Tag Archives: neighborhood
ZOMBIE OUTBREAK? – Are Zombie Bees Infiltrating Your Neighborhood?
Parasite zombie flies and a honeybee; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Zombie bees are not science fiction. They are real—and real threat to already-threatened U.S. honeybee populations.
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) in California and South Dakota have been observed acting zombielike, wandering away from their hives at night and crawling around blindly in circles.
These insects have been rendered insensate by a parasitizing fly that lays eggs in the bees’ bodies. After the bee dies a lonesome death, pupae crawl out and grow to adult flies that seek new bodies to infect.
Such a sight startled John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, when he looked at dead honey bees he had collected on campus. He soon started noticing clumps of dead bees under light fixtures in the area. He and his colleagues found that this bizarre bee behavior was the result of the fly Apocephalus borealis (they described their findings in January in the journal PLoS ONE). After sampling hives around the Bay Area, they found that, disturbingly, more than three quarters were infected with this parasite.
Honeybee colonies have been collapsing at an alarming rate in the U.S. for the past several years. And without these important pollinators, many of our favorite foods, from almonds to zucchini would be difficult to produce. Scientists have implicated viruses, fungi, mites and other invaders in colony collapse disorder, but Hafernik suspects this parasite is a new villain on the scene. “Honeybees are among the best-studied insects,” he said in a prepared statement in January. “We would expect that if this has been a long-term parasite of honeybees, we would have noticed.”
How do you catch a zombie bee? A “ZomBee” trap; courtesy of John Hafernik/SF State University
Now, to see how far the zombified bee problem has spread, he and his colleagues are enlisting the help of the whole continent. They have launched ZomBeeWatch.org, a citizen science project that allows people to help them track suspicious bee behavior and collect specimens. Through the project, which launches in full today, they are hoping to find “if this parasitism is distributed widely across North America,” Hafernik said in a new statement.
To help out, you can sign up to collect sick-looking or dead bee specimens and observe them to see if parasite fly pupae emerge. Industrious citizen scientists can build light traps to attract any parasitized bees in their area (full instructions are on their site). And the researchers promise that even bees that do not turn out to be true “ZomBees” are important to report in an effort to better understand contributors to colony collapse.
“If we can enlist a dedicated group of citizen scientists to help us, together we can answer important questions and help honeybees at the same time,” Hafernik said.
Not sure what a zombie bee looks like? Here’s a video clip of a sick bee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs32DCaxU1U&feature=youtu.be (Read more about parasites that make their hosts act like zombies in the article “Zombie Creatures.”)
In case you’re wondering what we’ve been wondering—ahem, what else can these zombie flies infect?—ZomBee Watch has an answer: “The zombie fly only parasitizes insects and does not lay eggs on or in humans,” according to its website. “As far as we know, it does not transmit any diseases that are contractible by humans.” As far as we know…
ZOMBIE THEME PARK – COOLEST THING EVER
Why wait for the zombie apocalypse? One man wants customers to experience the terror now.
With soaring budget deficits and population on the decline, Detroit has become a laboratory for testing out creative solutions for cities, like urban farming and pedestrian-friendly greenway trails.
Mark Siwak says he has his own idea for bettering the city — a live-action zombie theme park set in one of Detroit’s abandoned neighborhoods.
Paying customers would be chased by a growing horde of zombies (all professionals) through a cordoned-off, desolate section of the city, seeking shelter in abandoned homes and factories and businesses.
Z World creator Siwak, who has launched a fundraiser on IndieGoGo (he’s raised $2,200 of the $140,000 needed to meet his goal), says that the city of Detroit needs to consider creative solutions to areas of urban blight.
Mayor Dave Bing’s long-touted campaign promise was the implementation of theDetroit Works Project, which could ultimately relocate residents from blighted districts to more populated areas in an attempt to centralize city services. Spread across 140 square miles, Detroit proper is so large that the entire cities of San Francisco and Boston, plus the borough of Manhattan, can fit inside its borders.
And Siwak says, with all that land, there’s room in the Motor City for a zombie theme park. He even compares his idea to the city’s famed Heidelberg Project, in which artist Tyree Guyton transformed the empty homes of his neighborhood into a large-scale art installation.
But some critics have shrugged off “Z World” as an exploitative and insensitive ploy to profit off the glamorization of Detroit’s problems. Curbed Detroit blogger Sarah Cox wrote that Siwak’s plan “sounds a lot like all that fun we had during the 1960s race riots. It is nice to know that Z Land is finally going to capitalize on our love of adrenaline rushes and nostalgia. Now even visitors from the ‘burbs can ‘wonder if they will make it through the night.'”
Siwak told CBS Detroit that “the city can only have so many urban farms or similar uses for vacant plots.’
And while he’s far away from his funding goals, not to mention permission from the City of Detroit, he says he’s already getting resumes from Detroiters who’d like their next 9-to-5 to focus on eating brains and staggering through the streets.
