Nick Christos ‘20
Surgeons from the Army have successfully grown an ear in a woman’s arm and transplanted it, according to The New York Times. The woman, an Army soldier, was returning to Fort Bliss, Texas when she lost control of her car after a tire blowout which led to her car flipping multiple times and the loss of her ear. In the first procedure of its kind in the Army, Lt. Col. Owen Johnson III, Chief of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at William Beaumont Army Medical Center, and his team used cartilage from the soldiers’ ribs and placed it under her skin to allow for an ear to grow. A total ear reconstruction procedure was done six years ago at Johns Hopkins which was successful as well.
A mass shooting in Australia, which left seven members of the same family dead, was the worst mass shooting in the country in decades. In a suspected murder-suicide, seven people were found murdered in the small town of Osmington, a very tight-knit community where almost everyone knows everyone. Once police arrived they found three high power rifles, licensed to Peter Miles, who they believed executed his wife Cynda Miles, a very prominent member of the Osmington community, his daughter Katrina Miles, and his four grandchildren. Peter Miles then called the police and was found dead, by means of suicide, upon police arrival at the scene. This is the second mass shooting in the history of the country. After Australia’s first mass shooting, known as the Port Arthur massacre which took place in 1996 and left 34 people dead, the country extremely tightened gun laws and did not have another mass shooting over the next 22 years.
Over the past few weeks, Hawaii has been suffering from molten rock and spewing lava from the Kilauea Volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. Nearly 2,000 people whose homes and streets have been overtaken by flowing lava have evacuated from the region. 26 homes have been destroyed by the lava which now covers about 117 acres. Since 1790 there have been three major lava flows.