Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Mysterious sphere appears on Japanese beach

A mysterious iron ball washed up on a Japanese beach.

Popular reactions sketch out our era's attitudes and obsessions:

There were suggestions it resembled something from the popular manga series Dragon Ball, while others believed it was a UFO that had fallen from the sky.

TV footage of the object prompted speculation on social media, coming so soon after Japan said it “strongly suspected” several Chinese spy balloons had been spotted over its territory in recent years.

Naturally this would make a fine opening for an alien invasion story.

 

Another mysterious severed foot appears

Another severed human foot has appeared, and police turn to the public for assistance with a very Infocultish mystery.

Sgt. Aaron Pomeroy with the Richmond Police Department said the foot was found Saturday at 2:45 p.m. on Point San Pablo Beach, north of Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It's a right foot, likely a size 6 or 7 that belonged to a woman or small man, he said. 

We at Infocult have been following mysteriously separated body parts for a while.

(thanks to Steven "No Achilles Heel" Kaye)

Wisconsin Gothic

The American state of Wisconsin offered today's case of real-life Gothic.  Police arrested a "renegade nurse" and charged a facility with cruelty over horrendous and fatal mistreatment of a man.

The summary:

a renegade nurse cut off a man's foot without his consent and wanted to have it stuffed in her family's taxidermy shop and put on display to warn children to "wear your boots" in cold weather.

The details make things worse.  The unfortunate man was already in awful shape, as "frostbite... left his feet blackened and necrotic."  In the facility, it was time for horror:

According to a criminal complaint, the man's foot at that point was hanging on by a tendon and roughly two inches of skin. However, a nurse who changed his bandages said he could still wiggle his toes the day Brown cut off his foot, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Still, nursing home staff failed to notify hospice or a doctor of the man's condition after the fall, even though the man was so delirious he could not take his morphine pills, according to the inspection report.

On May 27, Brown unilaterally decided to amputate the foot for his "comfort," despite other nurses advising her against it. When Brown entered the man's room with two nursing aides to change his bandages, she "cut the victim's tendon, which amputated his right foot completely," using bandage scissors. One of the nursing aides would later testify to state officials that the man "felt everything and it hurt very bad."

Things got worse from there.  First, what the nurse wanted to do with the... materials:

Brown reportedly put the foot in a biohazard bag and placed it in a freezer. A nursing assistant at the facility told investigators that Brown later pressured her to retrieve the foot because Brown wanted to preserve it in her family's taxidermy shop and display it with a sign saying, "Wear your boots, kids."

Then how the enterprise responded:

Leadership at the nursing home, meanwhile, failed to respond to the incident properly, according to the state report. According to federal regulations, the nursing home should have reported the incident to state authorities within 24 hours. But, it took the nursing home a full week to report the incident. At that point, an anonymous complaint had already alerted the state, and the man had died.

Such a cluster of horrors in one horrendous story: body horror (both the decay and the amputation), violation of deep trust, and inhumane treatment of the sick.

(thanks to Steven "no scissors" Kaye)

A vampire's face, reconstructed, allegedly

What might a vampire look like?

A partnership between a business and the military offered an interesting answer to this Gothic question.  Parabon NanoLabs and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory started with the remains of a 19th century Connecticut man whose unusual burial suggested the locals considered him a vampire.  Researchers then proceeded:

Based on DNA analysis, the researchers predicted that Barber had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, and brown or black hair, per a statement from Parabon. Then, using the predictions and a 3-D image of the skull, a forensic artist reconstructed Barber’s face.

Behold the resuit:

 

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Denying devil worship, or today in Gothic politics

Today in Gothic politics, a note from Brazil:

Take a look at point 2.

A quick run to Google Translate for "Lula nao tem pacto nem jamais conversou com o diabo" yields "Lula has no pact nor has he ever talked to the devil."

Why deny it?  Apparently rumors and slurs flew. There was at least one metaphorical charge of devil dealing.  Lula's present campaign has had to deny any Faustismo.

