Cover up Zombie threat

[Ron Caliburn]

Zombie trend driven by societal unhappiness, professor says
Zombie walks documented in 20 countries as of 2012
The Associated Press Posted: Mar 11, 2013 10:23 AM ET Last Updated: Mar 11, 2013 10:20 AM ET

Zombies seem to be everywhere these days.

In the popular TV series The Walking Dead, humans struggle to escape from a pack of zombies hungry for flesh. Prank alerts have warned of a zombie apocalypse on radio stations in a handful of states. And across the country, zombie wannabes in tattered clothes occasionally fill local parks, gurgling moans of the undead.

Are these just unhealthy obsessions with death and decay? To Clemson University professor Sarah Lauro, the phenomenon isn't harmful or a random fad, but part of a historical trend that mirrors a level of cultural dissatisfaction and economic upheaval.

Lauro, who teaches English at Clemson, studied zombies while working on her doctoral degree at the University of California at Davis. Lauro said she keeps track of zombie movies, TV shows and video games, but her research focuses primarily on the concept of the "zombie walk," a mass gathering of people who, dressed in the clothes and makeup of the undead, stagger about and dance.

It's a fascination that, for Lauro, a self-described "chicken," seems unnatural. Disinterested in violent movies or games, Lauro said she finds herself now taking part in both in an attempt to further understand what makes zombie-lovers tick.

"I hate violence," she said. "I can't stand gore. So it's a labour, but I do it."

Origins in Toronto

The zombie mob originated in 2003 in Toronto, Lauro said, and popularity escalated dramatically in the United States in 2005, alongside a rise in dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq.

"It was a way that the population was getting to exercise the fact that they felt like they hadn't been listened to by the Bush administration," Lauro said. "Nobody really wanted that war, and yet we were going to war anyway."

The mid- to late 2000s also saw an uptick in overall zombie popularity, perhaps prompted in part by the release of post-apocalyptic movies including Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later.

As of last year, Lauro said, zombie walks had been documented in 20 countries. The largest gathering drew more than 4,000 participants at the New Jersey Zombie Walk in Asbury Park, N.J., in October 2010, according to Guinness World Records.

"We are more interested in the zombie at times when as a culture we feel disempowered," Lauro said. "And the facts are there that, when we are experiencing economic crises, the vast population is feeling disempowered. ... Either playing dead themselves ... or watching a show like Walking Dead provides a great variety of outlets for people."

But, Lauro pointed out, the display of dissatisfaction isn't always a conscious expression of that feeling of frustration.

"If you were to ask the participants, I don't think that all of them are very cognizant of what they're saying when they put on the zombie makeup and participate," she said. "To me, it's such an obvious allegory. We feel like, in one way, we're dead."

They are describing incidents of Zombie attacks as hoaxes or the work of this social protest movement of 'Zombie Walkers'. Those weren't just 'Zombie Walks' in 20 countries, I assure you.

The Zombies are real, and if we keep letting them convince us they aren't out there and they aren't attacking us, we'll leave ourselves defenseless in the case of an outbreak.

[Hannah]

Dad,

They aren't all Zombie attacks. There was a Zombie Walk on campus. Everyone involved had fun.

Hannah

[Ron Caliburn]

Are you so sure?

There are zombies among us
Forget free will – many of us could be taking orders from the parasites inside our brains, reports Jerome Burne

Imagine a parasite that lodges in the brain and starts to exert a sinister influence over your behaviour. It affects how sexy you feel, or how angry or frightened, even how you dress. Not only does such a creature exist – but it may have infected up to 40 per cent of the population.

Perhaps the most famous example of such “zombie reprogramming” (or neuroparasitology, to give it its proper name) comes from a parasitic wasp that attaches its eggs to the belly of an orb spider. Larvae emerge and release chemicals that zombify the spider, which stops spinning its normal spiral web and instead starts producing a cocoon to hold the baby wasps when they emerge.

