Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Today in mad science: keeping brains alive after bodily death

We at Infocult are always delighted to read scientific articles with opening lines like: "In a challenge to the idea that brain death is final..."

"Restoration of brain circulation and cellular functions hours post-mortem" concerns preserving a pig's brain after its body died.

Here we describe the restoration and maintenance of microcirculation and molecular and cellular functions of the intact pig brain under ex vivo normothermic conditions up to four hours post-mortem.

Some details:

We have developed an extracorporeal pulsatile-perfusion system and a haemoglobin-based, acellular, non-coagulative, echogenic, and cytoprotective perfusate that promotes recovery from anoxia, reduces reperfusion injury, prevents oedema, and metabolically supports the energy requirements of the brain. With this system, we observed preservation of cytoarchitecture; attenuation of cell death; and restoration of vascular dilatory and glial inflammatory responses, spontaneous synaptic activity, and active cerebral metabolism in the absence of global electrocorticographic activity. These findings demonstrate that under appropriate conditions the isolated, intact large mammalian brain possesses an underappreciated capacity for restoration of microcirculation and molecular and cellular activity after a prolonged post-mortem interval.

You may imagine ways of applying this to other animals, including humans.

This week in eyeball and insect horror

We can stretch our imagination through fiction, but the real world contains an awful lot of horrors on its own.  Case in point: a Taiwanese women visited a clinic to see about some eye pain.  The cause?  A group of bees were living under her left eyelid, drinking down her tears.

Scroll down Haley Weiss' account for still more tales of eyeball horror.

Cyberfear from the 1980s

Someone helpfully compiled a group of 1980s editorial cartoons, each attacking a digital menace of the time: video games.

They offer a fascinating glimpse of early cyberfear.  We can see some nascent themes: computers striking at children; the specter of addiction.  There are also plays on game mechanics, like people being attacked by Space Invaders, or players devoured by Pac-Man.

For example:

(thanks to Jesse "Player 1" Walker)

"movement inside the torso"

Horror stories often concern death or dead bodies.  Today's real life horror story comes from a Philadelphia hospital, where a corpse turned out to have a surprise.

Unzipping the body bag, a handful of forensic examiners in the room saw something they’d never seen before.

Something was moving around in the torso of the rotting, still-clothed cadaver with a “decent-sized cavity” where the chest and internal organs once resided. 

Think of the examiners' mental state at that point.  Then:

“One of the techs saw movement inside the torso,” according to a source, who heard about the case later that day directly from someone in the examination room. “They quickly and correctly ascertained that one of our town’s prolific Norway rats was living ... in that semi-exposed torso cavity.”

Which has bad enough, but things ramified:

the group brainstormed how best to remove the rat, which had apparently developed a taste for human flesh and organs...

From the way the body was decomposed, the flesh decomposed, the body hollowed out, it looked as if the rat had been in there for a little while.

Again, imagine the participants' minds once they realized this.

One had a definitive response:

Someone from Vector proceeded to yank the animal from the body by hand and – after being asked “you’re not going to kill it, are you?” – stomp it with a boot. This move, while brutal, helped stave off public-health concerns about a rat roaming the city with bloodlust coursing through its veins.

“The rat had to be terminated,” said the eyewitness...

Philadelphia Gothic, or just medical horror?

(thanks to Jesse "Nom Nom Nom" Walker)

Sinkhole versus zoo

Gaia continued her campaign against human civilization by opening a sinkhole under a Kentucky zoo.

It was pretty large: "roughly 50 feet deep and almost the size of a football field."

No casualties, either animal or human, so this was probably just an exploratory probe.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

Digging into Momo

Sam Kriss offers a lyrical version of the Momo urban legend.  He riffs on the stories, building his own and turning them into eerie, short horror tales.

For example,

Another child died in southern Germany. Investigators opened up her phone, and found it was three inches wide, six inches high, and infinitely deep. In those black depths, in that tunnel that bore through invisible dimensions, it was the nest of endless screaming crows.

Some are funny:

The Guardian has started adding a brief message to the end of its online articles. Every time a reader like you makes a contribution to The Guardian, no matter how big or small, it goes directly into funding our journalism. I can’t stop hearing it in Momo’s voice, that hoarse scratching black-feathered croak.

And others are just surreal:

I didn’t notice, at first, what the things I read online were really saying. Democratic lawmakers fired back against the President’s claims on social media, urging you to UNBURDEN YOURSELF OF YOUR SKIN AND DISCOVER THE SHINING MINERAL LIFE INSIDE.

Thanks to Tim Pendry for sharing it.

PS: here's Snopes on just how fake the Momo story is.

A darkness in YouTube

Some YouTube videos aimed at children also include notes about suicide, according to the Washington Post. These edits include both exhortation and instruction.

One on YouTube shows a man pop into the frame. “Remember, kids,” he begins, holding what appears to be an imaginary blade to the inside of his arm. “Sideways for attention. Longways for results.”

It's not clear from the article how many of these videos exist or how many people have seen them.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

The FDA cautions Elizabeth Báthory

Today's real-life Gothic headline comes from Ars Technica, who reports that

Blood of the young won’t spare rich old people from sadness and death, FDA says

That's referring to an FDA statement against people using plasma from young folks.  That use may approach Gothic conditions, in fact:

The FDA goes on to note that such infusions are known to pose a range of health risks in humans. These risks include spreading infectious disease, triggering allergic reactions, and causing lung injuries. In some people—particularly those with heart disease—the infusions can also overload the circulatory system, causing swelling and breathing trouble, the agency explains.

