Cobra got the idea while attending a body-art convention with his colleague Shannon Larratt, who in self-portraits had digitally made the whites of his eyes blue.

Larratt was a fan of “Dune”, the celebrated science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, and wanted to resemble the Fremen, the residents of the desert planet Arrakis, whose eyeballs were all blue.

“I asked Shannon if he’d be interested in making his own eyes permanently blue if I figured out a way,” Cobra says. “He laughed and said, ‘Only if two other people try it with me.'”

Cobra recruited two other friends and, after intensive research, performed the first “eyeball tattooing”. A few months later, he says, the TV series “CSI: New York” had an episode based on the procedure, “and the rest is history”.

The procedure, which takes just a few minutes, is as simple as it is perilous – and as apparently painful.

The white of the eyeball, known as the sclera, is “tattooed with a solid colour or mix of colours” using the “hand-poking” procedure in which an ink-laden needle is poked into the skin.

Using a hypodermic syringe, the ink is “placed safely” in a super-thin layer of the sclera, between its mucous-covered outer membrane and the hard inner white of the eye, Cobra says. He’s since “streamlined” the procedure with better technique and materials.

Cobra got his first tattoo at age 15 after seeing the body art and tattoos in photos of indigenous tribes in National Geographic magazine. He offers piercing and tattooing services and surgical body modifications like putting points on ears, splitting tongues, implanting horns and scarring the skin in patterns.

Since inventing eyeball tattoos in 2007, he says, there has never been a complication with his clients. There are, however, reports of such procedures going wrong, including loss of eyesight at the hands of novice tattoo artists.

Cobra blames this on “people with very limited basic education, who see this just as a cool thing to do and do not care about their bodies”.

“In a way I am responsible – it was my invention – but I’ve always told people never to do this,” says Cobra, who recently moved from Paris to Melbourne, Australia, to start a new studio.

“It’s sad for me because it’s something I created to use as an art for people to express themselves so they can feel comfortable with their body and their place in the world.”

In February the government of New South Wales, where Melbourne is located, effectively legalised the eyeball tattoo by defining it as a “skin-penetration procedure”. The state wanted to regulate the practice so it will be performed in a clean and safe environment.

“Eyeball tattooing involves much the same risk of transmission of blood-borne viruses as other forms of tattooing, which is why we moved to tighten the regulations,” says Health Minister Jillian Skinner.

But Luke Arundel, a Melbourne-based optometrist, says the practice is “painfully dangerous”. “Cobra might have had a good record so far, but at the end of the day it’s the eyes – the most sensitive organ of our body. “Sticking things into an eye is a very risky business, no matter how safe you are. There is very little margin for error,” Arundel says. The ink dye has to be injected into a membrane less than half a millimetre thick.

“It’s a sight-threatening procedure that could lead to severe infection, retinal detachment and other problems.” There’s a chance of chronic headaches, ulceration around the area of penetration and severe sensitivity to light. “Also, there is no guarantee that it will not develop complications later in life.”

Thirty-year-old Kylie Lee Garth had Cobra tattoo her eyeballs two years ago by Luna Cobra. The whites are now shiny sea green.

“It’s just a natural progression,” she says. “I liked the way it looked and I wanted this modification. There was no risk involved. I knew he had tweaked the method in the past 10 years to the safest possible way and I had witnessed that.”

The process was “scary, mentally”, says Garth, a New Zealander who also does body piercing professionally and is a rookie tattoo artist.

“The procedure itself was fine. I felt the cold of the needle. It was a bit scratchy at first. The ink was in blots the first day, but when I woke up the next day, my eyes were |green. It was the most exciting |day of my life!”

http://www.Instagram.com/|lunacobra/?hl=en

http://www.LunaCobra.net

Untold millions of people must have thumbed through the thin pages of directories seeking a plumber or a travel agent for a holiday. But today you can find all that information on the Internet. No longer do you need to run down columns of names in alphabetical order with your fingertip, muttering aloud the alphabet as you seek the entry you’re looking for.

Nevertheless telephone books are still printed and delivered round the globe. You find them piled up in the hallways of apartment buildings, in supermarkets or at collection stations and most are dutifully picked up by phone subscribers.

Why? Critics say the books are out of date when they arrive, and incomplete: most mobile numbers are not listed in them.

“I seldom look in a phone book myself,” admits Rhett-Christian Grammatik, a private telephone book publisher who is head of the Association of German Reference and Directory Media (VDAV).

The world’s first telephone directory was printed in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. Curiously, it had no numbers in it, just names. You relied on the operator to connect you to the right subscriber. New Haven had 50 of them.

Initially, people thought telephones were a useless, show-off toy. When Berlin’s first telephone book came out in 1881, it was colloquially referred to as the “Book of 99 Fools”. That was as many names as it held.

