Milk Cameo:

Techniques for producing organic materials enable the fabrication of plastics made from human or animal milk by solidifying their casein content. The `Perle de lait' range of jewellery imagines a new set of personalized post-natal objects. The breast-feeding mother sends a feeding bottle full of her milk to a laboratory where it is transformed into a gem-like substance that can be mounted on a neck-piece or any other form of jewellery.

Metal Layering Technique Leads to Fine Tuned Implants

A laser heats the powdered metal in the exact places that need to be firm. "It's like baking a cake," says Andreas Burblies, spokesman for the Fraunhofer Numerical Simulation of Products, Processes Alliance. Any remaining loose powder is subsequently removed. "The end product is an open-pored element," explains Burblies. "Each point possesses exactly the right density and thus also a certain stability." The method allows the engineers to produce particularly lightweight components that are also extremely robust.

There are a lot of other amazing things on this guy's site too, like the electroshock helmet and whatever the hell this is.

Police find pipe bomb stuffed inside chicken

SIMSBURY, Conn. - Authorities in Connecticut are wondering who stuffed a raw roasting chicken with a pipe bomb and left it on a roadside.

Simsbury police Capt. Matthew Catania says a motorist noticed the chicken Friday morning. He says the bomb was large enough to harm a person if it went off.

The road was closed while the Hartford Police Department's bomb squad came and blew up the chicken.

Nobody was injured. No arrests had been made Monday night.

Previously.

American Cyborg:

The bird of prey was slowly starving to death after a poacher shot her upper beak off three years ago. But thanks to a team of volunteers an artificial beak has been attached to the 15-pound eagle helping her to grasp food.

Jane Fink Cantwell who found the bird scrounging for food and slowly starving at a landfill in Alaska said: "A bullet had to be removed from her curved upper beak, leaving her tongue and sinuses exposed, with a stump useless for grasping food. Eating with her beak was like using one chopstick. She also had trouble drinking and couldn't preen her feathers."

Despite the success of the operation, the bird will never be released back into the wild because she has spent too much time with humans and the final beak will not be strong enough to tear flesh from prey.

Previously.

"There are two things we shall make you; smooth between the legs and smooth between the ears, and what we take from you will be used to feed the kings of this Earth."

After sweating through the kid's eyebrow wax, Engle was directed to give her pint-size [8 year old] client a bikini wax. [...] As Engle talks, my head floods with images of breaking this poor young munchkin out of the clutches of her surely nipped-and-tucked mother, to let her grow old and hairy under my prudish wing. "But... there's nothing there, right?" I ask Engle. "I mean, at eight? Am I forgetting something?"

"Nope," she says. "There's not. Doesn't matter. That's when the mothers are starting them these days."

[...] "I've actually been joking that I'm going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?" Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. "It's such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age -- it's an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it's growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it's not there, `Do you wax? Do you shave?' Because so many of them do."

Wouldn't it be cheaper to just buy her one (or a hundred) of those wheelchairs that can climb stairs?

Where else but San Francisco City Hall could a 10-foot-long wheelchair ramp wind up costing $1 million?

Thanks to a maze of bureaucratic indecision and historic restrictions, taxpayers may shell out $100,000 per foot to make the Board of Supervisors president's perch in the historic chambers accessible to the disabled.

Supervisor Jake McGoldrick [...] asked that the board take some more time to come up with an alternative, like maybe just getting rid of the president's elevated seat.

The root of the problem dates back to when City Hall got a $300 million makeover in the 1990s that made just about every hallway, bathroom and office accessible to the disabled. The exception was the board president's podium, which is reachable only for someone who can climb the five steps from the chamber floor.

The understanding was that the room would eventually be made fully accessible. But no one worried about the podium until 2004 when Supervisor Michela Alioto-Pier, who uses a wheelchair, joined the board. [...]

Even if the board gives its final blessing, however, construction of the ramp won't be completed before the end of the year - midway through Alioto-Pier's second and final term.

"I deserve equal access to every part of the chamber," Alioto-Pier told her colleagues, adding that ending discrimination is worth the $1 million.

Orgasmatron

The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron -- rests on the skin just above the belt line. Two electrodes snake into the space between the vertebrae and the spinal cord. A video-game-like remote control allows women (or their partners) to turn electrical pulses on and off and fiddle with timing and intensity.

Design work is underway to get the cost of the procedure down to about $12,000 -- roughly the price of breast implants, Meloy says.

He plans to shrink the size of the internal processor to the size of two sticks of gum and the external processor to roughly the size of a belt pager, all while ensuring that the system is durable enough to withstand shear forces of typical use.

i-Limb:

More cyborg porn.

Previously.

Update: From their press release: "Some patients, especially soldiers, love the more robotic look of the i-LIMB Skin, but others like their device to blend anatomically with the rest of their body, and prefer to have a life-like covering for the i-LIMB Hand and ProDigits.” Hah! Crazy meatsacks. Where's the chrome?