On his site, Siwak assured, “while zombies are great, the real neat thing about this project is the potential to inject some life into a forgotten neighborhood – with the opportunity to work with neighborhood groups and organization.”
This wouldn’t be the world’s first live-action zombie role-play game, though Detroit’s proposal is almost certainly the most expansive. In Atlanta, thrill-seekers wielding paint ball guns will pay as much as $30 to play hide-and-seek with undead zombies in a formerly abandoned truck stop rechristened as the Atlanta Zombie Apocalypse, opening Sept. 28. Over on the other side of the pond, wish.co.uk offers zombie combat mission experiences with training from military veterans and movie-grade special effects.
ASTEROID COLLISION PENDING – HOW CAN WE AVOID IT?
Steve Carell’s new movie, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, opened yesterday. Despite its being billed as a comedy (one with a rather dreary basis), the movie has gotten a lot of people thinking about one thing: if a killer asteroid was headed toward Earth, is there anything we could do as a species to avoid doomsday?
The unfortunate truth is that the world would probably be helpless to do anything.
When doomsday scenarios are considered, planners usually give months or even years advance notice time to come up with a plan to divert the colliding body and save the world. Now, as the events of last week show, huge asteroids can, literally, just pop out of the cosmos and into our neighborhood just a few days after discovery.
Right now, there are millions of known asteroids (and untold numbers more undiscovered) floating around the solar system, mostly between Mars and Jupiter, safely out of Earth’s way. Of the millions of asteroids, over 8,800 are classified as near-Earth. Of the near-Earth objects, just over 4,700 are considered as potentially hazardous, which is defined as an object over 500 feet in diameter that can come within 4.6 million miles of Earth.
Obviously, a metallic space rock 500 feet across traveling at up to 15 miles per second could do an immense amount of damage. For comparison, the object (most likely a comet) that caused the Tunguska Incident was probably less than 100 yards (300 feet across) but still leveled forests for over 1,000 square miles.
Needless to say, if a Tunguska-sized object were to hit a populated area, the death toll would be apocalyptic. Large impactor? Worldwide devastation and possibly an end to civilization as we know it. So, if scientists were to discover a doomsday asteroid on a collision course with Earth, could we do anything about it or would we simply have to resign ourselves to a terrible fate and possibly go down in history like the dinosaurs?
The problem with many doomsday scenarios: when contemplating ways to defend our planet, many planners always give several months and often years of notice. Problem: asteroids have a way of sneaking up on us, which is not hard to do considering that there are more people working at the average McDonald’s than there are full-time asteroid hunters manning the world’s observatories. Earlier this year, it was reported that Los Alamos had completed a study wherein nuclear weapons showed promise in deflecting asteroids but, for many, such a scenario should be considered last resort, not first option.
The widely agreed upon solution: early detection, which can only be achieved through a vigilant watch of the skies by skilled astronomers, professionals and amateurs alike.
Girlfriend: ‘Miami Zombie’ may have had voodoo spell that made him chew off a man’s face
On the Saturday morning before he would make headlines for chewing off a man’s face — before he would come to be known tragically as the “Miami Zombie” — Rudy Eugene held his Bible and kissed his girlfriend goodbye.
Eugene’s on-again, off-again girlfriend said he woke her up at 5:30 a.m. to say he was going to meet with a “homeboy.” She said she found it strange he was rummaging the closet so early in morning. He didn’t name the friend or say where he was going.
He planted a kiss on her lips and said, “I love you.”
Shortly after, he left the central Broward apartment he shared with her.
“I told him be safe and I love you too. When he walked out the door I closed it, locked it and went back to sleep,” said the girlfriend, who spoke to theMiami Herald on Wednesday but asked that her name not be disclosed. She said that she thought it unusual that he was leaving the house so early, but didn’t press him on it.
An hour after he left, Eugene called her cellphone. “He called me and told me his car broke down. He said, ‘I’ll be home, but I’m going to be a little late.’ Then he said, ‘I’m going to call you right back.’ ” That was the last time Eugene’s girlfriend heard from him.
Around noon Saturday, she said she felt uneasy. She got into her car to search for Eugene, thinking he might still be stranded somewhere. She drove through North Miami and Miami Gardens, familiar neighborhoods Eugene frequented to visit with friends and family.
“I was worried. I couldn’t do anything. I just kept calling the phone,” she said. “I left messages saying, ‘Rudy, call me, I’m really worried.’ ”
She said Eugene never told her where he was going that morning, and she was surprised to hear reports that he’d been in South Beach in the hours before he attacked a homeless man, Ronald Poppo.
As a matter of fact, she said, the previous day he told her he didn’t want to go to South Beach because of the heavy police presence for Urban Beach Week. Eugene, who had been arrested in the past for possession of marijuana, told her he didn’t want to get arrested.
