sullivan said the man seemed uninjured immediately after the ordeal, and "other than being a little dusty ... embarrassed and shell-shocked," he was "none the worse for wear."
Witnesses told rangers the man rattled a fence separating him from the bison, appearing to try to get its attention as he was taking pictures. Some also said he may have chucked a couple of rocks at the beast.
... why do people like me freak out about the amount of debt that the Federal government is floating? Simple: Because either the fiscal overindebtedness causes interest rates to spike, thereby crashing the country’s economy and bankrupting its government; or it leads to runaway inflation that spirals out of control and into hyperinflation, thereby crashing the country’s economy and bankrupting its government. A garden of forking paths, maybe, but it all leads to the same crummy destination.
A Canadian voice coach is creating a buzz with his unusual technique of using vibrators to help his students hit the high notes.
University of Alberta drama professor David Ley uses the sex toys to massage the throats of actors and singers.
"I know it's a bit different. I know there's a giggle factor, but it works. It relaxes tension in the larynx, it improves range and projection," he told MetroNews.ca.
He was looking for an alternative to massaging the larynx by hand, for people who hate the feel of fingers on their throat, when he discovered the technique.
That led him to a sex shop where he found some vibrators that had a frequency around 100 and 120 hertz, the range of the human voice. He tried some on a student with good results.
"This is the fundamental problem with progressives and perhaps American socialism in general: 'We believe we can achieve equality through programs of inequality'."
No one knows exactly how much money has left Cyprus' banks, or where it has gone. The two banks at the centre of the crisis - Cyprus Popular Bank, also known as Laiki, and Bank of Cyprus - have units in London which remained open throughout the week and placed no limits on withdrawals. Bank of Cyprus also owns 80 percent of Russia's Uniastrum Bank, which put no restrictions on withdrawals in Russia. Russians were among Cypriot banks' largest depositors.
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By Sunday, one participant in the negotiations said, there was almost no capital left in Laiki, a bank whose market value peaked at 8.1 billion euros in November 2007. Laiki's former vice chairman Pavlou disagreed, estimating there had been 2.5 billion euros in foreign deposits alone.
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ECB officials contacted Latvia, another EU country that has received large Russian deposits, to warn authorities against taking in Russian money fleeing Cyprus, two sources familiar with the contacts said.
"It was made clear to our Latvian friends that if they want to join the euro, they should not provide a haven for Russian money exiting Cyprus," a euro zone central banker said.
"If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be 'Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?'. If the bank can't do it, then we'll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we'll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders," he said.
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The [Cyprus] agreement is what is known as a "bail-in", with shareholders and bondholders in banks forced to bear the costs of the restructuring first, followed by uninsured depositors. Under EU rules, deposits up to 100,000 euros are guaranteed.
The approach marks a radical departure for euro zone policy after three years of crisis in which taxpayers across the region have effectively been on the hook for resolving problem banks and indebted governments via multiple rescue programmes.
That process, with governments and taxpayers bearing the costs and providing the back stop, had to stop, Dijsselbloem said.
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"If we want to have a healthy, sound financial sector, the only way is to say, 'Look, there where you take on the risks, you must deal with them, and if you can't deal with them, then you shouldn't have taken them on,'" he said.
"The consequences may be that it's the end of story, and that is an approach that I think, now that we are out of the heat of the crisis, we should take."
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"If we have even more instruments in terms of bail-in and how far we can go on bail-in, the need for direct recap will become smaller and smaller.
. . .
"Now we're going down the bail-in track and I'm pretty confident that the markets will see this as a sensible, very concentrated and direct approach instead of a more general approach," he said.
"It will force all financial institutions, as well as investors, to think about the risks they are taking on because they will now have to realise that it may also hurt them. The risks might come towards them."
Archimedes once said that if he had a lever long enough and a place to stand, he could move the world. Today, the half-Greek island of Cyprus appears to be the fulcrum, and the long arm of the EU may be the lever that heaves the entire world over the edge of the abyss.
