Zombies

Only in science fiction are people's minds possessed by alien beings. For grasshoppers, zombification is an everyday hazard, and it obliges them to end their lives in a bizarre manner. Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects it.The interaction occurs as the worm induces the grasshopper to seek out a large body of water and then leap into it.The parasite, known as a hairworm, lives and breeds in fresh water. But it spends the early part of its life cycle eating away the innards of the grasshoppers and crickets it infects.When it is fully grown, it faces a difficult problem, thatof returning to water. So it has evolved a clever way of influencing its host to deliver just one more service - the stricken grasshopper looks for water and dives in. The suicidal behavior of the infected grasshoppers has been studied by a team of biologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, France, led by Frederic Thomas and David Biron.

They did their fieldwork around a swimming pool on the border of a forest near Avene les Bains in southern France. Hordes of infected grasshoppers - more than 100 a night - arrive at the pool during summer nights.The biologists captured grasshoppers before their suicidal plunge and removed the worms. The worms grow to several times the length of the grasshopper's body before they emerge. Because of their unusual size, it is easy to extract andanalyze the different sets of proteins that they produce before, during and after they compel their hosts to drown themselves. "We found the parasite produces and injects proteins into the brain of its host," Thomas said.Parasites have long been known to influence their hosts' behavior in ways beneficial to the parasite. The rabies virus, for instance, makes animals rabid so that they bite others and transmit the virus.An unusually specific instance of behavioral manipulation was discovered recently in a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.The hairworm seems to have perfected......

Zombies appear regularly on our TV screens, as more Tales of the Undead are unleashed upon us, and some old ones exhumed. But here's a surprise - zombies can be real. In real life, the zombies come from the Caribbean island of Haiti. They are a person who has been almost-killed, and then later raised from the almost-dead by a voodoo priest, to be used as slave labour for the rest of their miserable life. Zombies can move, eat, hear and speak, but they have no memory and no insight into their condition. There have been legends about zombies for centuries, but it was only in 1980 that a real-life case was documented.

The story begins in 1962, in Haiti. A man called Clairvius Narcisse was sold to a zombie master by his brothers, because Clairvius refused to sell his share of the family land. Soon after Clairvius "officially" died, and was buried. However, he had been later secretly unburied, and was actually working as a zombie slave on a sugar plantation with many other zombies. In 1964, his zombie master died, and he wandered across the island in a psychotic daze for the next 16 years. The drugs that made him psychotic were gradually wearing off. In 1980, he accidentally stumbled across his long-lost sister in a market place, and recognized her. She didn't recognise him, but he identified himself to her by telling her early childhood experiences that only he could possibly know.

Dr. Wade Davis, an ethnobiologist from Harvard, went to Haiti to research this story. He discovered how to make a zombie. First, make them "dead", then make them "mad" so that their minds are malleable. Often, a local "witch doctor" secretly gives them the drugs. He made the victim "dead" with a mixture of toad skin and puffer fish. You can put it in their food, or rub it on their skin, especially the soft, undamaged skin on the inside of the arm near the elbow. The victims soon appear dead, with an incredibly slow breath, and an incredibly slow and faint heartbeat. In Haiti, people are buried very soon after death, because the heat and the lack of refrigeration makes the bodies decay very rapidly. This suits the zombie-making process. You have to dig them up within eight hours of the burial, or else they'll die of asphyxiation...

Scientists have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans. US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years. Pittsburgh's Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject'sveins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

The animals are considered scientifically dead, as they stop breathing and have no heartbeat or brain activity. But three hours later, their blood is replaced and the zombie dogs are brought back to life with an electric shock. Plans to test the technique on humans should be realised within a year, according to the Safar Centre. However rather than sending people to sleep for years, then bringing them back to life to benefit from medicaladvances, the boffins would be happy to keep people in this state for just a few hours, But even this should be enough to save lives such as battlefield casualties and victims of stabbings or gunshot wounds, who have suffered huge blood loss.

View: Full Article | Source: news.com.au

Humans believe in the possibility to bring the dead back from their graves, although the eerie perspective evokes nothing but fearAccording to classic science, it is absolutely impossible for a dead person to return to the world of the living. It is generally believed that a human being will not be able to resurrect if he or she remains in the state of clinical death for morethan three or five minutes, or dies from severe physical injuries.

The destruction or decomposition of the human body ceases all vital processes, which distinguish the living matter from what is usually referred to as remnants. The latter, scientists say, cannot move, see, hear, produce any sounds or perform any other functions of a living body.However, there can be several exceptions from this rule. There were incidents registered in medical practice, when beheaded bodies of executedpeople would raise to their feet and even make a few steps. One of such incidents occurred in the beginning of the 15th century in Germany, during a public execution of a sea pirate, known as Steterbreker.

View: Full Article | Source: Pravda.ru