One year left.

Z-Day. 2012. The Mayan zombie super-apocalypse. Sensational journalism. Paranoid survivalists. Gun nuts. People out having fun. Boy scouts taking their preparedness to the next level. If you can be ready for this, you can be ready for anything.

2012 and the end of the world has been discussed at length here (dozens of comments pending) and elsewhere. This site naturally leans towards a zombie apocalypse on the 21st of December, 2012. We’re zombie fans, we love this stuff. Take it with a grain of salt as you will. True,  most apocalypse theories and end time projections lack scientific evidence, but we don’t really care. If we can prepare in a year for a be-all end-all apocalypse of local or global scale based on humans turning into something decidedly less human, you can count on a zombie preparedness expert to get you out of a jam, change a flat tire, whip up delicious scorpion stew, or have a solid sate of mind to hear your own fears. We’re there for you, but we won’t hesitate to end it real quick if you decide to get all bitey on us. Just don’t expect us to share our escape strategies and survival plans with anyone, even our loved ones. They will be revealed when necessary.

Doomsday 2012 will certainly be creeping into mainstream media as the year progresses. You may count on a few groups or individuals even creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Y2K, Heaven’s Gate, May21, 2011 — the dates have come and gone, and some of us remain. That may be true come a year, but it doesn’t mean our curiosity will be satisfied on the 22nd.

Research indicates it will be the “Boyle” rage virus, still alive human type of zombie. If you’re looking for evidence, all it takes is a few Google searches and Cracked’s RSS feed. Cracked has posted numerous articles about Z-day. Here’s a few relevant ones to bring you up to speed.

5 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Apocalypse Could Actually Happen

• Brain parasites (such as toxoplasma or Naegleria fowleri)
• Neurotoxins (like tetrodotoxin)
• Rage Virus (think advanced rabies)
• Neurogenesis (stem cell research causes post-mortem or post trauma brain growth)
• Nanobots

 7 Scientific Reasons a Zombie Outbreak Would Fail (Quickly)

• Natural predators (dogs, wolves)
• Heat
• Cold
• Biting as a bad poor of transmission
• Inability to heal (which assumes dead zombies)
• Natural landscape barriers
• Weapons and people

And a terse list that fulfills a lot of our carnal desires:

5 Reasons You Secretly Want a Zombie Apocalypse

• Guilt Free Violence
• Free Stuff
• Simplicity
• Acting Like a Jerk
• Being the Alpha Dog

Even if the zombie, climate, political, or economic apocalypse doesn’t happen on the 21st, zombie haters will remain vigilant, stocked, and prepared.

It’s not a paranoia, it’s not a fear, or even a desire. It’s a mindset to think “what if” and “how can I be ready”.

Time to start the countdown.

In my wanderings across the news, horror, feeds and depths of the Internets for all things zombie, there’s one thing I forgot: Tabloids. As Tommy Lee Jones said in MIB, they are the “Best investigative reporting on the planet. But go ahead, read the New York Times if you want. They get lucky sometimes.”

The Weekly World News had this gem:”BRAIN-EATING VACCINES TURN AMERICANS INTO ZOMBIES”

ALBUQUERQUE, NM – The U.S. government is using brain-eating chemicals to turn Americans into Zombies.

The mainstream media and the scientific dictatorship of the United States Federal Government is giving Americans brain-eating vaccines and putting brain-eating chemicals into the water supply. These chemicals, whether ingested by mouth or injected through the skin, virtually rewire minds into a state of subservient compliance so that their natural instinct to rebel against tyranny is neutered. They also make people want to eat more broccoli.

However, as reported a few years ago, brain eating amoeba found in lakes in the American Southwest has been known to slowly kill people with zombie like symptoms.

A similar article can be read here, with talking head video. Brain Eating Vaccine: Alex Jones on Vaccines (Image courtesy this article).

This is fantastic stuff. Whether you follow conspiracies, zombie culture, or have your escape plan ready — stay in the know. Remember, stay low, keep moving, and remember to double tap.

Here’s some science of the new decade for you: how about draining pigs of their blood, making them clinically dead, and then bringing them back to life?

