2. Radiation
Despite what the movies may have told you, exposure to radiation is much more likely to result in a long, agonising death than superpowers.
The actual process that produces symptoms is the ability of ionizing radiation to rip apart atoms and molecules, making them highly unstable and reactive. This, understandably, is not very good for you.
The severity of your symptoms depends on the dose and the type of radiation. Small doses will bring about nausea, headaches, vomiting, fevers and rashes. Slightly higher doses will start to rip apart your cells, causing blood cells, white and red, to die.
This means a weakened immune system, haemophilia and anemia as your white blood cell, red blood cell and platelet counts plummet (those of you who paid attention in science class will notice that this is basically everything that makes blood, blood).
At extreme doses, the skin becomes red and blistered and begins to slough off, there is an increased risk of neurological damage, throwing tremors and seizures into the mix. The headaches and vomiting become debilitatingly intense and treatments such as blood and bone marrow transfusions will be ineffective. You will almost certainly die at these doses, and fast.
This is the case with short, intense bursts of radiation. However, long-term, low-level exposure massively increases the risk of cancers and the radiation will cause your DNA to physically mutate.
1. Scaphism
Scaphism, or “The Boats”, was an ancient method of execution designed by the Persians to causes as much suffering as possible before death.
The only descriptions of the practice that we have are from the Greeks, the mortal enemies of the Persians, so we can’t be entirely sure how common the practice actually was, or whether the Greeks used a bit of artistic license.
One thing we can be sure of, however, is that it would be a terrible way to die.
The victim would be trapped inside two boats, or hollowed out tree trunks, with just their head, hands and feet protruding. The would be force-fed milk and honey (some kind of Persian irony there) to the point at which they developed horrendous diarrhea. At this point more milk and honey would be poured all over them, particularly the eyes, mouth and genitals, in order to attract insects.
The idea was that, as the boats filled with milk, honey and faeces, biting and burrowing insects would colonise it, inflicting horrible torture on the victim. There is debate as to whether the insects would actually burrow into the skin, or simply drive the victim mad as they swarmed, but this combined with whatever injuries were inflicted (because you can be sure they were), would cause the body to become horrendously gangrenous.
The torture was dragged out for as long as possible, but death would eventually come as a result of dehydration, starvation, exhaustion and septic shock.
You don’t need to be a scientist to figure out that that’s a nasty way to go.
Source: whatculture
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