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How a Zombie Outbreak Could Happen in Real Life
Could zombies actually exist? What would it take for human corpses to rise up and hunt the living? We often think zombies are scientifically impossible — but actually, they’re just very implausible. Here’s one wayThe Walking Dead could happen in real life.
To start our zombie thought experiment, we need to make some basic assumptions. First, we’re ignoring all supernatural zombie origins. We’re also going to set aside space radiation, mysterious comets, or Russian satellites. Our focus will be narrowed to biological origins –- a zombie contagion. Of course, there are many different zombie scenarios in books and film, and no one theory is going to cover all of them perfectly.
The first aspect of human zombification we need to tackle is basic zombie physiology. In virtually every zombie scenario, zombies are able to function despite increasing levels of physical deterioration due to injury or decomposition. There has to be some mechanism for transmitting neural impulses from the brain to various body parts, and for providing energy to muscles so they can keep operating.
The most common science fictional explanation for zombie outbreaks is a virus — but viruses and bacterial infections are not known for building large new physical structures within the body. So let’s count viruses out. Instead, the need for a mechanism to activate deteriorating body parts actually provides the cornerstone of what is, in my opinion, the strongest theory: fungal infection.
We know that fungi can infect humans. We also know that fungal networks exist in most of the world’s forests. These mycorrhizal networks have a symbiotic relationship with trees and other plants in the forest, exchanging nutrients for mutual benefit. These networks can be quite large, and there are studies that demonstrate the potential for chemical signals to be transmitted from one plant to another via the mycorrhizal network. That, in turn, means that fungal filaments could perform both vascular and neural functions within a corpse.
This leads us to the following scenario: microscopic spores are inhaled, ingested, or transmitted via zombie bite. The spores are eventually dispersed throughout the body via the bloodstream. Then they lie dormant. When the host dies, chemical signals (or, more accurately, the absence of chemical signals) within the body that occur upon death trigger the spores to activate, and begin growing. The ensuing fungal network carries nutrients to muscles in the absence of respiration or normal metabolism.
Part of the fungal network grows within the brain, where it interfaces with the medulla and cerebellum, as well as parts of the brain involving vision, hearing and possibly scent. Chemicals released by the fungi activate basic responses within these brain areas. The fungi/brain interface is able to convert the electrochemical signals of neurons into chemical signals that can be transmitted along the fungal network that extends through much of the body. This signal method is slow and imperfect, which results in the uncoordinated movements of zombies. And this reliance on the host’s brain accounts for the “headshot” phenomenon, in which grievous wounds to the brain or spine seem to render zombies fully inert.
This leaves the problem of zombie metabolism. Where do the zombies get the nutrients needed to perform physical activity, plus the necessary nutrients to fuel the life-cycle of the fungi? This is most easily explained by the zombies’ constant, endless drive to devour meat. The fungal network would still need some way to metabolize meat, and zombies seem to be able to function even in the absence of a human digestive system.
It is possible that this particular fungi has evolved a means to extract energy and nutrients from meat in a similar manner to carnivorous plants. The ingestion of meat may actually be vestigial, an unintended result of the drive to bite. In this case, the fungi may draw energy from the decomposition of the host’s own organic material, which effectively puts a shelf-life on zombies (in addition to the deterioration of body structures beyond the point where the fungal network can compensate).
Accounts of dismembered parts moving purposefully may be apocryphal.
Now we have established a working theory for fungal zombies. How could such a disease arise? The goal of any biological organism is to live long enough to reproduce, but many pathogens are self-limited by their own lethality. The host dies before it has a chance to spread the pathogen inadvertently. This gives us two pathways for development of the zombie fungus. First, a fungal species existed that used the digestive tracts of mammals to travel. In other words, animals ingested the fungus, including spores. The spores were later defecated out in a new location. Some mutations occurred that caused the spores to gestate while still within the host. However, in most cases, the host’s immune system would destroy the fungus. Further mutations could lead to spores that only trigger once the host has died, avoiding this problem.
Another possibility is a fungal infection that was highly aggressive and caused rapid death within the host. That strain was not able to successfully reproduce as often as a mutated strain that delayed activation until post-mortem.
Of course, it’s one thing for a fungus to activate after the host dies, and quite another for the dead host to stand up and start attacking things. There are many evolutionary steps in between, which is why a zoonotic origin seems likely.
The precursor fungus could have been ingested by pigs, which are omnivorous. Captive pig populations, subject to overcrowding, would have been perfect places for the fungus to spread and mutate. In some poorly managed pig farms, dead pigs may have gone unnoticed, allowing post-mortem development of the fungus. Dead pigs were likely partially eaten by their living counterparts, allowing the fungal strains with post-mortem mutations to spread back into the population. The method of transfer from the pig population to the human population seems fairly obvious.