Naturally, this is a military project, and those always end well. The theory goes, if you drain a pig (which has a physiology similar to humans) of blood and replace it with a cocktail of hydrogen sulfide, you will extend the “golden period” where life saving surgery and medical treatment are possible. Basically, you shut down the brain and heart, placing the patient in suspended animation, and bring them back later.

Dr Matthew Miller working on the project states: “Everybody’s talking about the military use of this, and that’s our focus now.” He continues, “but really, this could be much, much bigger than that.”

This will surely save lives on the battlefield if perfected, but at what cost? Where does mental deterioration and unstable psychosis set in? Agreed, this could be a stretch, but this reanimation research continues.

With a 15-person team working exclusively on this project, successful results are expected within 18 months. “Darpa wants this to happen yesterday, because it was needed yesterday,” Dr. Miller said. Once the team comes up with the right elixir, it’ll undergo federally mandated safety testing. After that, the vaccine will be sent to the battlefield for application to live humans.

One may call it suspended animation, life extension or a zombie vaccine, but the science and research into extended life after death continues.

Resources

Pentagon: Zombie Pigs First, Then Hibernating Soldiers (Wired)

Pentagon Plans Zombie Pig Project: Night of the Living Swine? (Gadget review)

Second Illustration: Marmoto

If you’ve survived last night, that must mean either A) you don’t live in Flint or Detroit or B) they’re just not burning buildings like they used to anymore.

Zombie Walk

Devil’s Night in Grand Rapids Michigan was a bit more placid than usual. Instead of burning churches like they ususally do, the teeming masses of socially repressed youth and ne’er do-wells rose up against the system by becoming… ZOMBIES.

A world record zombie walk was held last night, with near FOUR THOUSAND zombies shambling about the city. For more information, check out the following articles, and this film clip.

Zombie Walk brings out the dead in downtown Grand Rapids

World Record Zombie Walk, Grand Rapids, MI 

Toxic Blood

Riverside California, 1994: A sick woman is admitted to the ER, with a highly elevated heart rate, rapidly decreasing blood pressure and incoherent speech. Nurses drawing blood notice manila colored particles in her blood. Then they notice the deathly, checmical and ammonia smell coming from it. Then their faces feel burning, they pass out and wake up in uncontrollable convulsions. The hospital is evacuated, and a fully-suited  hazmat team is brought in to manage the strange occurances.

Her blood ends up putting five people in the hospital, some in intensive care, and others suffering from avascular necrosis, a condition in which bone tissue is starved of blood and begins to die. Read that again: the chemicals swirling around in this womans blood, when exposed to air, caused people to pass out, become overwhelmingly sick, and kill their bones. Forensic scientists and several goverment agencies never reached a conclusion (or suppressed their findings) as to what happened to her blood and body.

Analysis of a Toxic Death at Discover Magazine

Halloween Podcast

In case you missed it on the 29th, Red Bar Radio in Chicago interviewed me on their Halloween show. Think shock jocks and real raunchy radio, but they were certainly interested in what I had to say. Either that, or they were a bit disturbed about my waving a knife around and showing up in military gear.

Red Bar Radio podcast – Warning: raunchy, sick humor.

So the soviet reanimated animal research continues.

What do you get with one part cellular cleaning agent, one dead heart, and a couple of mad scientists? That’s right: reanimated hearts.

Perhaps the efforts of earlier commie scientists are still being perfected. Scientists in Minnesota have been injecting dead rat hearts with a cleaning solution, then using a pacemaker and pump to get the things working. After eight days they began to pump on their own. Creepily slow beating.

The researchers say they were curious to see what would happen in the laboratory if nature was given the appropriate tools. The team already knew that decellularization had been used in making tissue heart valves and blood vessels and decided to try the process out on whole organs such.

Of course, this begs the question: how long is too long for death? Zombie rats? Are human hearts next? While I admit this is wild speculation, it’s interesting nonetheless. This cutting edge science illustrates it is possible to reanimate dead tissue.

How to mend a broken heart – News-Medical.net

I touched a nerve with my earlier post about reanimated dogs heads. This is a followup to that post, as well as an addendum to my article about types of zombies. This would fall under the scientifically reanimated corpse.

