(NBC News)

It was an exciting day for a 26-year-old veteran, the first soldier to survive after losing all four limbs in the Iraq War. On Tuesday, Brendan Marrocco wheeled himself into a packed news conference to show off his newly transplanted arms following his surgery last month at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Marrocco received his new arms in a 13-hour operation that involved 16 surgeons on December 18 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. "I hated not having arms," Marrocco said during the news conference. "I was alright with not having legs. Not having arms takes so much away from you. Even your personality. You talk with your hands. You do everything with your hands, basically. And when you don’t have that you’re kind of lost for a while." Marrocco received his two new arms from a deceased donor, becoming one of only seven people in the United States who have undergone successful double-arm transplants. “It's given me a lot of hope for the future. I feel like I’m getting a second chance to start over after I got hurt,” Marrocco said. “I’m excited for the future.” [NBC News] 

Twitter makes your tweets more beautiful with bigger photos

Twitter announced some changes on Wednesday to how photos and videos will display in user timelines, emphasizing media in the stream as the company builds out its support for photos and video in status updates as a crucial part of its future. In a blog post Wednesday, the company explained some of the changes coming to the site, including larger photos that appear on profiles and in search results, as well as media galleries that will incorporate videos from “Vine, YouTube, Vimeo, and other partners whose videos appear in expanded tweets.” Twitter is clearly focusing on the role of visual media recently, having just launched Vine, the company’s standalone short video app, and having released a photo editing service in competition with Facebook’s Instagram last year. [Giga OM]

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