“Could he be any sloppier?” — James Hartman

“26-year-old single mom looking forward to doing the ‘little things’ again. Six-and-a-half weeks after receiving the first hand transplant in the western United States, Emily Fennell is becoming so accustomed to her new right hand that she barely remembers when she didn’t have one. The 26-year-old from Yuba City, Calif., underwent transplant surgery at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, a 14-hour procedure that began just before midnight on March 4 and concluded at 2:30 p.m. the next day. ‘It has been surreal to see that I have a hand again, and be able to wiggle my fingers. My 6-year-old daughter has never seen me with a hand,’ said Fennell, a single mother. ‘She looked at it, touched it and said it was ‘cool.’ Fennell was discharged from the hospital April 8 and will continue to stay near UCLA for two months for monitoring and occupational therapy.” — UCLAHealth

“Scientist have discovered a breathtaking fossil of a spider attacking a wasp during the dinosaur age, estimated to be 100 million years old. The preserved encounter occurred in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar in the Early Cretaceous period between 97-110 million years ago, when scientists suspect dinosaurs would have been roaming the area. Though the spider presumably had been waiting patiently for its prey, both the attacker and the unsuspecting wasp met their demise when they were showered in amber, a liquid preserver.” w/ photos

“A Welsh student can remember every detail of his teenage years – including what he had to eat and what the weather was like on any given day. Aurelien Hayman, 20, from Cardiff, is one of only a handful of people in the world with hyperthymesia, or highly superior autobiographical memory. “It’s not something that I realised overnight, but when I was 14 I discovered that I was quite good at remembering some things that had happened years before,” he said. When asked about the random date of October 1, 2006, he remembers it was a cloudy Sunday, he listened to the song When You Were Young by The Killers, and he had asked out a girl but been turned down… He said: “There’s no method or technique to it. I’m not aware that my memories are being coded. It’s like being able to access something in a filing cabinet very quickly.” w/ photo

“Ashrita Furman of Jamaica, New York, USA, balanced 62 pint glasses on his chin in Los Angeles, California, USA, on the set of the television show Guinness World Records: Primetime. The record has changed hands many times over the years and in 2007, Ashrita reclaimed the record by balancing 81 glasses for 12.10 seconds.”

“Scientists are claiming they have discovered a new species of monkey living in the remote forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo — an animal well-known to local hunters but until now, unknown to the outside world. In a paper published in the open-access journal Plos One, the scientists describe the new species that they call Cercopithecus Lomamiensis, known locally as the Lesula, whose home is deep in central DR Congo’s Lomami forest basin. The scientists say it is only the second discovery of a monkey species in 28 years. In an age where so much of the earth’s surface has been photographed, digitized, and placed on a searchable map on the web discoveries like this one by a group of American scientists this seem a throwback to another time.” w/ photos

“Who’s the chick holding the gun?” — MrKolt2112

“Millions of people suffering from Multiple Scleorosis, Parkinson’s, muscular dystrophy, spinal cord injuries or amputees could soon interact with their computers and surroundings using just their eyes thanks to a new device that costs just $53. Comprised of off-the-shelf materials, the new device, can work out exactly where a person is looking by tracking their eye movements, allowing them to control a cursor on a screen just like a normal computer mouse. The researchers demonstrated the device by getting students to play the computer game Pong using just their eyes.” — InstituteofPhysics

“An artificial jellyfish which is able to swim with the help of beating heart muscle cells has been created by scientists. The tentacled artificial creature, made from silicon, has been dubbed ‘Medusoid’ because of its resemblance to the snake-haired character from Greek mythology whose gaze turned people to stone. It is able to mimic the swimming movement of a jellyfish thanks to muscle cells from rat hearts which were implanted onto its silicon frame and grown into a pattern similar to the muscles of a real jellyfish. By applying an electric current to a container of conducting liquid, the scientists demonstrated they could ‘shock’ the muscles into contracting so that it began to move through the water. The ‘reverse-engineering’ project by researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University was published on the website of the Nature Biotechnology journal.” w/ photos

“It’s amazing the kind of things people create in their backyards. Just a few days ago we posted about the stunning Four Seasons Garden, and the impressive replica of the Golden Gate Bridge built by Larry Richardson, and let’s not forget the backyard Titanic we featured a while back. Today, I found some photos of a colorful castle like the one you usually see in children’s fairy tale books, and learned it was actually built by a retired bricklayer, right in his own backyard, in the German town of Dudweiler. The 76-year-old castle enthusiast spent 37 years building his masterpiece out of stones, bricks and thousands of bags of cement.” w/ photos