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Zane Whitmore of Seattle was pierced through the flesh on his shoulder blades four times, and then hung from these piercings onto a hot air balloon. He floated around California’s Long Valley Caldera for seventy-five minutes, suspended ten thousand feet over the ground:
The stunt was part of a Portland film production company’s filming of a feature-length documentary called Feet Off the Ground. Planning for the hot air balloon ride took about two years.
“This balloon suspension is really the culmination of several years of immersing ourselves in the body modification and suspension communities,” Matt Morgan, co-founder of film production company Precarious Egg and one of the producers of the film, said in a press release describing the project.
Link -via Boing Boing
Martin Mireles has been paralyzed from the neck down for nearly twenty years. He can maneuver a mobility chair by steering it with his mouth, but a new magnetic tongue stud developed by researchers at the Northwestern University School of Medicine makes it a lot easier:
Mr. Mireles, 37, tested the equipment one recent afternoon by guiding a wheelchair through an obstacle course lined with trash cans. Mouth closed, he shifted the magnet to travel forward and backward, left and right.[...]
To operate the system, the user wears a headset with sensors that pick up magnetic signals from the tongue ring. Moving the tongue to the mouth’s upper left corner, for instance, moves the wheelchair forward. (The researchers hope that in the future, touching each tooth could signal a different command, from turning on the television to answering the phone to opening a door.)
Researchers decided to use the tongue because they wanted to take advantage of some of the functions a severely disabled person still had. The tongue does not tire easily, they said, and it is not usually affected by a spinal cord injury because it is directly connected to the brain through a cranial nerve.
Link -via Gizmodo | Photo: Steve Kagan/NYT
Surely some daring Neatoramanaut can beat this record:
ARLINGTON, Texas, May 11 (UPI) — A Texas body modification enthusiast said he broke a Guinness World Record by receiving 1,197 piercings in a single day.
Jeremy Stroud said Arlington body modification artist Tyson Turk spent about five hours May 2 inserting 800 needles into his back, 300 in his right arm, 50 in his leg and about 20 in his left arm, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram reported Monday.
Image by flickr user sean dreilinger used via Creative Commons license
Update 5/13/09 by Alex: if you can stand the loud music, here’s the video clip: Link [YouTube]