In the 40′s, the Soviets were working on experiments involving reanimating mammals, specifically canines. In this film, witness the shock and horror as organs are reanimated though electricty and with mechanical hearts and lungs! Now, it’s noted that this is no outstanding feat, a human heart can operate with nutrient rich blood and plasma alone. What’s fascinating in this film, is the apparently conscious and reactive head of a dog. Is it merely muscle synapses and reflexes? Perhaps, but the dog shows a keen awareness to its surroundings, suggesting activated sight, sound and other senses.

Canines? Yes. Humans? Perhaps. How long can we wait? Hours or days? It stands that a reanimated human head would be responsive to its surroundings, and most likely not feral and try to eat you. This of course, begs the question of human souls and the like, where this news report will not go.

One thing remains certain. DESTROY THE BRAIN. You won’t see that dog head barking and licking its chops if it has no brain.

Pittsburgh. Reanimated Corpses. The Zombie Holocaust.

Except this time, its not a movie.

Naturally, there are great medical benefits of prolonging death. It grants doctors more time to operate and save patients, but there remains a great unpredictable factor of bodily decay and brain rot associated with reanimating patients, even in a closely controlled setting. Even some of the dogs have suffered permanent damage.

I’m sorry, this center for reanimation is in fucking Pittsburgh. PITTSBURGH. Consistently the site of Hollywood zombie outbreaks, attacks, apocalypses, sightings, feasts and record-setting zombie mall walks. Those poor inhabitants of Monroeville, PA can ususally be found stumbling about in various states of decay and death, either at the mall, in the parking lot, or shambling the eight miles from the Safar Center for Zombie Creation.

The experiment bears a frightening similarity to that of Communist Russian scientists in the 1930’s that experimented with reanimating and sustaining life in severed dogs heads, as well as attaching multiple heads to single bodies. Surely this kind of practice cannot publicly be performed today, yet dogs remain an abundant and useful test subject for reanimation and resuscitation practices. A controversial communist Russia film was released in 1943 to American scientists. The video shows Reds working on a reanimated severed dogs head hooked up to an Autojektor, one of the first artificial hearts used to maintain life.

From Time Magazine, Monday, Nov. 22, 1943:

The autojector, a relatively simple machine, has a vessel (the “lung”) in which blood is supplied with oxygen, a pump that circulates the oxygenated blood through the arteries, another pump that takes blood from the veins back to the “lung” for more oxygen. Two other dogs on whom the experiment was performed in 1939 (were still alive four years later). The autojector can also keep a dog’s heart beating outside its body, has kept a decapitated dog’s head alive for hours—the head cocked its ears at a noise and licked its chops when citric acid was smeared on them. But the machine is incapable of reviving a whole dog more than about 15 minutes after its blood is drained—body cells then begin to disintegrate.

I’ll post the entire film with review and notes later. Here’s a short, distrubing excerpt.

Safar Center scientists, it would seem, are filling in the gaps left in these grizzly experiments performed over 60 years ago. It’s the same thing — killing and reviving dogs in the name of science — but the end results can have strange, perhaps undead outcomes. How long can a dog remain dead? Can half a dog be reanimated? How long before the brain is damaged to a feral, bad-dog state?

Zombie dogs are really freaking hard to kill as evidenced in say, Wolfenstein, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or any other video game for that matter. Heck, even mean, fully live dogs are hard to deal with — deranged reanimated hounds from the depths of science hell are something that should never be fooled with.

• Weekend of the living dead: Zombies return to the Monroeville Mall
• Boffins create zombie dogs
• NY Times: Zombie Dogs
• Safar Center for Resuscitation Research
• Film – Russian Scientists Reanimate Dead Dogs – and severed heads
• Experiments in the Revival of Organisms – Creepy 1939 Russian real Undead Film
• Red Research into reanimating severed dogs heads – Time responds to the Red Zombie film

Stem cell research is a double edged sword. On one hand, the potential benefits to science, humanity and health are immense, and on the other hand it can be plagued with ethical and moral dilemmas involving life, cells, tissue and some may say – playing God.

