The gruesome new field of neuro-parasitology could provide insights into the neurological basis for behavior and decision-making — By Conn Hastings Imagine a parasite that makes an animal change its habits, guard the parasite’s offspring or even commit suicide.

What lurks in the Arctic’s thawing permafrost? From the air, the coast of Greenland appears vast and tranquil. Hundreds of fjords, their surfaces a mirror of blue sky and cloud bottoms, divide the territory.

From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to infection: where strigoi, revenants, zombi, and loup-garou are generally the result of targeted curses, post-Univ

The U.S. military has always been the one place in government with a plan, forever in preparation mode and ready to yank a blueprint off the shelf for almost any contingency. Need a response for a Russian nuclear missile launch? Check. Have to rescue a U.S.

Philosophy of mind and the nature of consciousness are fascinating topics, which recur both here at Scientia Salon [1] and at my former writing outlet, Rationally Speaking [2].

Zombie Booth An undead GIFbite by Emilie Gervais

Want to take part in future episodes? : Submit a GIFbite

ASAP/4: Genres of the Present Conference, Royal College of Art, ‘Abject Materialities (an Ontology of Every Thing on the Face of the Earth)’ as part of panel, ‘Figuring Genre in Contemporary Culture: How to Survive in a Post-Zombie Digital Landscape’, with Zara Dinnen, Rob Gallagher and Simon Clark, October 4th-6th 2012

The Zombie President

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven to climb to a high spot. Just before dying, the infected body—a zombie—grasps a perch as the mature fungal invader erupts from the back of the zombie’s head to rain down spores on unsuspecting victims below, starting the cycle again. This isn’t the latest gross-out moment from a George A. Romero horror film; it is part of a very real evolutionary arms race between a parasitic fungus and its victims, ants.

One zombie by itself is not necessarily very scary, but in B movies from, Night of the Living Dead to Zombieland, Hollywood’s animated corpses have a nasty habit of creating more of the walking dead. Controlled by some inexplicable force, perhaps an intensely virulent pathogen, the main preoccupation of a zombie is making other zombies.

Neuroscience has shown that all thoughts and behaviors are associated with neural activity within the brain. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the zombie brain would look and function differently than the gray matter contained in your skull. Yet, how would one know what a zombie brain looks like?

Luckily, the rich repertoire of behavioral symptoms shown in cinema gives the astute neuroscientist or neurologist clues as to the anatomical and physiological underpinnings of zombie behavior. By taking a forensic neuroscience approach, we can piece together a hypothetical picture of the zombie brain.

My new book Shock Value: How a few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror, explores how horror went mainstream by revisiting the golden age that began in 1968 with Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead and reached its zenith in the 1970s with movies like Halloween and Alien. Today the genre is bigger, more diverse, and more lucrative than it was back then, but its films rarely shock or inspire as they once did. There are many good new scary movies, but few great ones. It doesn't have to be this way. That's why every day this week I will offer a modest proposal to help build a better horror movie, starting today with this simple piece of advice: Stop trying to be so damn respectable! Hollywood occasionally produces a trashy good time such as the 3-D remakes of My Bloody Valentine and Piranha, and HBO has scored big with the guilty pleasures of True Blood. 

The First Zombie-Proof House: via: all-thats-interesting:

Somehow, ritual drunk-conversation concerning team captains for the apocalypse has become a major part of the lives of 20-somethings. Having been matured in the Grandaddy-crowned masterpiece film (put “A.M. 180” on and forget that you have a job) 28 Days Later and the best-selling Zombie Survival Guide, we’re all a little too ready to deal with the 2012 of our dreams.

Zombies are “characters” in the sense recently revived by the critic Aaron Kunin—they are a type whose existence extends beyond any one work or even medium. This is why we can speak of “the zombie” in the first place, and why the specter of the ludicrous hovers even over the realist commitment to character. In his book on laughter Henri Bergson observes, “In one sense it might be said that all character is comic, provided we mean by character the ready-made element in our personality, that mechanical element which resembles a piece of clockwork wound up once for all and capable of working automatically. It is, if you will, that which causes us to imitate ourselves.” When “clockwork” characters show up in popular genre fiction, as they so often do, critics are apt to take them as an aesthetic offense to the human. It might be more accurate to say that our aesthetic displeasure in hackneyed types records our confrontation with a truth about the human we would rather deny, but which the z

Monsters are on the rise. People can't seem to get enough of vampires lately, and zombies have a new lease on life. This year and next we have the release of the usual horror films like Saw VI and Halloween II; the campy mayhem of Zombieland; more-pensive forays like 9 (produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov), The Wolfman, and The Twilight Saga: New Moon; and, more playfully, Where the Wild Things Are (a Dave Eggers rewrite of the Maurice Sendak classic).

The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it's social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in Iraq—some think there's an uptick in such fare during wartime. Perhaps it's the economic downturn. The monster proliferation can be explained, in part, by exploring the meaning of monsters. Popular culture is re-enchanted with meaningful monsters, and even the eggheads are stroking their chins—last month saw the seventh global conference on Monsters and the Monstrous at the University of Oxf

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

The scientific paper is published in a book - Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress.

In books, films, video games and folklore, zombies are undead creatures, able to turn the living into other zombies with a bite.

But there is a serious side to the work.

In some respects, a zombie "plague" resembles a lethal, rapidly spreading infection. The researchers say the exercise could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations.