Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Florida brain-eating parasite is on the rise

Florida generates its own particular form of Gothic horror.  Today's case in point: a brain-eating microbial parasite is growing in numbers across several counties in that state.

What does Angiostrongylus cantonensis do to us?

Fatality rates for the disease are low, but the parasite can cause a form of meningitis, and severe infections can lead to a coma or death. In adults, signs of infection include headaches, stiff neck, fever, vomiting, nausea, and paralysis of the face and limbs. Infected children exhibit nausea, vomiting and fever. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, there is no treatment for an A. cantonensis infection

How does it work?  A multi-species chain:

This malicious worm is dependent on two species for its lifecycle. Snails ingest the parasite by eating infected rat feces. In turn, rats eat the infected snails, and the cycle of despair continues. Humans contract the disease by consuming infected snails—either accidentally or deliberately—or by eating infected frogs or crustaceans, which can also contract the parasite.

Perhaps this is a quiet new front in Gaea's war against humanity.

Dawn of the skull cult

Recent excavations and research into Göbekli Tepe reveal what one team describes as an ancient skull cult.

Gresky and her colleagues found three skulls scored with deep cuts made by sharpened stones. The carvings bisect the center of the face, continuing up the forehead and all the way around to the back of the skull. One skull, painted with red ochre, also had a hole drilled in the top. A likely explanation is that the skull cultists were tying the skulls with cords, then threading another cord through holes in the skull, in order to suspend them from the stones.

More:

carvings of headless people and severed heads are common themes on pillars at Göbekli Tepe. Some images show animals holding human heads, while others show headless men (we know they are men because they have erections, a common representation during this period in human history). It's likely these decorated skulls were part of a worldview elaborated in these stone carvings.

Infocult: with humanity since the dawn of time.

(thanks to Steven "Acéphale" Kaye)

Creepy teasets

Have you ever felt your teapots, cups, and bowls weren't Gothic enough?  Infocult is here to help.

Sarah Duyer is a San Francisco-based artist who brings ceramic tableware to life in unsettling and thought-provoking ways. Teapots with spidery legs scuttle across their platforms, dripping with black and blood red paint; bowls and mugs with human teeth and fingers resemble the offspring of botched laboratory experiments. Infused with body parts and the illusion of movement, each pot, bowl, and mug seems to take on a half-consciousness that troubles its status as an ordinary, innocent object.

(via MetaFilter)

Buried alive in Gibraltar, to stop Nazis

Amusing Planet explores a WWII urban legend, which turns out to have a firm grounding in reality.  Operation Tracer ensconced six British soldiers within a hidden chamber dug out of Gibraltar.

It was 

a secret cave which was meant to hold six men, sealed from the outside. The men were expected to survive and observe the activities of the Germans for a period of one year or more, should Gibraltar fall to Nazi forces.

A state secret, it took time and amateur sleuthing to reveal Tracer's remains:

The first breakthrough came more than fifty years after the war ended. In late 1997, a team of explorers called the Gibraltar Caving Group felt a gust of wind coming from a tunnel, leading to the discovery of a large complex at the top of the southern end of the Rock. The explorers broke through a brick wall to reveal a doorway behind which they found observations posts lined with cork tiles to provide insulation against cold and sound, an aerial and remains of a bicycle. The secret chamber was dubbed the "Stay Behind Cave". 

A fine Gothic plan.

(via MetaFilter)

Hundreds of bats shut down fire station

Hundreds of bats swarmed a Florida fire station, shutting it down.

[A]nywhere from 500 to 1,000 bats found their way into the station in Pasco County, north of Tampa. The nocturnal winged critters have been found in several parts of the building and created an unsanitary and unsafe working environment...

The newspaper reports emergency workers first spotted them at dusk five years ago. Then the officials tried offering them bat boxes, which have holes in the bottom and rods that run horizontally inside for hanging. But the colony moved into the station anyway...

“They’ve found them in the sleeping quarters, they found them in the weight room, they found them in the bathrooms...

Florida is its own Gothic.

(thanks to Steven Kaye)

When police could have turned seriously Gothic: a mad science idea from 1930

In 1930 American police could have become even more disturbing that they already were.  A real estate speculator won a patent for "a new and useful apparatus for obtaining confessions from culprits". 

What was that apparatus?  A giant mechanical skeleton with glowing red eyes, combined with a human interrogator shouting questions through a megaphone and audio-visual recording built into the skeleton's skull.

Like so:

How would this work?  According to the patent's author, one Helen Shelby,

The skeleton is arranged in front of the panel, with its feet resting upon the glass top of the light chamber, the lights mounted in this chamber being adapted to flood the entire skeleton from the feet up, while a second source of light mounted upon the panel over the skull of the skeleton... is adapted for additional flooding from an opposite direction, the purpose being to produce the appearance of an apparition having a translucent outer, or astral body, and a diaphanous veiling constituting the so-called aura, the lighting being of a character adapted to flood with a ghostly light and to bring out clearly the skeleton's outlines.

As the patent's diagram has it,

As a bonus, or "[t]o add to the mystification, the bulbs, forming the eyes of the skeleton, will be caused to blink, upon the subject's replying to questions while under examination, this blinking resulting from the variations in the sound waves as governed by the microphones controlling the electric circuits".

So it's one part The Shadow (first appeared in 1930, same year as this patent), one part Batman (appeared less than a decade later, and famously argued that "Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot"), and one part Dr. Mabuse (1921).

(thanks to Jesse "Watch Where You Put That Megaphone" Walker)