Tag Archives: ash
TEASER CLIPS Walking Dead': Preview the ‘Resurrection’ That Awaits the Survivors at the Prison (Exclusive Video)
The Ricktatorship has its work cut out come season three of AMC’s The Walking Dead.
Following the eventful second-season finale that saw Hershel’s farm go up in flames and Rick and company hit the road in search of a new home, the not-so-merry band of survivors will have to prepare for a massive battle if they plan to set up shop at the prison.
STORY: ‘The Walking Dead’ Season 3 Trailer, Premiere Date and More
Hershel (Scott Wilson), now out of the relative safety of the farm, is in for quite a rude awakening, noting that “Christ promised a resurrection in mind … I just thought he had something different in mind.”
Showrunner Glen Mazzara recently told THR that this season, everyone — including Hershel and his daughter Beth — will feel a need to be a “valuable part of the team” and contribute. “If I don’t get this done, if I don’t kill that walker, that walker may kill someone else,” he said. “So everybody bonds together for the good of the group. They all have each other’s backs.”
STORY: ‘The Walking Dead’ Cast, EPs Spill on Season 3, Shocking 100th Issue
“The pace seems very different this year and I think it’s just a lot more suspenseful, it’s lot more intense than it was last year,” he added.
Check out the clip below, exclusive to The Hollywood Reporter, to see what awaits Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Hershel and the group at the prison.
10 SECOND TEASER CLIPS
When season 1 of The Walking Dead came to a close, fans were left unsure of where the series was headed. After heavily deviating from the comic book’s canon, the producers of the show made it very apparent they were on their own track.
With season 3, however, fans know the show is working towards some really exciting territory, and are about to experience storylines that more closely mirror Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel. Characters like Michonne and the Governor – fan favorites we’d been hoping would get thrown in the mix – are now being brought to life, and figuring heavily into this forthcoming season.
To help get fans prepared for the show’s return this October, a new TV spot has been released. While it’s extremely light on…well, anything, it does tease a suspenseful season 3 for Rick Grimes. In it, Rick appears to be scoping out an enclosed space, perhaps in an abandoned house, and what he finds cannot possibly be good:
We know that after establishing his role as leader of the group (Ricktatorship?) in the season 2 finale, Grimes and his band of survivors will be making their way to the prison – a key location in the comics – but how they will get there is unclear. And then, once they discover the seemingly abandoned prison, it’s going to be interesting to see what the group discovers inside its walls.
Obviously, as has been shown in a few set photos from The Walking Dead season 3, there will be zombies, but how some of the series’ new characters will come into play – including those that were created specifically for the show – hasn’t been detailed. It’s already been teased that a major character will not survive season 3, but as we learned last season, there’s never just one death.
Along with the introduction of Michonne and the Governor, season 3 will also reintroduce audiences to the character of Merle Dixon, whom last we saw in some pretty dire straits. Towards the tail end of season 2, some hints were delivered that suggested Merle was alive; since then, the casting of Michael Rooker and a new magazine cover confirm it.
There are plenty of surprises in store for viewers of The Walking Dead season 3; however, this time there also are a few expected places the series appears to be headed towards. Those looking to know more can anticipate additional details, and more TV spots, as we near the season’s premiere.
The Walking Dead begins season 3 on October 14th at 9pm on AMC.
IF YOU THOUGHT ZOMBIES WHERE TOUGH – Try Surviving Yellowstone’s super volcano
For preppers, it’s the ultimate end game: surviving the eruption of Yellowstone’s super 
volcano.
While some folk worry about an asteroid strike bringing about the end of the world as we know it, as scientists say it did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, North America is actually sitting on its own extinction-level event waiting to happen.
“Everything would be wiped out; it would take years for the climate to recover and decades for the rivers to clear up because everything would be choked with volcanic ash for a wide area around the eruption site,” said Kelly Russell, professor of volcanology at the University of British Columbia. “The southern latitudes of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba would all see ash cover, how thick it would be depends on the winds and the amount of magma.”
Russell stresses that such super eruptions are extremely rare — the last one happened before human civilization — but that they can and do happen, and Yellowstone, in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, is an active field that has seen three massive eruptions.
He compares Yellowstone to Mount St. Helens in Washington state in 1980.
“It produced one cubic kilometre of magma, and we saw ash fall from it in southern B.C., a small amount, but it was there, and when we look at the very largest eruptions that have taken place at Yellowstone, they can spew out a thousand cubic kilometres, so that’s a thousand times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption that’s in everybody’s minds.”
