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Any good designer knows the way to a clients heart is through their stomach. So when deciding what kind of cookies to make for client gifts this year I thought, why make the usual chocolate chip cookies when I can make PANTONE CHIP cookies!

Just 13 days after receiving a pioneering larynx transplant, a Californian woman was able to speak her first words in a decade. Her own larynx was permanently damaged by an operation 11 years ago.

The first combined larynx and thyroid transplant was performed in 1998, but in the latest operation Brenda Charett Jensen of Modesto, California, received a section of trachea too. The feat, which took 18 hours, was performed last October at the Medical Center of the University of California, Davis, but announced only yesterday.

The transplant also works far better than the first because more of the donated organs’ nerves have been plugged into the 52-year-old woman’s own nervous system. This enables her to move muscles that control speaking by moving the vocal cords, and others that will eventually allow her to swallow again, once she relearns how to do it.

“It is a miracle,” says Jensen. “I’m talking, talking, talking, which just amazes my family and friends.” The sound of her voice is her own, rather than that of the donor.

For your amusement, we present a selection of images that highlight the average persons apparent inability to summon the common sense necessary when securing property with a lock.

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From animal hoarders to shopping addicts, reality television is no stranger to chronicling the bizarre habits of others. But Adele, featured in recent episode of TLC’s My Strange Addiction, just may win the prize for oddest infliction yet: She can’t stop eating couch cushions.

Adele began ingesting the foamy furniture when she was ten years old, and on a daily basis, she says she eats a full eight-by-eleven chunk. “I just take little bite-sized pieces and snack on it all day,” she said. In her lifetime, she has polished off seven couches and two chairs.

On one day of the year the Dogon people of Mali can fish in the sacred water of Lake Antogo. It’s every fisherman for himself as the lake is emptied in minutes.