The evolution of fully mobile dead pigs probably started with a simple bite reflex that could transmit spores to nearby pigs. A bite combined with a muscular spasm, a sort of lunge, would work even better. After many generations, this developed into full post-mortem mobility. Thus, a dead host went from a drawback to an advantage, becoming a mobile platform for spore distribution. In fact, the zombie hunger drive may have originated as a spore distribution method –- only later was the ability to metabolize meat acquired. We can extrapolate this development to assume the further refinement of the fungal neural system, allowing for zombies which are far more coordinated and can run at nearly full speed.
While this type of behavior modification may seem unlikely, there is precedent for it within the animal world. Several species of parasitic wasps are able to reprogram the behavioral patterns of their hosts (bees, ants and even caterpillars), creating complex new behaviors beneficial to the wasp and detrimental to the host. While the hosts in these cases aren’t dead, this does demonstrate that complex chemical overrides can evolve in nature.
Hopefully scientists can develop an effective zombie fungicide in time.
THE DEAD SHALL RISE – Vampire skeletons discovery comes after zombie apocalypse scare
A discovery of vampire skeletons by scientists were found in Bulgaria. New of this comes on the heels of a bizarre zombie apocalypse scare from last week.
Archaeologists believe they’ve discovered centuries-old skeletons that were pinned down with iron rods going through their chests. It was a ritual done to the dead so they wouldn’t turn into vampires, FOX reports. The practice occurred in certain parts of Bulgaria and continued up until the turn of the last century.
Two skulls were found over the weekend near the Black Sea town of Sozopol in Bulgaria.
At the time time there was superstition that those who did evil when they were alive, would return from the dead and feast on the living’s blood. This prompted the hammering of iron rods through the dead’s chest bones and hearts.
Over 100 corpses around Bulgaria have been found stabbed as a way to prevent them from becoming vampires.
The latest news is a slight distraction from the horrific zombie apocalypse-like incidents that took place throughout the U.S. and Canada last week. At least this discovery is about skeletons, archaic beliefs, and traditional practices of the old ages. It’s seemingly less shocking compared to cannibalism!
Inside zombie brains: Sci-fi teaches science
- A new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” is about, well, zombies
- The zombie virus basically eats the brain down to the amygdala
- When it’s humans vs. zombies, the best solution is a strategic attack, mathematician says
Zombie author and expert Dr. Steven Schlozman will join us for a Twitter chat at 12:00 p.m. ET on Tuesday, April 26. Tweet your questions to @cnnhealth and follow along at #cnnzombies.
(CNN) — An airborne virus is rapidly turning people into zombies. Two-thirds of humanity has been wiped out. Scientists desperately look for a cure, even as their own brains deteriorate and the disease robs them of what we consider life.
Relax, it’s only fiction — at least, for now. This apocalyptic scenario frames the new novel “The Zombie Autopsies” by Dr. Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist who holds positions at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital/McLean Program in Child Psychiatry.
You might not expect someone with those credentials to take zombies seriously, but it turns out the undead are a great way to explore real-world health issues: why certain nasty diseases can destroy the brain, how global pandemics create chaos and fear, and what should be done about people infected with a highly contagious and incurable lethal illness.
“One of the things zombie novels do is they bring up all these existential concerns that happen in medicine all the time: How do you define what’s alive?” says Schlozman, who has been known to bounce between zombie fan conventions and academic meetings.
“When is it appropriate to say someone’s ‘as-good-as-dead,’ which is an awful, difficult decision?”
What a zombie virus would do to the brain
So maybe you’ve seen “Night of the Living Dead,” read “World War Z,” or can’t wait for the return of the AMC show “The Walking Dead,” but you probably don’t know what differentiates the brains of humans and zombies.
First things first: How does the zombie disease infect its victims? Many stories in the genre talk about biting, but Schlozman’s novel imagines a deliberately engineered virus whose particles can travel in the air and remain potent enough to jump from one person to another in a single sneeze.
Now, then, to the brain-eating. The zombie virus as Schlozman describes it basically gnaws the brain down to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for the “fight or flight” response. The zombies always respond by fighting because another critical part of the brain, the ventromedial hypothalamus, which tells you when you’ve eaten enough, is broken.
The brain’s frontal lobes, responsible for problem-solving, are devoured by the virus, so zombies can’t make complex decisions. Impairment in the cerebellum means they can’t walk well, either. Also, these humanoids have an unexplained predilection for eating human flesh.
“The zombies in this book are stumbling, shambling, hungry as hell,” Schlozman said. “Basically they’re like drunk crocodiles; they’re not smart, they don’t know who you are or what you are.”
Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies
How a zombie virus would be made
So the bloodthirsty undead wander (or crawl) around spreading a lethal illness ominously called ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome, or ANSD, for short.
“When something really terrifying comes along, especially in medicine or that has a medical feel to it, we always give it initials. That’s the way we distance ourselves from it,” Schlozman said.
The virus has several brain-destroying components, one of which is a “prion,” meaning a protein like the one that causes mad cow disease. In real life, prions twist when they are in an acidic environment and become dangerous, Schlozman said. How our own environment has changed to make prions infectious — getting from the soil to the cows in mad cow disease, for instance — is still a mystery.
