Breathlesspics: Science

Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva

It’s a disease where your body’s repair mechanism is completely broken, and starts “healing” the fibrous tissue (read muscles, tendons and ligaments) by turning them into bone. That’s right, your whole body is slowly being petrified, as you excruciatingly transform into a creature formed of bone. Except, it’s bone without the smooth and mobile joints of the normal skeleton, so it’s like having a body filled with twigs that scrape and hinder every moment. Why not just cut off the growths? That causes the repair system to kick into overdrive, converting more of the body into bone and faster. There’s no known treatment for the 450 sufferers worldwide, and in one famous case a sufferer survived up to the age 40, at which point his entire body except his lips and transformed into bone, leaving him completely immobile.

Harlequin Ichthyosis

This incredibly deadly mutation causes babies to have super-thick skin which cracks where it should fold, leaving open wounds prone to infection. There eyes, orifices, and soft tissue are often painfully contracted, and moving can be agony for them. Currently, the odds of a child hit with the disease living are greatly improved, and there’s even a 27 year old survivor of the condition currently still alive, who’s the oldest survivor on record.

Madura Foot

Madura foot, also known as Eumycetoma, is a chronic fungal disease of the foot. You get the fungal infection from working on farm fields, where the spores spread from the soil to open cuts on your feet, where they quietly take root, and don’t cause any pain, just some milky discharge, for up to a year. Then enormous pus filled nodules start growing all over your feet...all the way down to the bone. There’s no vaccine or real cure for the disease, leaving the treatment to antifungals or amputation if they don’t work.

Filarial Worm

Another horrible parasite, but what makes this one even worse is the simple fact that it can live in your eye. Even worse, there are some leeches which will latch onto your eyeball. And the most horrible fact is it’s so common that it’s the second most common cause of blindness in the world.

Cornu Cutaneum

Cutaneous horns are tumors that cause horns to grow out your skin . Technically the stuff it's made of is keratin, the same stuff as fingernails, but it’s still creepy. And they don’t know what causes it, but they think it’s linked to HPV and radiation

Cancrum Oris

Cancrum Oris, commonly called Noma, is gangrene of the face, and for some reason it seems to hit kids more often than adults. More than 80% of those affected by the disease die, as it eats away at the tissue and musculature around their jaws. What causes it? It’s an opportunistic infection that likes to hop on board in situations where people are malnourished, have unclean drinking water, poor dental hygiene, and live in close proximity to farm animals. So pretty much anywhere unconscionably poor. What’s even worse is that it’s especially prevalent in the immuno-compromised, like HIV+ kids growing up in southern Africa

Guinea Worm

Guinea worm disease, aka Dracunculiasis, is one of those horrible stories that people tell you about travelling to third world nations — in fact, it’s one of the most commonly bandied tales of woe. First, you swallow the baby worm with dirty water, at which point it happily chills out in your digestive tract for a year, before metamorphosing into something much nastier. It then migrates to a limb — usually a foot — and forms a large and incredibly painful blister. You know how they get it out? They fish out one end, and pull it out slowly over the course of days or weeks of agony. You try and pull it out too fast, and it snaps, recoiling into the body to live again.

The surface of the moon is soiled with hundreds of items, from spacecraft to bags of urine all of human origin.

• more than 70 vehicles, spacecrafts, modules and routers

• Five USA flags
• 2 golf balls
• 24 boots
• several cameras
• film envelopes
• 96 bags of urine, feces, and vomit
• several DIY javelins
• different tools and shovels
• bags
• blankets
• towels
• used wipes
• personal hygiene items
• empty packages of dehidrated food

• a photograph of Charles Duke's family
• a small aluminum sculpture, a tribute to the American and Soviet "fallen astronauts" who died in the space race
• a patch from the never-launched Apollo 1, which went down in flames
• a small silicon disk bearing goodwill messages from 73 world leaders
• a silver pin
• a medal honoring Vladimir Komarov and Yuri Gagarin
• a cast golden olive branch