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Europeans living outside Cyprus should not kid themselves that this is just a Cypriot problem – anyone with a bank account in Greece, Spain, Italy, etc. should be thinking very hard about how safe their cash is from confiscation. As we go to press, the Cypriot parliament has backed away from the bank levy on everyone that caused so much uproar, but the new deal still seizes money from larger depositors. This does not undo the fact that it’s still stealing – nor that the ECB asked for some of every citizens’ savings. Europeans living in non-PIIGS countries should not kid themselves about the impact on themselves if the countries near default tumble like dominoes.
And people not living in Europe should not kid themselves into thinking that this is just a European problem; in today's global economy, every country would get hurt by a banking and economic collapse in Europe. Those who think Asia will save the world must remember that the EU is China's largest trading partner. Or was – who can say it will be tomorrow?
Key point: with a fractional reserve banking system, it doesn't take a majority of bank depositors to decide to withdraw their cash to put their banks out of business. If something like 10% of depositors decided to withdraw all of their money, banks would be in real trouble – and even if only a smaller percentage were to initially decide to keep their cash at home, they could spook the required fraction into panicking and pushing the banks into insolvency. In stable times, fractional reserve banking may seem like free goodies for all, but during unstable times, it makes banks that much more precarious. Things have to be pretty dire for an entity like the ECB to demand action that could spark such a panic.
But wait – the banks are backed by the governments, so depositors are safe, right?
Yeah, right – the same bankrupt governments that are facing insolvency themselves . . .
We've been saying for some time that the global house of cards could topple at the slightest rustling of the wings [of] any of a number [of] circling black swans. Something like the ECB turning draconian with Cyprus and scaring the heck out of everyone else in the EU seems more like a swan dive right into the heart of the teetering structure.
Many mainstream commentators are dismissing the significance of the Cyprus debacle – but the same type of people also dismissed the threat of the subprime crisis until it could no longer be denied.
This does not prove that what's happening regarding Cyprus today is the tipping point future historians will point to as the beginning of the end of the EU and hence the rest of the old economic order. But it could be.
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What is absolutely clear is that the extreme measures the ECB has just shown it is willing to take are solid evidence that we are right about just how shaky things are – just how close to the crumbling edge of the abyss the whole world is.
Even if the direct, overnight theft of Cypriot bank deposits does not spark a bank run across Europe, it won't change this fact.
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If ... the wheels fall off the economic "recovery," the vast majority of people will see a substantial reduction in their standard of living – and many will simply be wiped out.
It turns out that what happened in Colorado was not a spontaneous reaction to criminal violence but the consequence of a longterm, planned strategy among Democratic operatives to oust conservatives from office and replace them with leftwing extremists.
Further, it also turns out that what happened in Colorado is a blueprint for the entire country, in every state, and eventually in the halls of Congress itself.
The blueprint is known in political circles as "the Colorado model" and refers to a very different strategy than that which is normally utilized by state political parties.
A group of leftwing extremists and four liberal Democratic millionaires/billionaires collaborated to develop the new strategy that would bypass the grassroots Democratic Party machine in the state in order to think totally outside the box. The core of the new strategy is a privatized political infrastructure with the four mega-donors footing the bill. New campaign finance laws were analyzed and probed in order to find ways to make the new laws work to their favor.
The gang of four mega-donors -- Pat Stryker, Rutt Bridges, Jared Polis, and Tim Gill -- created a new political infrastructure that operated totally outside the realm of the Colorado Democratic Party. All of the functions of the Party were replicated by the new infrastructure, but more functions were added that went much further than state parties ever envisioned.
While the new private infrastructure employed the traditional tactics such as grassroots organization, leadership recruiting and building, and policy development, the four mega-donors relied heavily on 527, 501(c)(3), and 501(c)(4) organizations, each with different names and identifies but all working in complete harmony to destroy the Colorado Republican Party and any conservative coalition in the state. Television and radio ads relentlessly attacked conservatives, often with no factual basis, but by the time political operatives found out who was behind the false allegations and mounted an attempt to expose the falsehoods, the mega-donor organizations had already moved on to other issues and false charges, making it difficult if not impossible for Republicans and conservatives to keep up.
The strategy worked in the 2006 and 2008 election cycles in Colorado. Democrats took control of both houses of the state legislature and installed a Democratic governor.
