The social hierarchy of a wasp is pretty rigid. But what if a snide little parasite made you a deal. You could live the life of a queen, no foraging for anyone but yourself, living off the fat of the land. All you have to do is become subservient to a macabre march of death that enslaves your brethren and propagates the evil parasite.

For many paper wasps through Europe, the answer is “yes, please!”

The parasite X. vesparum infects the wasp which withdraw from their previous social pattern and instinctively fly away to a meeting point with other parasites. It’s there the parasites mate, with the male hosts disposing of their wasp coats, leaving them to die. But the females remain inside the wasps, turning them into zombie queens which find food for themselves and fatten up while infecting other nests and plants with the parasite larva.

“After that, they start wandering among the colonies,” spreading their deadly larval load, said Manfredini. “They don’t lay eggs. They don’t build colonies. They’re completely anarchic.”

Get your zombie queen paper wasp costume ready for Halloween!

[Wired]

Is this a picture of a zombie? Notice the open casket on the bottom right.

Physical deformity? Extremely well-made student horror film? Has hell indeed become too full forcing the dead to walk the Earth?

Justin Robert Young recounts his harrowing ordeal in the Forest with a Million Eyes. Brian, Andrew and Justin then step into the treacherous mental playground of a loyal listener and reveal their most deep-seated primal motivations when they are faced with surviving in a post-Zombie Apocalypse. One of them will become a ravenous fiend roving the ruins of civilization in search of fresh brains. Another will unleash his inner amoral self and cackle in delight as the world burns and search out female survivors to indulge his earthly desires. The final member of the trio will rise above tragedy and seek out vengeance for the horrific fate the befell is family and adopt a heroic new identity, and another, and another.

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Just because cats are trying to take control of our brains doesn’t mean they need them. In this eerie footage we see a cat achieve 3 different gait patterns with NO BRAIN AT ALL! Scientists turned off the cats brain to study how much of an animal’s movement is controlled by thought and how much is simply a mechanical mechanism.

As if we needed another reason to fear cats…

Many suspect that cats are “up to something.” Turns out that something is serving as a transportation system for parasites that make humans do foolishly dangerous things.

Toxioplasma gondi is a parasite that generally moves through a cat’s digestive system that is passed on to mice through the cat’s feces. Once infected, the parasite burrows into the internal organs of the mouse causing cysts and eventually making the mouse abandon it’s natural instincts and do everything it can to get the cat to kill it. Once eaten, the parasite passes again through the cat and finds a new host.

Unfortunately, Toxioplasma gondi can also infect other mammals, such as humans. That’s right. These parasites are taking over our brains, driving us to dangerous behavior, and causing mental illness! And all because we keep them in our homes and clean up their waste.

In some populations over 60% of the population is infected. Pregnant women and people with immune diseases can have serious side effects to the parasite, but the rest of us only have to worry about randomly trying to kill ourselves.

Explains base jumping.

[The Economist]

Everything dies. Somethings just die, only to be reborn as a deadly threat to those still living.

Everyone say hello to the Zombiesat, a term used by engineers to describe satellites which have lost communication with the ground are now just stumbling around as a shell of their former selves, posing a collision threat to other functional orbiters. So what are we to do with such a menace? Separate the head and destroy the brain?

Nope, turns out you just have to blow them higher into orbit so they either crash into each or slowly descend back into orbit and eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

Or… you could sign on to this awesome plan

Some more exotic measures involving tethers and other props have been proposed, Johnson said, but aren’t yet feasible.

For getting rid of very small pieces of space junk, there are two favorite ideas, he said. One involves shooting lasers at the objects to push them into lower-altitude orbits so they fall back down to Earth more quickly.

“That has technical, economic, as well as policy issues,” Johnson said.

Policy issues include a possible violation on the Total Badass Restriction Act of 1986.

[Space]

From the always reliable Pravda we get strange accounts of “black archeologists” (tomb raiders) who encountered some strange phenomena digging up World War II era graves

In 1997, a group of six people headed to Luban in the Leningradsky region, where the ruins of Makaryevsky monastery destroyed during the war rest amidst the swamps. Nearing the ruins, the group noticed bonfire flames. They were shocked to find out that the bonfire was hanging right in the air. As soon as they approached the ruins, the bonfire disappeared.

This would seem like a warning to any rational person…

“We excavated the bodies of six Russian and 11 German soldiers, four of which were Wehrmacht soldiers in a swamp trench shelter. We cut the logs and discovered decomposed German boots with bones sticking out. Then we began a more careful excavation, and found pelvic bones, a spine, and ribs. Little by little we dug out remnants of four people. It was getting dark. We left the skeletons at the trench and camped out on a meadow about 200 yards away.

This lead to more strange occurrences including hearing German music and laughter and finding fresh tank treads in the morning.

