Five years ago, Connie Culp’s husband Thomas aimed a shotgun at her face and pulled the trigger.

The blast shattered her nose and cheeks, tore up her hard palate and blew out her right eye.

A chaotic mess of shotgun pellets and bone splinters occupied the place where the middle of her face used to be.

Only her upper eyelids, forehead, lower lip and chin were spared.

Somehow she lived, but after 30 operations to fix the mess, the result was so horrifying that children dared not venture near her home.

Five months ago, Culp received the face of a dead woman during the nation’s first facial transplant surgery, which was performed at Cleveland Clinic.

Last week, she stood before reporters for the first time since the life-changing surgery. Her expressions were mechanical. Her speech was gravelly. There were baggy folds of skin that doctors plan to remove once her circulation improves and the facial nerves regenerate.

But she could talk and smile. She did quite a lot of the latter, actually.

“I guess I’m the one you came to see today,” Culp, 46, told reporters. But “I think it’s more important that you focus on the donor family that made it so I could have this person’s face.”

Culp wants to help others accept people that have suffered disfiguring burns and injuries.

“When somebody has a disfigurement and don’t look as pretty as you do, don’t judge them because you never know what happened to them,” she said. “Don’t judge people who don’t look the same as you do. Because…one day it might be all taken away.”

Culp’s husband turned the gun on himself after shooting Connie, but he didn’t get the job done there, either. He went to prison for 7 years.

When it comes to the early diagnosis of autism, scientists are on a roll.

Last month, a group at Yale showed that autistic children could be differentiated from age-matched controls by their responses to visual and auditory cues in cartoons.

Now, a group at UNC has demonstrated using MRI scans that a specific part of the brain known as the amygdala was roughly 13% larger in autistic children than it was in normally developing kids, even after adjusting for age, gender and IQ.

To reach this conclusion, Joseph Piven and colleagues scanned the noggins of 50 toddlers with autism and 33 age-matched controls that were developing normally.

“We believe that children with autism have normal-sized brains at birth but at some point, in the latter part of the first year of life, (the amygdala) begins to grow in kids with autism,” Piven told CNN.

The amygdala helps people process faces and emotions, a behavior known as joint attention. Piven’s group confirmed that toddlers with big amygdalas had joint attention problems.

“We would basically try to get the child to look one way, we’d turn and point to a clock and see whether or not the child would notice it,” Piven explained. “The 2-year-olds without autism would…see where you are looking and join you but the children with autism, with large amygdalas, would not.”

Autism experts say such findings are critical in developing new ways to diagnose autism and initiate treatment earlier in the course of the disease.

Autism affects about 1 in 150 children. It is the most rapidly growing serious developmental disability in the US. The average age for diagnosis of autism is 3.

The findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.