Scientists in Britain are developing a technique to cultivate live tissue from the stem cells in dead embryos. This tends to escape any moral dilemma as the cells are no longer dividing and are considered dead. Dead tissue, brought to life. Nothing wrong there! I don’t have to explain much to illustrate where this is going.

Tissue Regeneration.

Setting aside all ethical and moral dilemmas about cultivating and developing stem cells and where they are harvested, stem cell research will progress and it will yield strange new results to us. There are certain things that should be brought up when considering a futurist look at stem cells. Specifically, tissue regeneration and reanimation. It is not so far fetched to consider – stem cells bear the unique property of being able to form into any cell the body needs, liver, heart, arm, brain. Perhaps in twenty to fifty years, we will have reached the point where stem cell therapy will allow quadriplegics to walk and the dismembered to grow new limbs. This is fantastic. And terrifying.

From the Max Planck Institutes:
“the possibility of regenerating the complex structures of entire organs, such as the kidneys for example, is already conceivable, although a comprehensive understanding of the organogenesis is necessary”.

Activating stem cells to produce or grow new tissue, organs and limbs is a scary and unknown frontier for biotechnology, especially since technicians are reanimating them to begin with. Certain questions are brought to mind:

• How will developing tissues be controlled?
• Is there a limit on what will be grown or developed?
• How large a tissue sample can be reanimated?
• Will reanimated tissue samples take on the characteristics of HeLa cells?
• Can stem cells grow in a dormant host?
• Will stem cells be beneficial in reanimating dead brains?

Even our scientists and government are in on the action. DARPA has a $7.6 million grant to focus on tissue and limb regeneration. Hydra Biosciences is working on a drug to target regeneration of the heart – without using stem cells.

Tissue Reanimation.

Naturally, this is all speculation from a futurist, but things that must be considered. Reanimation research is shaky ground, though progress is being made. While British scientist sort out the problematic origins of stem cell cloning, scientists in Germany are truthfully working on reanimation research – and are having success restoring dead brain functions.

Reanimation research at the Max Planck Institutes focuses on restoring functionality to a dying brain after cardiac arrest and reanimating the neural processes. The brain poses a certain problem in reanimating an entire organism, as all other organs and life are tied to the functioning of the brain. Nerve clusters and neurological activities have been restored after an hour of death, but complete reanimation fails as the brain is overwhelmingly affected by cardiac arrest.

Reanimating the 1918 flu pandemic virus seems rather precarious – especially since no one has an immunity anymore. The virus could mutate, react violently with current medicines and turn into a resistant super strain, or perhaps just be itself and kill us all like it used to.

Not to sound like the bearer of bad news, but left unchecked, research into reanimating tissue, organisms and organs could have disastrous consequences. When radiation was first discovered, it killed its finders.

Resources:

• Scientists turn dead cells into live tissue
• Reanimation research
• Regenerative medicine and stem cell research
• The Scariest Ideas in Science
• Regeneration Sans Stem Cells

When a person dies, their cells begin to deteriorate and die as well, leading to what we know as “death”. Prolonging this decay and starving cells and bacteria of oxygen can lead to prolonging one’s death. Children found at the bottom of pools have been successfully revived because their bodies were kept cold and limited of oxygen. During cardiac arrest, the heart stops beating – it’s usually fatal and people are often declared dead within minutes. Doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital are bringing people “back from the dead”.

Such is the case of one Bill Bondar, 61. Bill has no recollection of dying or even being brought back. This has perhaps as many philosophical revelations as it does physical. What is the time limit on such a procedure? Minutes, hours or years? If there is a soul, at what point does it depart from this corporeal entity?

“I didn’t know I died, I didn’t feel anything, I still don’t believe it,” Bill said.

“I looked at his face, and I was looking at a dead man,” Bill’s wife Monica said.

Cold saline is injected into a patient, and they are wrapped in cryopads to supercool the body and deprive cells of oxygen. This new technology is still in its infancy and can only be used on certain patients. It tests the limits of science, the body and philosophy. Imagine a bizarre scene out of “Flatliners” where one trys longer and longer stints of death. In fifty years if this technology is perfected, a body could theoretically live forever if its death met certain conditions.

Let’s hope the reanimated mind is in the same operational, alive condition it was frozen in.