Russell points out that two feet of ash from the Crater Lake eruption in Oregon 7,700 years ago can be found in Oliver, B.C., and in the banks of the Bow River in Calgary. He says if Yellowstone cuts loose, the southern Canadian prairies could get covered in many feet of ash, and the American states closest to Yellowstone would be smothered with an even thicker layer of the sterile rock powder, killing off livestock and leaving them unable to grow food.
“The ash is terrible, take a window and grind it into a coarse flour, then breath that in, it does terrible things to the human body. It would be important to have masks and filters, if you were trying to survive it,” Russell said. “The United States would stop being a food-exporting nation and starting being a food-importing nation.”
Yellowstone’s volcano doesn’t have the classic menacing cone shape, so many people don’t know that a magma chamber bigger than New York City lies beneath the steaming surface.
640,000 years ago, animals similar to elephants, rhinoceroses and zebras roamed the plains of the United States when Yellowstone blew — and it took out the animals and every other living thing that couldn’t fly away from the blast.
Scientists estimate Yellowstone’s volcano explodes every 600,000 to 700,000, and some say the time could be coming for another eruption. If it blows, the chances of survival sound bleak, but that’s not stopping some survivalists from preparing.
“Some people who visit there say there are more hot springs popping up there, and there is more of a sulphur smell that’s stronger than ever. You take from it what you want and I just pay attention to it a little more than the average person, just in case,” said Jason Charles, a firefighter in New York City. “I don’t want it to be a curve ball we don’t see coming. I keep it in the back of my head.”
Charles was a paramedic on 9/11 and saw thousands of people struggling to breath through the toxic dust. He has special dust and ash filters for his gas mask in case of another NYC disaster, or if Yellowstone blows.
“I know some people who have bought UV lights, in case they need to grow their own food – but that’s also assuming that the power grid stays up, but then there’s a space issue, how much could you grow?” he said. “It’s better to store food that will last.”
Charles has a one-year supply of food for his family, including his wife and four children. Meal-ready-to-eats (MREs), canned pasta and lots of canned fruit are stuffed into his apartment and his storage locker. He prepares for all sorts of disasters because he says no one should depend on the government to save them.
“The government couldn’t handle (Hurricane) Katrina. Compared to Yellowstone, Katrina was a drop in the bucket,” he said. “I have always heard as a rumour, they would wait for the masses to die and whatever survivors are left, that’s who they’d take care of, because they can’t take care of hundreds of millions of people we have living here in the United States.”
Jake Lowenstern, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is the guy in charge of the Yellowstone volcano observatory.
“Worst-case scenario, a super eruption is a thousand cubic kilometres of material gets sent out of the magma chamber. When that happens it’s going to send out a lot of ash, and it circles the globe and changes the climate for years, drops the temperature for a few years,” Lowenstern said.
He said while a super eruption is highly unlikely, and even if it does happen not many would survive, it doesn’t hurt to prep.
“Things you can do to prepare for one kind of disaster are useful for any kind of disaster: lots of food, water, medical supplies and batteries on hand, and for an eruption, add good masks, air filters and weather stripping to keep the ash out of homes.”
Massive eruptions of the past:
— Archeologists say human beings barely survived the last super eruption on Earth. 74,000 years ago, Toba blew up on the Island of Sumatra. It cloaked the planet in sulphur, reducing the temperature by 20 degrees, wiping out growing seasons with snow cover nearly all year and causing mass starvation. Geneticists say the disaster reduced the human population to as few as 1000 people, thus causing the genetic similarity between individuals which is traced to the same time period.
— A volcanic eruption has been blamed for plunging civilization into the Dark Ages and triggering the bubonic plague. In his book Catastrophe, archeological journalist David Keys pinpoints a Krakatoa explosion in 535 AD. He says with the power of two billion Hiroshima bombs it darkened the sky and caused drought and flooding all around the world, including in Northeast Africa, which led to a bumper crop of rodents that passed their infected fleas onto rats and mice on European ships docked for trade off of southern Egypt, beginning the spread of the plague of Justinian.
— In 1815, the Tambora volcano erupted in the East Indies. Global temperatures dropped. Europeans and North Americans called it a “year without summer.” Snow fell in New York in June. Frost was recorded in each of the summer months and crops failed. 200,000 people died in Eastern and southern Europe from starvation and typhus.
— In 1783, Iceland’s Laki Volcano erupted. 9,000 people died in Iceland and thousands more died around the world from crop failure, disease and starvation. Temperatures dropped 13 degrees Celsius.
— Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 in the Philippines, a comparably small explosion, ejecting 20 million tonnes of sulphur. Scientists say it reduced global temperatures by about 2 degrees.
CDC visitors exposed to deadly germs?
Washington (CNN) — It’s a highly secured, sophisticated research lab studying deadly diseases such as bird flu, monkeypox, tuberculosis and rabies.
It’s in a facility called Building 18, which cost taxpayers $214 million.