A sinkhole claims a human victim

A man perished in a sinkhole, seemingly continuing Gaia's earthly war against humanity.

The event took place in Israel, and involved a sinkhole opening up within a swimming pool:

Mobile phone video from the scene shows floaties and water being sucked to the bottom, at the center of the pool, as people sitting by the poolside shout in Hebrew. A man is seen approaching the sinkhole, slips and is almost pulled in before he backs away.

A dreadful way to die.

(thanks to Steven "No Floaties" Kaye)

The earliest cannibalism

Researchers claim to have discovered evidence of the oldest known acts of cannibalism.  The creatures eating each other were trilobites, roughly 500 million years ago.

The paper documents damage caused by trilobites whacking and chewing on each other from different directions, then digesting the gnawed off bits.

Evidence for cannibalistic violence:

A total of 38 injured specimens exhibiting various healed cephalic and thoracic injuries are documented, in addition to the mangled remains of two individuals that probably resulted from the activities of a durophagous predator or scavenger. Specimens of both species show that most injuries are located on the posterior portion of the thorax, indicating that predators preferentially attacked from behind and/or prey individuals presented the posterior of the trunk towards the predator when threatened or fleeing. The larger sample of injured R. takooensis shows that while unilateral injuries are more common than bilateral ones, there is no evidence for a left- or right-side bias, contrasting with previous suggestions that Cambrian trilobites exhibit right-sided injury stereotypy. 

Nature: Gothic from the very start.

 

Real-life Gothic headline of the day

The American state of Ohio continues to offer real-life Gothic evidence, as seen by this story:

Man arrested while dismembering ex-girlfriend, police say

That headline actually describes the article's contents pretty clearly. 

Police responded to a domestic call Friday morning at an apartment complex in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania. ... Clifton Heights Police Chief Timothy Rockenbach says a neighbor called 911 after hearing “loud screaming” and other noises coming from the couple’s apartment....

When they went to the back of the home and looked inside, authorities say they found 32-year-old Nicholas Scurria decapitating his former girlfriend...

The world is Gothic, when you look at it the right way and at the right time.

 

New lifeforms invent new form of reproduction

The annals of horror include more than a few tales of mad science.  Some are fictional; others are not.

To begin with, scientists created life, again:

Formed from the stem cells of the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) from which it takes its name, xenobots are less than a millimeter (0.04 inches) wide. The tiny blobs were first unveiled in 2020 after experiments showed that they could move, work together in groups and self-heal.

Then that life created a new way to reproduce itself:

the xenobots, which were initially sphere-shaped and made from around 3,000 cells, could replicate. But it happened rarely and only in specific circumstances. The xenobots used "kinetic replication" -- a process that is known to occur at the molecular level but has never been observed before at the scale of whole cells or organisms...

Download Xenobotsparentrotatingalargeballofstemcells

Naturally science took a hand:

With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers then tested billions of body shapes to make the xenobots more effective at this type of replication. The supercomputer came up with a C-shape that resembled Pac-Man, the 1980s video game. They found it was able to find tiny stem cells in a petri dish, gather hundreds of them inside its mouth, and a few days later the bundle of cells became new xenobots.

We can leave the possibilities to the reader's imagination.  Well, with this extra detail: "The research was partially funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency."

Sinkhole eats car in Mumbai

The Earth continued her subterranean war on the human race this week, opening a sinkhole in Mumbai and devouring a car in it.

It turns out that the water was from a well, over which people erected a concrete slab.

The residents said the building was constructed more than 80 years ago and the concrete portion around 40 years ago. It was built over a well that supplies water to the residents of Ramnivas building.

“Half of the well was covered with the concrete portion, while a part of it was kept open. Everyone parks cars there, and this is the first time that a portion of it caved in,” said [car owner] Doshi.

Check the video for the eerie ease with which Gaia consumes a human artifact.

(thanks to Steven "Moleman" Kaye)