We have no idea what they were thinking. Digging up Nazi graves only equals one thing: Zombie Nazis. That’s a proven fact.

link: Tomb Raiders Digging WWII Graves Witness Inexplicable Phenomena – Pravda.Ru

Someday, all the deceased extras that played ooky revenants in “Night of the Living Dead” will ungrave for real and you’ll be subjected to blog post after blog post comparing pictures of the actors’ actual shambling undead remains to screenshots of them in zombie make-up. Until then, here’s something to fill the space. (Your hellish zombie apocalypse will be Weird Things’ tacky media renaissance.)

Be Your Own Pet – “Zombie Graveyard Party!”

Known for referencing elementary school apocrypha like Creepy Crawlers and Super Soakers, defunct indie punk outfit Be Your Own Pet could always be counted on for catchy, energetic pop songs that successfully walked the line between twee irony and hyperactive sass. This song from 2008’s “Get Awkward” bemoans the lameness of love while endorsing two kid-tested, Fulci-approved alternatives – brain eating and graveyard partying.

Harry Belafonte – “Zombie Jamboree (Back to Back)”

Written by the otherwise-unknown Conrad Eugene Mauge Jr., this modern calypso standard is the rum-drenched, Caribbean foil to “Zombie Graveyard Party!”’s undead suburban kegger. This version is notable for being the only recording of the song approved by the AMA for testing cadaver booty response.

Jonathan Coulton – “Re: Your Brains”

With songs featured everywhere from Popular Science to John Hodgman audiobooks, Coulton is an unstoppable force of sheer melodic nerdiness. Presented as a memo and steeped in the buzz word-laden idiom of corporate bureaucracy, his tribute to the undead equates a mindless legion of walking corpses to impotent capitalist drones and their empty, abbreviated business vernacular. But, like, in a funny way.

Sufjan Stevens – “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!”

The music on Stevens’ undeniably wonderful, but relentlessly hyped, album “Illinois” ranges from cartoonish to macabre. This spookier, word-count-devastating track is less concerned with actual zombies than with the stumbling, ghoulish remains of a once-vital American landscape and its assimilation into modern homogeneity. It’s also still fairly concerned with actual zombies.

Fela Kuti & Africa ‘70 – “Zombie”

Political activist and pioneer of the afrobeat movement, Fela Kuti often used the latter descriptor to fill the responsibilities of the former. His two-song album “Zombie” employed the image of easily manipulated voodoo zombies to deliver a scathing, uncompromisingly funky critique of the Nigerian army. Interestingly, the album’s unofficial sequel, “Mothman,” offered a rump-jiggling screed against voodoo.

Golems, zombies and familiars – three cultures worth of mystical servants rendered, willingly or by force, from the wilds of nature and the bare, lumbering essence of humanity. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday – His Master’s Voice. Look back at Monday’s post about Golems.

Today: Zombies

Prior to George Romero’s 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” zombies weren’t the brain-craving herders that modern corpse reanimation flicks portray. The rudiments of Romero’s bitey stumblers have always been there – walking corpse, glazed expression, inchoate moans and indifferent shamble – but traditional zombies are far less assertive. The classic Haitian zombie (or “zombi”) is supposedly the reanimated corpse of a recently deceased person who has been bodily resurrected to serve the will of a bokor – a powerful voodoo sorcerer. Unlike rabbis, who are thought to attain golem-creating abilities only after years of prayer, atonement and meditation, bokors are believed to innately possess powerful mystic abilities, including the capacity to trap specific aspects of departed human souls, which can then be bottled and sold as “zombie astrals” (e.g., an aspiring artist could buy the bottled artistic aspect of a famous artist’s soul).

To those waiting for the part where the zombies turn on their bokors and go all eat crazy – it doesn’t happen. The controversy surrounding zombies isn’t based around some legendary undead rampage that got everyone feeling iffy and nervous about necromancy; the controversy surrounding zombies is the probability that the so-called “walking dead” servants are actually living people who have been pharmacologically enslaved by covertly administered neurotoxins. According to ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who wrote two pioneering and heavily disputed books on the topic, zombies are created using a combination of two powerful neural agents (one of which, tetrodotoxin, is most famously found in blowfish) to dull a subject’s consciousness and autonomic function, creating both the illusion of death and a totally spaced-out, barely sentient obedience (Note that the power and longevity that Davis ascribed to these chemicals is scientifically dubious).

In truth, zombies probably result as much from mind-altering powders as from Haitian voodoo culture, in which they have always played a significant role. It wouldn’t be unfair to suggest that zombification is far more voluntary than it appears, with the toxins used to induce a prolonged stupor during which the participant, consciously or sub-consciously, fills the socio-cultural role of the zombie, thereby, legitimizing the bokor’s power and reinforcing sorcery’s role, even in a depressingly magic-less modern world.

Friday: Familiars