And now, the Biosafety Level 3 lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is also the subject of a congressional investigation after a potentially dangerous airflow leak at that lab, CNN has learned.
The leak occurred on February 16, when air flowed the wrong way out of a germ lab into a clean-air corridor, rather than through the powerful HEPA filter that cleans the air, congressional sources and CDC officials said. Visitors touring the facility were in the clean corridor when they observed a puff of air being pushed out from the lab through a slot in a door window.
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If experiments had been under way at the time of that air leak, experts say, unprotected visitors could have been exposed to deadly germs, although an epidemic would have been unlikely.
According to U.S. Rep. Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican and a medical doctor, the House Energy and Commerce Committee has asked the CDC for documents about that incident. The request came in the wake of a report on internal CDC e-mails about the incident, first reported by USA Today last week.
“The biggest concern was that there was a contingent of visitors who were walking through the building,” Burgess said. “And had one of those people been stricken or made ill or worse, obviously that would have been devastating.”
The lab handles small mammals such as rats, ferrets and mice as part of its experiments with pathogens, according to CDC officials. They say animals were in the lab at the time of the air leak, but they were secured in filtered cages.
CDC officials say the lab was clean, was not active at the time, and no one got infected.
“At no time during recent incidents featured in the media were CDC workers or the public in harm’s way,” agency spokesman Tom Skinner said. “This unique facility features multiple security layers specifically designed to protect workers and the public in the event of an incident.”
In a statement released to CNN, Burgess’ committee said, “We will actively work to find out if there are additional concerns or incidents associated with Building 18. Any anomaly or breach is of concern, and we will work to ensure the integrity of the facility is maintained and that our scientists are safe.”
There has been at least one other safety-related incident in that same building where February’s air leak occurred.
In 2008, it was discovered that a high-containment lab door was sealed with duct tape. That incident was first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and confirmed to CNN by Skinner.
Robert Hawley, former safety chief at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, said the CDC has many safety layers in place at its labs. Hawley says researchers at the Biosafety Level 3 lab work in biosafety “cabinets” within the lab itself.
“Nothing is handled outside that cabinet,” Hawley said. “So they’re working with minute amounts of material, and the chances of aerosol are negligible.”
But there are questions about a possible cover-up.
In an internal e-mail, reported by USA Today, CDC biologist Kismet Scarborough said the centers “… will do anything … to hide the fact that we have serious problems with the airflow and containment in this whole building.”
CNN has not been able to independently verify that e-mail. But in response, Skinner said, “CDC will continue to take an open, transparent and inclusive approach to address any safety challenge in a manner that will ensure the safety of our workforce and the public.”
Skinner said the agency “intends to cooperate fully with Rep. Burgess and the committee to address any questions they may have about Building 18 at CDC.”
SuperVolcanoes – This Is the Way the World Ends? Volcanoes Could Darken World
Super-volcanoes have probably caused more extinctions than asteroids. But until now it has been thought that these giant volcanoes took thousands of years to form — and would remain trapped beneath the earth’s crust for thousands more years — before having much effect on the planet.
But new research indicates these catastrophic eruptions, possibly thousands of times more powerful than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, may happen only a few hundred years after the volcanoes form. In other words, they may have a very “short fuse,” according to researchers at Vanderbilt University.
Such an event could make thermonuclear war or global warming seem trivial, spewing untold tons of ash into the atmosphere to block sunlight. The result would be many years of frigid temperatures, wiping out millions of species. A super-volcano that erupted 250 million years ago is now believed to have created the greatest mass extinction the world has ever seen, wiping out up to 95 percent of all plant and animal species. Some renegade scientists believe it was a volcano, not an asteroid, that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
But is global suicide lurking right below our feet? Is a super-volcano about to blow its top? Not as far as scientists can tell. Such a volcano results from the accumulation of a giant pool of lava just a few miles below the ground, and there is no known formation anywhere on the planet that is expected to erupt in the immediate future.
Scientists, who could be wrong about that, have thought for decades that once that pool forms, it stays there for thousands of years before erupting. But the new study by geophysicists from Vanderbilt, along with colleagues at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, documents several lines of research showing that the trigger could be pulled quickly, possibly within a few hundred years.
“Our study suggests that when these exceptionally large magma pools form they are ephemeral and cannot exist very long without erupting,” Vanderbilt’s Guilherme Gualda said in releasing the study, published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE.
That research, as well as earlier research that led to a very different conclusion, was based on the formation of crystals in the molten magma that decay at known rates and thus provide a geological clock, dating various events in the history of the volcano.