Then there is a parasitic fungus called Ophiocordyceps. After being infected with its spores, the Camponotus ant, found in the Brazilian rainforest, develops an unsteady gait, wandering off its normal paths. The creature has become compelled to find a remarkably precise location: a tree about 25cm above the usual ant trails, facing northwest. At noon, it will clamp its jaws on to a leaf in a death grip. Within six hours, it will be dead. A few days later, a tube will sprout from the ant’s head. This is the fruiting body of the fungus that emits the spores, which will infect a new generation of ants.

Worms can do it, too. One species needs to get inside a sheep to reproduce – so it hijacks the brain of another type of ant, which it programmes to climb to the top of a blade of grass every evening and hold on tight. It remains there through the night, waiting for a grazing sheep to eat it. If it’s still there in the morning, it climbs down to avoid being burnt by the sun. But in the evening, the alien instructions take over and it climbs up again.

Scientists are only beginning to understand how such parasites’ controlling abilities evolved – but what is clearer is how they pull off some of the stages. Prof David Hughes, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, discovered that one of the chemicals produced by Ophiocordyceps had the power to destroy mitochondria, living creatures’ cellular “power stations”. Once the ants’ jaws lock on to the leaf, they don’t have the energy to unlock them.



Joanne Webster, professor of parasite epidemiology at Imperial College London, explains that many parasites favour the brain, “because it shelters them from the full fury of the immune system”. But, she says, “it also gives them direct access to the machinery to alter the host’s behaviour”.

And those hosts include humans – raising all sorts of tricky questions about whether we are in control of our actions. For example, there is a single-celled parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is found in domestic cats, and is estimated to infect 350,000 people a year in Britain. Its effect on humans became the obsession of Jaroslav Flegr, professor of evolutionary biology at Charles University in Prague, who linked it with disturbed behaviours such as reckless driving and a greater risk of suicide.

Unlike the zombified ants and spiders, humans aren’t the intended target of “Toxo”. It can only reproduce in the intestines of cats (new spores are expelled in their faeces). So the parasite’s brain-manipulating powers are focused on getting back inside a cat – and making its host behave in ways that boosts its chances of being eaten.

Rats infected with Toxo, as scientists at Imperial College discovered, actually like the smell of cat urine, instead of being terrified by it. And studies at Stanford University in California have revealed the neural changes that lay behind this transformation. Toxo – which comes in the form of tiny single-celled cysts – was clustered in two areas of the brain: those controlling fear and pleasure. Pathways that normally responded to the smell of cat urine with alarm had been damped down, while the pleasure hormone dopamine, normally released in response to female rodent urine, was now triggered by the whiff of cat. Most recently, researchers have shown that Toxo’s DNA includes two genes that boost dopamine production.

Human brains have plenty of similarities with those of rats and mice, suggesting that the greater number of car crashes among those with Toxo infection could be due to it damping fear responses. But while female rats show that they find infected males much sexier, the clear effect on humans is to reinforce certain sexual stereotypes. Infected men become introverted, suspicious and more likely to wear rumpled old clothes, but infected woman are just the opposite: in one study, they were usually well dressed when they arrived at the lab for interviews, and also more trusting and sociable.

Do any other microbes provoke similar changes? The leading candidate so far is one of the most common in the world – influenza. Researchers at Binghamton University in New York State, using the ’flu vaccine as a proxy for infection, recorded the behaviour of 36 academic staff two days before, and two days after, getting a jab.

The result was astonishing. Before the vaccination, according to the journal Annals of Epidemiology, they interacted with an average of 54 people a day; afterwards it shot up to 101. Yet the amount of time they actually spent with each person plummeted – from 33 to 2.5 minutes. “Subjects who normally had very limited or simple social lives,” said one researcher, “were suddenly deciding they needed to go out to bars or parties” – the perfect places for a virus to find new hosts.

This may sound terrifying, or at the least unnerving, but there is much that researchers hope to learn from such infections: for example, understanding the way they rewire emotional circuits could provide valuable insights when developing psychiatric drugs. Even zombies, it seems, may have their uses.

[Nemesis]

Properly enchanted, zombies can make reliable minions.

[Ron Caliburn]

It's obvious you've finished with your homework Cynthia. Speaking of minions, I could use your assistance in the forge.