Despite the scepticism, the telephone and its associated book were only beginning their triumphant march. Then came the split into white-pages (residential) and yellow-pages (business) directories.

The Library of Congress in Washington DC has the world’s biggest collection of historic phone directories from round the globe: 100,000. Every year, another 1,500 arrive from 100 nations of the world, so it’s clear the printing presses are still rolling fast.

In Germany, and that would probably be true of most nations, there are big regional differences in how much a telephone book is used.

Grammatik’s association did a study in 2015 and found that “the older the user, and the more rural their residential area, the more they used the phone book”.

In hip, sophisticated Berlin just 28 per cent of people still leaf through a printed phone book to find anything, whereas in rural states such as Brandenburg or Saxony-Anhalt, the use can be as high as 70 per cent, surveys show.

Uwe Calm from a phone-book publishing company, Oeding Verlag, doesn’t have a simple answer as to why the printed phone book hasn’t died out yet. “People keep using them out of sheer habit, without really thinking about whether there’s an alternative,” he suggests.

What has kept phone books going in many countries is the advertising revenue they generate.

A full-page display in a German phone book costs 15,000 euros (Bt600,000), says Heiko Hanslik from the VFT, the association that represents commercial publishers of give-away directories in Germany.

He predicts local phone books will be around for a while yet.

This should make a lot of Germans happy. A YouGov survey of Internet users found that less than a quarter wanted to see the printed phone book abolished, even though half said they do use the Internet to look up telephone numbers.

“You can browse in them,” Calm says in defence of the printed book. “Perhaps you’ll discover something you weren’t looking for and lose yourself a bit.”

With 100 million units in circulation in Germany, where each locality’s directory is reprinted annually, the telephone book has managed to reach the same level of recognition as Chancellor Angela Merkel – 97.5 per cent. That’s how many people say they know what it – or she – is.

The unprecedented feat was made possible by computer software replacing the damaged spinal cord as the communication highway between Ian Burkhart’s brain and his hand muscles.

“This is the first time a completely paralysed person has regained movement just by using their own thoughts,” said researcher Chad Bouton of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York.

Burkhart, a 24-year-old from Ohio, has a pea-sized chip in his head to read his brain signals, which are then deciphered by a computer and rerouted to the hand, wrist and finger muscles.

The muscles receive their instructions from an electrode sleeve worn on the right forearm – with which Burkhart can now also swipe a credit card, pick up a spoon, hold a phone to his ear and play the cords of a guitar video game.

The US-based researchers hope their work, still in an early phase, will one day allow paralysed people to feed and dress themselves.

Their device, called NeuroLife, reroutes messages from the brain to the muscles, bypassing the spinal cord.

Two years ago, they reported a major breakthrough when Burkhart was able to open and close his hand.

With a lot more training, he has since refined his skills and can now grip a “stir stick” with his fingertips, and use it.

Burkhart broke his neck in a holiday diving accident aged 19 and was left quadriplegic – meaning his arms and legs are paralysed.

“Doctors told me I’d broken my neck and that most likely I’d be able to move my shoulders around, but nothing else for the rest of my life,” he told journalists in a teleconference ahead of the report’s release.

He volunteered for the trial, Burkhart said, because he wanted to help people like himself regain their independence.

“Just not being able to use your hands does limit you quite a bit,” he said. “I have to rely on other people for things.”

Burkhart underwent surgery to have the chip implanted in the brain’s motor cortex area, which controls movement.

The chip was attached on top of the skull to a “connector” linking it to a computer which Burkhart “trained” to read his mind and decode which movements he wanted to execute.

The command to open, clench or pinch is then relayed to an electrode sleeve on Burkhart’s right arm.

“When we first hooked everything up… it was a big shot,” he recounted.

“I hadn’t moved in about three-and-a-half years at that point. Now it’s something that’s just so fluid it’s kind of like it was before I had my injury.

“I just think about what I want to do, and now I can do it.”

Some of the functions he has relearnt have the potential of changing his daily life for the better. But for now, he can only do them in the lab.

The researchers said they hope to improve the technology to help not only people with spinal cord injuries, but also those who suffered a stroke or traumatic brain injury.

“Maybe in a few years from now we can have a wireless system that allows a patient like Ian to be able to move his hand and his arm… without cables to connect,” said Ali Rezai of Ohio State University.

“This becomes more streamlined hopefully over time, maybe integrated into your cellphone… communicating with your sleeve.”

Several teams worldwide are researching ways to bypass a damaged spinal cord, many focusing on using the mind to control robotic limbs or exoskeletons.

But the holy grail is to allow quadriplegics to use their own limbs, limiting the need for surgery and prosthetics.

“If all the work we’ve been doing can help anybody get more independence back, I mean that’s great,” said Burkhart.

“I really cherish the independence I had before my injury, so if you can give someone that ability back, it’s huge.”

A video explaining the findings |can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60fAjaRfwnU