By Saturday evening she still had not heard from the man she calls “my baby, my heart.” She turned on the TV to watch the late-night news and heard an unreal story: A nude man near the Miami Heraldbuilding pounced on a homeless man, chewing off his face. The man with pieces of flesh hanging from his teeth was shot dead by police.
“I thought to myself, ‘Oh my God, that’s crazy,’ she said. “I didn’t know that it was Rudy.”
All day Sunday she placed phone calls to friends asking if they’d seen Eugene and again she searched North Dade streets for her boyfriend.
At 11 a.m. Monday she got the call from a member of Eugene’s family.
The caller shouted terrible news into the phone: “Rudy’s dead, Rudy’s dead.”
“I immediately started to scream,” she said. “I don’t know when I hung up the phone, I was hysterical.”
But it was not until the afternoon, when she left her home to grieve with the rest of Eugene’s family in North Miami Beach, that she heard even worse news: The man everyone was calling the Miami Zombie was her boyfriend.
Her reaction: Utter disbelief. “That’s not Rudy, that’s not Rudy,” she remembered saying aloud in shock.
“I’ll never be the same,” she said.
The man being depicted by the media as a “face eater” or a “monster” is not the man she knew, she said. He smoked marijuana often, though had recently said he wanted to quit, but he didn’t use stronger recreational drugs and even refused to take over-the-counter medication for simple ailments like headaches, she said. He was sweet and well-mannered, she said.
Eugene’s girlfriend has her own theory on what happened that day. She believes Eugene was drugged unknowingly. The only other explanation, she said, was supernatural — that someone put a voodoo curse on him. The girlfriend, who unlike Eugene is not Haitian, said she has never believed in voodoo, until now.
“I don’t know how else to explain this,” she said.
She and Eugene met in 2007. While in traffic on a Miami street, Eugene pulled up next to her car and motioned for her to roll down her window.
She did. “I thought he was cute. I shouted out my number to him and he called me right then. We clicked immediately.”
Their five-year relationship hit rocky points over the years, and they would separate for months at a time, then reunite again. She said their problems were mostly “communication issues.”
She said Eugene worked at a car wash and wanted to own his own business someday.
During their time together, she said, Eugene would sit on the bed or on the couch in the evenings with her to read from his Bible. He carried it with him just about everywhere he went, she said, and often cited verses to friends and family.
“If someone was lost or didn’t know God, he would tell them about him,” she said. “He was a believer of God.”
She cries often, she said. Eugene’s clothes and shoes are still in her closet.
“Something happened out of the ordinary that day. I don’t want him to be labeled the ‘Miami Zombie,’ ” she said. “He was a person. I don’t want him to go down like that.”
He was never violent around her, she said.
But according to police records, Eugene became violent at least once in his past and was arrested on battery charges. In 2004, he threatened his mother and smashed furniture during a domestic dispute, according to records from the North Miami Beach Police Department.
The police report says Eugene “took a fighting stand, balled his hands into a fist” and threatened one of the officers who responded.
Police had to use a Taser to subdue him. “Thank God you’re here, he would have killed me,” Eugene’s mother, Ruth Charles, told officers, the police report says. She told the officers that before they arrived, her son had told her, “I’ll put a gun to your head and kill you.”
On Wednesday, Charles said that despite the incident, she and her son had a warm relationship.
“I’m his first love … he’s a nice kid … he was not a delinquent,” she told Miami Herald news partner CBS-4 at her Miami Gardens home.
Charles told the station she was speaking up for the first time to defend her dead son.
“Everybody says that he was a zombie, but I know he’s not a zombie; he’s my son,” she said.
She said the man who ate another human being’s face was just not the son she knew.
“I don’t know what they injected in him to turn him into the person who did what he did,” she said, making the motion of someone putting a syringe into the crook of her arm.
A friend of Eugene’s since they were teenagers told the Herald on Wednesday that Eugene had been troubled in recent years.
Joe Aurelus said Eugene told him he wanted to stop smoking pot, and that friends were texting Eugene Bible verses.
“I was just with him two weeks ago,”‘ he said. They were at a friend’s house watching a movie and Eugene had a Bible in his hand.
“He was going through a lot with his family,” Aurelus said, and jumping from job to job.
“Rudy was battling the devil.”
Miami Herald staff writers Elinor J. Brecher and Scott Hiaasen contributed to this report.
Zombie Truck for All Your Zombie Collection Needs!
When the Dead rise and walk the earth a new industry shall be born: Zombie Containment and Disposal. This business will be crucial to the survival of not only the economy, but also the survival of mankind!
Enter THE ZOMBIE TRUCK! This beast is designed with one specific purpose: to capture and contain the Living Dead! Featuring a six foot cage that can hold up to eight Zeds, a bladed bumper, Zombie Emergency box, and a Gatling gun; this mad machine is able to clear a neighborhood of threat in no time! Check out this video and the gallery below (photo credits to Lucas Scarfone – Scarfone Photography)!
For Pics click here