vampire
oracknows | September 22, 2017Back in the day I used to do a weekly feature every Friday that I used to call Your Friday Dose of Woo. For purposes of the bit, woo consisted of particularly ridiculous or silly bits of pseudoscience, quackery, or mysticism, such as the Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface. Amazingly, I managed to keep that up for a couple of years, but over time I started sensing that I was getting a bit too repetitive. The same bits of pseudoscience kept recurring. Over time I had to dig more and more to find suitable bits of woo that amused me enough to inspire me to ever more over-the-top heights of…
dr. dolittle | August 3, 2012
Researchers have discovered six people living in remote areas of Peru (Truenococha and Santa Marta) with natural antibodies against rabies despite never having received a vaccination for this deadly virus. They hypothesize that vampire bats actually transmitted small doses of the virus to people over time creating the natural antibodies. All six individuals reported having been exposed to the bats either through a bite or direct contact (scratch, touching).
While the levels of antibodies in the individuals were low, they might be enough to trigger an immune response against the rabies virus…
sciencepunk | March 5, 2010After a brief insurrection by their blue collar offspring, zombies, vampires have once more regained their prominence as the monster supreme, leaping out at us from every bookshelf, cinema screen and TV set. What better time then for Mark Jenkins to unleash his accomplished study of the bloodsucker legend, Vampire Forensics.
Published through National Geographic Books and accompanied by a television documentary, Vampire Forensics delves into the long history of the vampire, one which began millennia before a certain Bram Stoker set pen to parchment. Drawing upon the latest research in…
bioephemera | February 10, 2010
On Tuesday, Feb. 23, National Geographic Explorer will be devoting an episode to "Vampire Forensics." You can preview a brief clip below the fold, but I'll warn you now: it's not CSI. It's more scientific ("unfortunately this evidence is inconclusive" LOL) and less sexy (inexplicably, Emily Proctor is nowhere to be seen). Overall, the feeling I got from the clip was sort of "Wow, we're National Geographic Explorer, that's pretty great, but we really wish we were sexy, like CSI. Does this sinister music help?"
In conjunction with the Explorer episode, National Geographic is releasing a book…
edyong | October 27, 2009In East Africa lives a species of spider that drinks mammalian blood. But fear not - Evarcha culicivora is an indirect vampire - it sates its thirst by preying on female mosquitoes that have previously fed on blood themselves.
Even though its habitat is full of non-biting midges called "lake flies", it can tell the difference between these insects and the blood-carrying mozzies it carries. Robert Jackson from the University of Canterbury discovered this behaviour a few years ago and one of his colleagues, Fiona Cross, has now found that the blood isn't just a meal for the spiders, it's an…
bioephemera | April 1, 2009
I've been as eager as a brain-starved zombie to get my hands on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Jane Austen mash-up concocted by Seth Grahame-Smith for Quirk Books. It sounded a like Regency Buffy: zombie-slaying Lizzy Bennet indulges in arch quips while skewering zombies and ninjas with her Katana, all in time for the Netherfield ball. The obvious question was, could this conceit actually work for the length of a novel?
The answer: yes - sort of. P&P&Z is no Buffy. But it will be entertaining for a particular type of reader: those who are familiar with the original novel, yet…
bleimanb | October 29, 2008Just in time for Halloween, researchers in Siberia have identified a new species of vampire moth. Scratch that, make that two species of vampire moth, both discovered by Jennifer Zaspel from the University of Florida in Gainesville.
The moths are remarkably similar to a strictly vegetarian moth called the Calyptra thalictri, leading Zaspel to speculate that this blood sucking relative represents a new evolutionary direction.
For the love of God, just stop...
Regular fruit eating moths often possess hooked/barbed tongues used to get under the skin of different fruits in order to get to the…
zooillogix | October 14, 2008They just don't write spine tinglers about killer pandas like they used to. Check out Heroic Comics #35, Facing Death in a Panda's Mouth, in its entirety below the fold.
Thank god they shot that panda. I thought they were goners! Via judgeabook.
gregladen | March 2, 2008
Normally, I keep my blog away from Squid and other cephalopods because I know that if PZ myers feels threatened, he may charge, and the squiggly molluscs are his bailiwick.
But, this evening at the Laden household analog of the dinner table, the question came up: "How many species of cephalopods are there, anyway? Huh?"
So I went on line to look, and before I got anywhere near the answer to this interesting question, I came across the Vampire Squid, Vampyroteuthis infernalis. This turns out to be an animal of great extremes....http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/…