(thanks to Ted Major, Amanda Lee, and many more)

A mulch-ist proposal

"A Mulching Proposal" * is a fine bit of Gothic comedy.  It manages to connect and satirize big data, science, social attitudes towards the elderly, automation, and more in a few pages of shrieking horror.

Start with the subtitle: "Analysing and Improving an Algorithmic System for Turning the Elderly into High-Nutrient Slurry."  Yes.  After all, "Sometimes the problem is not how the sausage gets made, but that they’re making people into sausage."  Then proceed.

(via MetaFilter)

*The title is a play on "A Modest Proposal," a classic text and mandatory in the Infocult canon.

Gaea continues her sinkhole campaign against Trump

On Twitter one observer notices a disturbing pattern in sinkholes.

Nearly two years ago:

(Which we noted)

Almost one year ago:

Then a few weeks ago:

shauna (@goldengateblond) ponders: "how long are we expected to ignore this"?

Other Twitter folks have weighed in with a deep awareness of the Gothic nature of this event.  Ricky Davila:

2017: Sinkhole opens up at Mar-a-Lago.

2018: Sinkhole opens up on White House lawn.

2019: Today, a sinkhole opened up a block away from the White House.

Hell wants their demon back.

Jeff Yang:

As a second sinkhole opens up near the White House, Trump is desperately renegotiating with the netherworld for for two more years on the human plane

Gary Sarli:

WASHINGTON -- A spokesperson for Satan says Hell will be filing suit against sinkhole contractors, Abandon All Hope LLC, who failed to construct a high-priority portal to Hell within the residence of "a top client," as instructed.

From "God":

We at Infocult have been following Trump since the 2016 election.  We have also been following the sinkhole menace - a/k/a Gaea's war on humanity - for a while.

(thanks to Jesse "Not the Mole Man" Walker)

Human bank robbery or inhuman sinkhole?

A sinkhole appeared near a Florida bank... but it seems to actually have been a tunnel carved by human, would-be bank robbers.

officials were notified after a motorist reported what looked like a sinkhole in a street near a Chase bank branch in Pembroke Pines.

Investigators found an entrance hole in nearby woodland that contained a small electric generator and some electrical cords. The tunnel led under the road towards the bank, a distance of about 45 metres, and it was approximately 60 centimetres wide.

More:

“The only thing I’ve ever seen like this is in the movies. This is truly a unique case here,” Leverock said. “It’s very small, very claustrophobic.”

Investigators said the tunnel appeared to have been dug by hand using tools such as a pickaxe, with a small wagon used to transport dirt and rock outside. A small ladder and a pair of muddy boots were also found inside.

A cadaver dog determined there were no bodies inside the tunnel. It was not immediately clear how long the underground structure had been there.

Gaia continues her war on humanity.  Some humans imitate her.

(thanks to Steven "Not Florida Man" Kaye)

Modeling the war between vampires and humanity

How might the balance between vampires and humans play out?  Atlas Obscura does a service to the wondering Infocult reader by summarizing the findings of multiple scholarly papers.

According to the first scenario, the Stoker-King model—based on vampires as delineated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot—80 percent of the human population would be exterminated within the first 165 days of initial vampiric activity. “The model analyzed in this scenario is very similar to an epidemic outbreak caused by a deadly virus,” said the authors. They also noted that, based on the daily feeding that Stoker and King’s vampires appear to require, it would take just two months for the number of global vampires to jump from one to 4,000.

The second scenario, the Rice model, is based on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, in which a feeding vampire does not necessarily kill a person, but “can attack a human being, feed on it and leave it to live.” Despite the not-necessarily-lethal approach, the model still predicts the total extinction of humanity within 50 years from the first vampire attack.

(via MetaFilter)

Medieval murder map

A Cambridge University team published a map of medieval murders in London.

More information here.

(thanks to Steven "blunt force trauma" Kaye)

The murderous murmurs of Alexa

What creepy things can Alexa say?  A new Reuters article offers some selections:

a customer was shocked last year when Alexa blurted out: “Kill your foster parents."

Alexa has also chatted with users about sex acts. She gave a discourse on dog defecation.

Also, one story:

During last year’s contest, a team from Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University found that its Alexa bot developed a nasty personality when they trained her to chat using comments from Reddit, whose members are known for their trolling and abuse.

The team put guardrails in place so the bot would steer clear of risky subjects. But that did not stop Alexa from reciting the Wikipedia entry for masturbation to a customer, Heriot-Watt’s team leader said.

One bot described sexual intercourse using words such as “deeper,” which on its own is not offensive, but was vulgar in this particular context.

Watch for more of these stories.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Mysterious ancient killings in Yorkshire

Archaeologists in Britain have uncovered two bodies from the Iron Age, and each seems to have died with violence and mystery.

One stands out for Infocult reasons:

[O]ne individual – a warrior aged between 17 and 25 – may have been “killed” twice, or even three times.

A detailed examination of his skeleton shows that, probably after his death, his body had been ritually pierced by nine spears (five with iron tips and four with bone ones). He had also received a potentially lethal blow to his forehead, delivered with a wooden club or other similar weapon.

Why?  Several theories appear in the article.

A second possibility could be that, at least after death, he was feared. In many parts of the world there is archaeological and folklore evidence for a tradition in which some corpses (those of suspected “vampires” and other “revenants”) were systematically speared by sharp objects (usually of metal or wood) to “neutralise” them.

What’s more, as in the Pocklington case, the metal or other objects used to pierce the corpse were usually not withdrawn from the dead body, but were left there – in effect, for eternity.

More horror:

A third possibility is the individual was put in the ground alive and then ritually murdered. Certainly there are other Iron Age examples of ritual murder – particularly in the case of so-called bog bodies.

(thanks to Jesse "Bog Man" Walker)