Julia Vins is extraordinary because she worked very hard towards her passion, which happened to be body building. This 19 year old teenager looks just like a doll, until you look beyond her face… then you notice her gigantic muscles, and colossal arms and shoulders that would scare a professional wrestler. Julia is the living proof that you can be extremely tough and strong and still look like an angel!

If there was a world record for anorexia, Ellen Lietzow would likely qualify. This teenager decided not to eat or drink for a long time, because she felt that would help her become popular. She did get a lot of public attention, although arguably for the wrong reasons. At age 17, she was rushed to the hospital when she collapsed in school, after a full week with absolutely no nourishment or hydration.

Many people who come across Hunter Steinitz assume this teenager was a burn victim… but in fact she suffers from something even worse. She has a rare condition callled “harlequin ichthyosis” which makes all of her skin turn very thick, red and dry. It got so bad she became unable to close her eyes and her hair stopped growing because her follicles were blocked… she also cannot sweat, which leads to many secondary problems.

Mahendra Ahirwar was an Indian boy who also suffered from a terrible rare condition… fortunately modern medicine was able to help him lead a normal life. At age 13, he was afflicted with such severe congenital myopathy that his neck turned 180º from the normal position. He was turned down by 50 local doctors until eventually a successful crowd-funding helped him find a surgeon who was able to operate on his neck.

Nihal Bitla really didn’t look like a teenager at all when he passed away at age 15. He suffered from a condition called progeria, which made him age at eight times the normal pace. This disease made him look like an old man before he became a teenager, while leaving him with a normal child’s mind. Although he sadly died much too soon, his story raised awareness of this terrible disease.

Fu Wengui was a 15 year old teenager from china who also suffered from a very unusual malformation that affected his neck, making it unusually long as well as causing him terrible pain. He had three extra vertebra in the spine, which eventually had to be removed to allow him to lead a peaceful and pain-free life.

Sara Swaringen is a teenager from North Carolina (USA) who has a rare condition called Giant Congenital Melanocytic Nevus, which only affects in in 1/2 million people. This condition made her grow tens of thousands of moles all over her body, giving her a very unusual dotted skin. Ciera refused to be put down by her condition and decided to stand up for herself and proud of her body, rather than looking for treatment.

Lucy and Maria Aylmer are twin sisters from Gloucester (England), but you really wouldn’t think so. Born to a half Jamaican mother and a white father, the girls each drew from opposite ends of the genetic pool. Lucy is a ginger with notably light skin, while Maria looks almost black with her extremely tight curls and very dark skin. You would be hard pressed to find twins who look as different as these girls!

Isa-Bella Leclair is another inspiring teenager who refused to be put down by her deformities. She has a condition called Parkes Weber Syndrome, which caused her right leg to grow and swell to more than twice the size of her left leg. The doctors warned her mother that she might never be able to walk, but her strong will proved otherwise. To this day, she keeps inspiring people all around the world with her positive attitude.

Abigail Loraine Hensel and Britany Lee Hensel are two American girls who were born as conjoined twins – meaning their bodies have merged while keeping their heads separate. They each control half of the body, which is packed with a pair of each organ even though it looks strikingly normal and symmetrical from the neck down. These twins effectively look like a normal person with two heads, and they have raised much attention in the scientific community and beyond – they even starred in their own reality series in 2012.

Look at your handwriting carefully. It may tell you many interesting things about you. Besides traits of personality, there is also the coded information about your health. Graphology is a science of deciphering the facts about you that are hidden in your handwriting.

Nowadays, graphologists can be helpful in various situations: from answering questions regarding your health to providing criminal investigations with information about the reliability of your testimony. Besides, many employers have made it a common practice to analyze the potential of beneficial employees by their handwriting.

You do not have to be an expert, but with some fundamental knowledge of graphology, you can check if you or any of your family members have signs ofabnormal psychology disorders like dyslexia, schizophrenia, or Alzheimer’s disease.

Keep on reading this article to learn what are the characteristic features of your handwriting that can determine serious illnesses, including physiological processes.

In a paper published last month in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, authors Sean McGinty, Sean McKee, Roger Wadsworth, and Christopher McCormick devise a mathematical model to improve currently-employed treatments of coronary heart disease (CHD).

"CHD remains the leading global cause of death, and mathematical modeling has a crucial role to play in the development of practical and effective treatments for this disease," says lead author Sean McGinty. "The use of mathematics allows often highly complex biological processes and treatment responses to be simplified and written in terms of equations which describe the key parameters of the system. The solution of these equations invariably provides invaluable insight and understanding that will be crucial to the development of better treatments for patients in the future."

The accumulation of plaque during CHD can result in chest pain, and ultimately, rupture of the artherosclerotic plaque, which causes blood clots blocking the artery and leading to heart attacks. A common method of treatment involves inserting a small metallic cage called a stent into the occluded artery to maintain blood flow.

However, upon insertion of a stent, the endothelium—the thin layer of cells that lines the inner surface of the artery—can be severely damaged. The inflammatory response triggered as a result of this damage leads to excessive proliferation and migration of smooth muscle cells (cells in the arterial wall that are involved in physiology and pathology) leading to re-blocking of the artery. This is an important limitation in the use of stents. One way to combat this has been the use of stents that release drugs to inhibit the smooth muscle cell proliferation, which causes the occlusion. However, these drug-eluting stents have been associated with incomplete healing of the artery. Studies are now being conducted to improve their performance.

"Historically, stent manufacturers have predominantly used empirical methods to design their drug-eluting stents. Those stents which show promising results in laboratory and clinical trials are retained and those that do not are discarded," explains McGinty. "However, a natural question to ask is, what is the optimal design of a drug-eluting stent?"

The design of drug-eluting stents is severely limited by lack of understanding of the factors governing their drug release and distribution. "How much drug should be coated on the stent? What type of drug should be used?" McGinty questions. "All of these issues, of course, are inter-related. By developing models of drug release and the subsequent uptake into arterial tissue for current drug-eluting stents, and comparing the model solution with experimental results, we can begin to answer these questions."

The model proposed by the authors considers a stent coated with a thin layer of polymer containing a drug, which is embedded in the arterial wall, and a porous region of smooth muscle cells embedded in an extracellular matrix.

When the polymer region and the tissue region are considered as a coupled system, it can be shown under certain conditions that the drug release concentration satisfies a special kind of integral equation called the Volterra integral equation, which can be solved numerically. The drug concentration in the system is determined from the solution of this integral equation. This gives the mass of drug within cells, which is of primary interest to clinicians.

The simple one-dimensional model proposed in the paper provides analytical solutions to this complex problem. "While the simplified one and two-dimensional models that our group and others have recently developed have provided qualitative results and useful insights into this problem, ultimately three-dimensional models which capture the full complex geometry of the stent and the arterial wall may be required," McGinty says.

In a complex environment with pulsating blood flow, wound healing, cell proliferation and migration, and drug uptake and binding, the process of drug release from the stent may involve a multitude of factors, which could be best understood by three-dimensional models. "This is especially relevant when we want to consider the drug distribution in diseased arteries and when assessing the performance of the latest stents within complex geometries, where for instance, the diseased artery may bifurcate," says McGinty. "We are therefore currently investigating the potential benefits of moving to three-dimensional models."