With all of the major leadership offices firmly under the control of leftists, the assault on the values that most Colorado residents have held dear were systematically attacked, culminating in the latest debacle, the infamous gun control laws that were approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor.
Many polls showed that most residents in the state clearly opposed the new laws but had them shoved down their throats by politicians who made no secret that they do not care what their constituents think. The result has been outrage. Sportsmen, hunters, and gun enthusiasts plan to bypass the state and take their business elsewhere. A major gun magazine manufacturer, Magpul, announced the day of the vote that they are leaving Colorado and taking approximately $85 million per year in revenue with them.
The longterm danger, however, lies in what is happening in other states, right under the noses of most Republicans and conservatives. The Colorado model is being used far and wide across America to replicate the Colorado coup. North Carolina is a perfect example.
A significant leak of information was noted by journalists in North Carolina that spelled out the secret strategy being employed by leftist operatives who are known under the umbrella organization called Blueprint North Carolina.
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The leaked memo states that the leftwing groups will stalk and pressure Gov. McCrory "at every public event," blast him relentlessly if he fails to follow through on campaign promises, "eviscerate" the Republican leadership in order weaken their ability to govern, and hire private investigators to infiltrate the executive branch, meaning the governor's office, in order to dig up dirt that could possibly be used to smear the governor and his top leadership team.
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But perhaps the most troubling revelation of all is that the tactics used by the Colorado model and Blueprint North Carolina are being replicated in other states, particularly the battleground states such as Florida.
A fishmonger in the south of China was gutting a squid for a customer when his knife hit an eight-inch live bomb.
The squid, which was itself more than three feet long, was caught in the shallow waters off Guangdong province, China, and taken to the fish market in Jiaoling county.
"This sort of squid lives close to the shore and normally makes a meal of small fish and prawns," said the fishmonger, who gave his name only as Mr Huang to the local Guangzhou Daily newspaper.
"Perhaps he thought the bomb was his favourite food and gulped it down. He certainly had a big belly when he was caught," he added.
Mr Huang said the police had arrived promptly after he called an emergency number and that they had taken it away and performed a controlled explosion.
Japanese scientists have found vast reserves of rare earth metals on the Pacific seabed that can be mined cheaply, a discovery that may break the Chinese monopoly on a crucial raw material needed in hi-tech industries and advanced weapons systems.
"We have found deposits that are just two to four meters from the seabed surface at higher concentrations than anybody ever thought existed, and it won't cost much at all to extract," said professor Yasuhiro Kato from Tokyo University, the leader of the team.
While America, Australia, and other countries have begun to crank up production of the seventeen rare earth elements, they have yet to find viable amounts of the heavier metals such as dysprosium, terbium, europium, and ytterbium that are most important.
China has a near total monopoly in the heavier end of the spectrum, though it is also the dominant supplier of the whole rare earth complex after driving rivals out of business in the 1990s. It still accounts for 97pc of global supply.
Beijing shocked the world when it suddenly began to restrict exports in 2009, prompting furious protests and legal complaints by both the US and the EU at the World Trade Organisation. China claimed that it was clamping down on smuggling and environmental abuse.
"Their real intention is to force foreign companies to locate plant in China. They're saying `if you want our rare earth metals, you must build your factory here, and we can then steal your technology," said professor Kato.
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Rare earth metals are the salt of life for the hi-tech revolution, used in iPads, plasma TVs, lasers, and catalytic converters for car engines. Dysprosium is crucial because it is the strongest magnet in the world but also remains stable at very high temperatures. Neodymium is used in hybrid cars, and terbium cuts power use for low-energy lightbulbs by 40pc.
The metals are also used in precision-guided weapons, missiles such as the Hellfire, military avionics, satellites, and night-vision equipment. America's M1A2 Abrams tank and the Aegis Spy-1 radar both rely on samarium.
Washington was caught badly off guard when China started restricting supplies. The US defence and energy departments have now made it an urgent priority to find other sources, but warn that it may take up to a decade to rebuild the supply-chain. The US Magnetic Materials Association said America had drifted into a "silent crisis".
