This week’s news post is going to be a short one.  It seems that there wasn’t a lot going on around the world this week, at least in terms of body modification.  That said, there are still a couple of stories for your reading enjoyment.

First up this week is Q&A with the author of Breastfeeding In Combat Boots, Robyn Roche-Paul.  This particular interview is target to women with nipple piercings who are worried about breastfeeding when they have children.

So if a woman wants a nipple piercing, should she worry that eventually she’ll want to breastfeed, and this’ll screw things up?

Robyn Roche-Paull: No. Chances are, she’ll be fine. Repeated piercings sometimes create scar tissue that can block milk ducts, but in general, a clean piercing by a reputable, professional piercer shouldn’t cause issues. Anecdotally, I have found that breastfeeding is not affected by established nipple piercings. However, some moms do find that they leak, copiously, due to the extra holes in the nipples … and some babies can find the extra flow difficult to manage. But nothing that isn’t manageable by breast pads and some positioning changes.

Will a nursing mother have to take the piercing out when she breastfeeds?

I would recommend that, yes. A baby could choke on a piece of jewelry if it comes apart. It can also cause mouth sores in the baby and harbor bacteria. The mom can take it out for each feeding, or just take it out for the duration of her breastfeeding. She can also use flexible Teflon jewelry while she’s breastfeeding.

The interview goes on to talk about when it’s a good time to get pierced if you’re planning a family.

There’s a few more stories to come, so just click the read more button to see the rest.

Next up, we head over to New Jersey where a group of students have come up with a way to use tattoos as a means of creating permanent empathy.

If typical internship activities include filing and making coffee, Stephanie Krivitzky’s 10 weeks with the BBH Barn were anything but orthodox.  The 22-year-old native of Montclair, N.J., dreamed up The Social Tattoo Project with fellow interns Jenn Huang and Haywood Watkins III. The three were tasked with a very brief mission: “Change perception famously.”

“We wanted to focus on changing perception, because we figured if we had a good idea we’d become famous anyway,” Krivitzky told The Huffington Post. They decided to focus on apathy and the expiration of empathy. Noticing that issues that remained pressing, such as the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Haiti, were no longer a part of the American consciousness, they set about finding a way to create a sense of permanent concern. The first five topics they chose to center on were the aftermath of Haiti’s earthquake, the Japan earthquake and tsunami, the Norway bombings, human trafficking and poverty.

Once the topics were chosen, the group sought out volunteers who would agree to get a tattoo that they had never seen. The tattoos would serve as a permanent mark of empathy for the victims of the five crises.

The Social Tattoo Project has inked five people, the themes of which were selected via voting on Twitter when followers would use hashtags to vote for a subject and the most popular subject would be the focus of the next tattoo. These tattoos cost them the entirety of their $1,000 budget from BBH. Sacred Tattoo in New York City provided the group with a 50 percent discount, which Krivitzky said saved the project.

I guess if they did this to become famous, it sort of worked.  I can’t fault them for trying to remind people that just because the media decided a story wasn’t worth following any more, it doesn’t make the people affected by it go away.

Scientists in The Netherlands have developed a synthetic skin combining human cells and spider silk.  This new type of skin is the first generation of what they hope will become bulletproof human skin that can be grafted onto soldiers.

A Dutch team created a piece of “bulletproof” skin from special, U.S.-made spider silk and human skin cells and found that it indeed can repel bullets — as long as they’re not traveling too fast.  The bulletproof skin showed its superiority over normal human skin by stopping a bullet fired at a reduced speed. But it fell short of surviving a shot at normal speed from a .22 caliber rifle, the benchmark for protection for a Type 1 bulletproof vest.

The special brand of spider silk came from genetically modified goats and worms at Utah State University in Logan. U.S. researchers have spent years harvesting the spider silk protein from the goat milk to try to make new types of super-strong fibers.  Essaidi combined the spider silk with human skin cells from Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.  Such skin is still a long way from adding practical protection to humans, but it gives a glimpse of what future soldiers or would-be superheroes might expect.

You know, as cool as this is, they could have saved a lot of time just by getting bitten by a radioactive spider.

Finally, if you’ve got 15 grand laying around, you can get yourself a pair of contact lenses encrusted with diamonds.

Creator Dr. Chandrashekhar Chawan told Today he got the idea for diamond contact lenses after his wife had the precious stones implanted in her teeth. His new La Ser eye jewelry line features contacts with 18 diamonds adorning a yellow or white gold ring around the lenses. He uses Boston Scleral lenses, which are typically used to treat eye illnesses, to prevent the lenses from touching the cornea. Only 3,996 sets will be made, and Chawan hopes to sell them outside of India. Experts, however, are skeptical about their safety.

Sal Riggio, a licensed optician at Manhattan Grand Optical in New York City had never heard of the diamond contacts until we brought them to his attention, but he dismissed them when he learned they were not FDA approved. “I don’t know if they’re comfortable and I don’t know if they’re healthy,” Riggio told us. “When they’re FDA approved and distributed in this country then we’ll learn about them, but it sounds ridiculous and unreasonable to me. Do I see a purpose? No, but today’s generation under 30, they do a lot of crazy things to their bodies. Tattoos, piercings—they probably would try it.” He laughed when we told him about the $15,000 price tag. “You’re going to have to call someone in Beverly Hills, because I don’t know anyone here willing to pay that. You won’t ever see them in my store.”

Today reached out to Dr. Rajesh Khanna, a cornea and refractive surgeon, who also had major misgivings about the glittery contacts, especially using the Boston Scleral lenses on patients who don’t need to wear them. “It’s a cumbersome, bulky lens, which has to be filled with saline solution and then inserted in the eye,” he told them. “The risk-benefit ratio is vastly different than for a person with healthy eyesight.”

Sure this may not be a permanent modification, but spending that kind of money to change the appearance of your eyes, is definitely a commitment, especially with the risks present.

Well, that’s it for this week.  I told you it was going to be a short news post.  If you’ve got a story you think should be included in next week’s news post, send me an e-mail or simply click this link.

Have a great weekend everyone, and I’ll see you back here Monday.