Tech News Update

The world’s first face, jaw and tongue transplant has been carried out by doctors in Spain. Surgeons spent 16 hours operating on a 43-year-old man whose face had been horribly disfigured. He will eventually be able to eat, taste, swallow and speak properly for the first time in 11 years. The unnamed recipient, from the Canary Islands, lost the lower part of his face including his lower lips, jaw and tongue as a consequence of radiotherapy to treat a tumour. The 30 surgeons at La Fe Hospital in Valencia finished the operation on Wednesday afternoon. Dr Pedro Cavadas, who led the team, said: ‘The patient has already seen himself in the mirror and he is delighted.’ The donor was a 35-year-old Belgian living in Spain who was killed in a traffic accident. Tuesday’s operation was the eighth involving a face since the surgery was pioneered in 2005. This case was particularly difficult because previous surgery had rendered the veins, arteries and nerves normally connected in these operations useless, Cavadas said. It comes after a series of high-profile face transplants this year. Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio performed one of the most extensive face transplants earlier this summer. They transformed the face of Connie Culp, who was left horrifically disfigured after her husband blasted her face with a shotgun. The 46-year-old mother of two had nothing but praise for her doctors and said she was no longer afraid to be seen.World first: Surgeons in Spain have performed the first ever tongue and jaw transplant (posed by models)Success story: Earlier this summer, surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio transformed the face of Connie Culp, who was disfigured by a gun blast

Smoke Detector Originally installed on the Skylab space station in early 1970s to alert crew members of unexpected fumes, smoke detectors are now required by law in every U.S. residence to prevent house fires. Yeah, it’s not just there to beeping annoy you when the battery needs changing.Black & Decker Cordless tools Recruited by NASA in 1971, Black & Decker constructed cordless, battery-powered instruments that allowed Apollo astronauts to collect lunar samples more easily during risky space walks.

The Great Leonardo Da Vinci designed many weapons, including giant crossbows, machine guns, siege towers, cluster bombs and even a precursor to the modern-day tank.Leonardo Da Vinci’s Terminator Leonardo Da Vinci’s mechanical knight was not discovered until 1957, when Carlo Pedretti discovered it, hidden amongst Da Vinci’s countless designs.

It looks like a catastrophic explosion in the latest sci-fi action thriller but this awe-inspiring image is actually based on the latest state-of-the-art space imaging. The artist’s impression, inspired by the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse, reveals an enormous plume of gas almost as big as our own Solar System blasting outwards.The discoveries, revealed by the latest techniques on the European Space Agency’s Very Large Telescope, could help unravel why the mammoth plasma ball spews out material at such an incredible speed.Superstar: An artist’s impression of red giant Betelgeuse based on combined images from the European Space Agency’s Very Large TelescopeAlmost 1,000 times larger than our sun, Betelgeuse is the second largest star in the constellation of Orion and one of the biggest stars known to man. The red supergiant is also one of the most luminous stars, emitting 100,000 times more light than the Sun. For decades, astronomers have struggled to explain how the mysterious red supergiants expel such vast amounts of material.

Injecting oxygen into cancerous tumours significantly boosts the chances of recovery, a ground-breaking study has revealed.Scientists at Oxford University found slightly increasing the supply strengthened blood vessels in cancer cells, making chemotherapy more effective. Cells which are damaged and weak had a constricted oxygen supply and were less sensitive to radiotherapy treatments, in a series of experiments on mice.Ground-breaking: Slightly increasing the oxygen supply could strengthen blood vessels in breast cancer cells like theseThe team behind the breakthrough hailed it as an ‘exciting’ development which would allow drugs to ’soften up’ tumours before they are targeted with strong treatments.Scientists had previously tried to starve tumours of oxygen, believing a more stable blood supply would only help the cancer spread. Professor Gillies McKenna, director of the UK-MRC Gray Institute for Radiation Oncology & Biology, said: ‘We are very excited to have uncovered this brand new approach to cancer treatment where the drugs prime the cancer cells for radiotherapy.’You might expect that by increasing an oxygen supply to tumour cells you would help them grow.