Now here’s something to send chills up your spine: In Schlozman’s world, airborne prions can be infectious, meaning mad cow disease and similar nervous-system destroyers could theoretically spread just like the flu. Swiss and German researchers recently found that mice that had only one minute of exposure to aerosols containing prions died of mad cow disease, as reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. A follow-up described in Journal of the American Medical Association showed the same for a related disease that’s only found in animals called scrapie. Of course, these are mice in artificially controlled conditions in a laboratory, and humans do not exhale prions, but it could have implications for safety practices nonetheless.
Like mad cow disease, the zombie disease Schlozman describes also progresses in acidic environments. In the book, a major corporation doles out implantable meters that infuse the body with chemicals to artificially lower acidity when it gets too high. But, sadly, when acidity is too low, that also induces symptoms that mimic the zombie virus, so it’s not a longterm solution. Everyone who gets exposed eventually succumbs, Schlozman said.
As for the unknown component of the zombie disease that would help slowly zombifying researchers in their quest for a cure, that’s up for the reader to figure out — and the clues are all in the book, Schlozman said.
How we’d fight back
You can’t ethically round up fellow survivors to kick some zombie butt unless the undead have technically died. And in Schlozman’s book, a group of religious leaders get together and decide that when people reach stage four of the disease, they are basically dead. That, of course, permits zombie “deanimation,” or killing.
The ‘zombie theology’ behind the walking dead
And how do you kill a zombie? Much of zombie fiction knocks out zombies through shots to the head. That, Schlozman said, is because the brain stem governs the most basic functioning: breathing and heartbeat.
A zombie-apocalypse disease like the one he describes probably wouldn’t evolve on its own in the real world, he said.
But, as we’ve seen, individual symptoms of zombies do correspond to real ailments. And if they all came together, the disease would be creepily efficient at claiming bodies, Schlozman said.
Bad news, folks: Even if people contracted a zombie virus through bites, the odds of our survival aren’t great.
A mathematician at the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (who uses the question mark to distinguish himself from other Robert Smiths, of course), has calculated that if one zombie were introduced to a city of 500,000 people, after about seven days, every human would either be dead or a zombie.
“We’re in big, big trouble if this ever happens,” Smith? said. “We can kill the zombies a bit, but we’re not very good at killing zombies fundamentally. What tends to happen is: The zombies just win, and the more they win, the more they keep winning” because the disease spreads so rapidly.
The best solution is a strategic attack, rather than an “every man for himself” defense scenario, he said. It would take knowledge and intelligence, neither of which zombies have, to prevail.
Why study zombies?
In his day job, Smith? models how real infectious diseases spread. But he’s already reaped benefits from his work on zombies. For instance, while many mathematical models only deal with one complicated aspect of a situation at a time, he tackled two — zombie infection and zombie-killing — when it came to speculating about outbreaks.
When it came time for modeling of real-world human papillomavirus (HPV), then, Smith? felt equipped to handle many facets of it at the same time, such as heterosexual and homosexual transmission of HPV.
“Knowing what we knew from zombies allowed us to actually take on these more complicated models without fear,” he said.
Studying zombies is also a great way to get young people excited about science. Smith?, who was on a zombie-science panel with Schlozman through the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange in 2009, has also seen math-phobic people get interested in mathematics by reading about his work with zombies.
“There are insights that we gain from the movies, and from fiction, from fun popular culture stuff, that actually can really help us think about the way that science works, and also the way science is communicated,” he said.
And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.
Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.
“The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity,” Schlozman says. “We’re increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal.”
Real Life Zombies
The thought of our bodies walking around and operating without our personal conscious or as the more spiritual believe without our soul is an idea that has intrigued and captivated the minds of human beings for centuries. Whether it be the living-dead and body snatchers of Hollywood movies or the stories of voodoo priests using potions to turn rivals into mindless drones to do their bidding, myths, movies, and stories about zombies have been a mainstay in human culture. But the idea of our bodies walking around without freewill or after we have passed may be closer to the realm of the natural than we all thought.
We have all been in the situation where we see a hideous bug in our sink or bathtub and instead of squishing it we take a more timid approach and turn the water on and drown the pest. Imagine you try to that and you watch the ugly sucker spin down the drain. You return to the bathroom later to make the horrifying discovery that the bug had returned from the dead. There are two possibilities: either you have a bathroom infested with bugs or you are dealing with a wolf spider, whose appearance is even more terrifying than its name.
Soviet Expiriment resurected dead, Real Zombies
In the 1940s, Soviet scientists were able to bring the dead back to life. This very technology will be the driving force behind the future Zombie apocalypse. 71 years later, we can finally get a peek through the Iron Curtain. What you see might horrify you. A poor dog, Torn apart in the name of science. Its lungs, hart and head, put to death then reanimated. Was this ever tested on humans, are Zombies real? Yes, as we can see, this has been done a very long time ago. Deep within Soviet Russia the communists scientist have played God. The day of Judgement will rain down on humanity and the dead shall rise. Nazi also conducted experiments with for nazi zombies. refer to times article for more details