According to Gualda, previous researchers looked at the decay of zircons, which are common in volcanic rocks, and concluded that the giant magma pools could exist for 100,000 years. But his team looked at the crystallization of quartz, the most abundant mineral in volcanic deposits, and concluded that such a pool would have to erupt in one-tenth of that time, and possibly in only about 500 years.
That makes the threat of super-volcanoes a bit more serious, but there’s no reason to panic.
Gualda’s team studied deposits in the Long Valley Caldera in northeastern California, where a violent eruption blew 150 cubic miles of molten rock into the atmosphere, blanketing much of North America with hot ash and dropping the earth’s surface more than a mile as it sank into the area once occupied by the magma. That was about 760,000 years ago, but all these years later the region still keeps a lot of scientists on the edge of their seats.
The Long Valley geology began misbehaving again in 1978 when a 5.4 earthquake struck six miles southeast of the caldera, suggesting that the volcano might be reasserting itself. In subsequent years that was followed by swarms of small quakes, which are closely associated with pending volcanic eruptions.
A couple of decades ago, trees began dying on nearby Mammoth Mountain from large amounts of carbon dioxide seeping from the magma, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Today, the caldera seems to be quieting down, despite several recent bursts of seismic events, but it is probably the most closely watched volcano on the planet. Scientists with the USGS are keeping a close eye on it, monitoring every little belch, and they insist there is no reason for the folks who live in California to be concerned. At least not yet.
Meanwhile, scientists at Oregon State University have been focusing their attention on Yellowstone National Park, where an eruption a couple of million years ago is believed to have been 2,000 times larger than Mount St. Helens. That region also shows constant signs of seismic unrest, and there have been eruptions there several times in the past, according to the Oregon researchers.
Incidentally, researchers at Washington State University in Pullman, who have also been studying Yellowstone, concluded earlier this year that the big eruption 2 million years ago wasn’t one blast, but two, separated by about 6,000 years.
But just because it was split into two parts doesn’t mean it was benign. The Washington researchers believe the first blast was the biggest, and it darkened the sky with ash from California to the Mississippi River.
So super-volcanoes cannot be ignored, and now it seems they can pull the trigger much more quickly than anyone had thought.
Zombie Ammo – Be prepared US Ammo is Zombie Ready
A weapon against zombies is being sold across the US after a series of cannibal attacks shocked the country. The largest independent producer of bullets in the world says their Zombie Max ammunition is a response to the flesh-eating crimes.
Hornady Manufacturing Company, an American maker of ammunition and hand-loading components has decided to cash in on current zombie terror.
Zombie Bullets are designed for those who want to be ready and fully-equipped for what the company calls “a Zombie Apocalypse.”
Zombie fascination is also bouncing around the internet, recently becoming the third most-popular search term on Google. Conspiracies and expectation of the Zombie Apocalypse have even forced the US Center for Disease Control to address the American public and deny the threat.
But the move has obviously failed to calm the situation down.
Hornandy say their bullets are sure to kill for good.
“Be PREPARED – supply yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse with Zombie Max ammunition from Hornady! Loaded with PROVEN Z-Max bullets… MAKE DEAD PERMANENT!” – says the promotion on the company’s website.
Image from wvoutpost.com
Company spokesman Everett Deger told WWJ Newsradio 950: “We decided just to have some fun with a marketing plan that would allow us to create some ammunition designed for that … fictional world.”
He also added that Zombie Max and Z-Max bullets are Hornady’s most successful products.
But it’s not just weapons. Principles of theoretical defense against zombies are also proving popular in the US right now. A Zombie Apocalypse Survival Class is being offered in the city of Conover. About a dozen people paid between $50 and $75 to take the first lesson Thursday night, WCNC.com reports.
“We focus on self-defense, firearms and how to handle apocalyptic situations. It could be anything from a nuclear bomb to a hurricane to an enemy invasion,” says Jack Simons, Jr., the course creator.
He added that it is “Basically, a survival course with a zombie theme.”
A recent outbreak of bizarre attacks triggered zombie conspiracies across the US. Some blame drugs, others believe it’s a psychiatric issue, but macabre zombie-style crimes have put the country on undead alert.
Last week, a man in Miami attacked and ate the face of his victim – a homeless man, and was shot dead by police. The victim survived, but doctors are having a hard time piecing his face together. Then, an engineering student in Maryland allegedly stabbed a man to death and ate his heart and brain. In Canada, police are on the hunt for a porn actor who reportedly slaughtered, dismembered, sexually violated the body and then ate his victim.
The zombie paranoia inspired two young men in Miami to stage a prank: video shot by an operator hiding in a parked car shows a young man wearing a blood-stained shirt. The“zombie” approaches passers-by with a roar and attacks them from behind. Vividly recalling recent bloody events in the city, most locals run away in a panic. The video quickly became an online hit.
