Coozer-Bits.

Creepy: New spider arrival quickly spreading.

Awesome: Lottery wins come easy if you can spot the loopholes.

D'oh: Three self-delusions that influence your decisions and productivity.

Yipes: Kate Winslet escapes fire at Richard Branson's luxury island retreat.

ZombieWatch: Cat urine turns rats into zombie prey.

ZombieWatch: Man wakes up in morgue after being mistaken for dead.

From NY Daily News:

An unconscious South African man, presumed dead by relatives, had a rude awakening Sunday when he came to his senses in a morgue, officials said.

His cries for help terrified employees at the mortuary in the Eastern Cape province of Libode.

"Two workers heard screaming from the refrigerators," Sizwe Kupelo, a spokesperson for the Eastern Cape Health Department, told ABC News. "They thought it was a ghost and they ran for their lives."

The man, who did not want his name released but is described as a grandfather in his 60s, had apparently suffered an asthma attack and fell unconscious.

"The family called a private undertaker who took what they thought was a dead body to the morgue," Kupelo said, according to South Africa's News24.

Relatives did not call paramedics, but instead phoned the mortuary, assuming he was dead. The morgue's owner told The Associated Press that the worker who picked up the supposedly dead man "examined the body, checked his pulse, looked for a heartbeat, but there was nothing."

Ayanda Maqolo was there when the elderly man woke up and started screaming after having been in the refrigerator with other corpses for at least 21 hours.

"He asked, 'How did I get here?'" the owner recalled the man saying. The owner added that the chilling experience even gave him "nightmares."

"I couldn't sleep last night," he told AP. "But today I'm much better."

ZombieWatch: New virus jumps from monkey to lab worker.

From Science:

It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy.

Adenoviruses are relatively large DNA viruses—as opposed to many other viruses that replicate using RNA—that commonly cause colds and respiratory infections in humans. They're also responsible for a variety of illnesses in cattle, dogs, horses, pigs, and other animals, but scientists thought the viruses and their ailments couldn't jump between species.

Then, on 14 May 2009, a healthy adult male titi monkey—a small, reddish-brown species that calls much of South America home—came down with a cough at the Davis primate center and soon became lethargic and wouldn't eat. Staff members gave the animal intravenous fluids and antibiotics, but its condition worsened, and after 5 days staff members euthanized him. Four weeks later, another titi monkey came down with the same symptoms. Then another. And another. Within 2 months, 23 of the 65-strong population had become sick, and 19 eventually died. A team led by infectious diseases researcher Charles Chiu of the University of California, San Francisco, analyzed lung tissue samples from the dead monkeys and identified a never-before-seen adenovirus, which they named titi monkey adenovirus (TMAdV).

But where did the virus come from? It's unlikely it originated in the titi monkeys themselves, Chiu says: "Hosts that are that susceptible to a disease are not likely to be its originators." So the researchers asked whether any lab workers had been sick during that period. One person, who had had close daily contact with the monkeys, reported coming down with a fever, chills, a headache, a dry cough, and a burning sensation in her lungs—hallmarks of the kinds of respiratory infection commonly caused by adenoviruses. Two of her family members reported similar, though less severe, symptoms in subsequent weeks.

Neither the lab worker nor her family members sought medical attention, and all recovered within 4 weeks, after which it was too late for researchers to swab for traces of the adenoviruses directly. Instead, they examined the patients' blood for antibodies and compared them with those found in the infected monkeys. The lab worker and one of her family members showed a match, suggesting that the monkeys gave the virus to the lab worker or vice versa. But when the team tested a representative set of 81 blood samples from donors in the western United States, none had antibodies. That suggests humans weren't the source of the outbreak either.

Woman dies at her own funeral.

From Daily Mail:

A woman died from a heart attack caused by shock after waking up to discover she had been declared dead - and was being prepared for burial.

As mourning relatives filed past her open coffin the supposedly dead woman suddenly woke up and started screaming as she realised where she was.

Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, 49, had been wrongly declared deceased by doctors but died for real after hearing mourners saying prayers for her soul to be taken up to heaven in Kazan, Russia.

CDC releases zombie apocalypse guidelines.

From the Daily Mail:

The next time a decaying corpse approaches you in the street, you'll know what to do.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has posted guidance telling people what to do in a ‘zombie apocalypse’ - and they don’t advise shooting the walking dead.

A light-hearted blog post by the organisation said U.S. citizens should prepare an emergency kit and then look for a zombie-free refugee camp.

But the Zombie Apocalypse campaign has a serious side as it intends to familiarise Americans with disaster preparedness techniques for the hurricane season.

‘There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for,’ wrote infectious disease specialist Dr Ali Khan. ‘Take a zombie apocalypse for example.

‘You may laugh now, but when it happens you'll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you'll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.’

The blog post drove so much traffic that it crashed the website on Thursday, and it came just days before an evangelist’s prediction of the May 21 ‘Judgment Day’.

‘If you prepare for the zombie apocalypse, you'll be prepared for all hazards,’ a CDC spokesman said.

The CDC said disaster preparedness involves putting together an emergency kit, coming up with an emergency plan and having two meet-up spots.

It recommends an emergency kit should include water, food, medication, battery-powered radio, a utility knife and vital documents.

Fungus turns ants into zombies at high noon.

I've been following the zombie ant story for awhile, and these new details are even weirder than usual. From Penn State Live:

New research has revealed how infection by a parasitic fungus dramatically changes the behavior of tropical of carpenter ants (species Camponotus leonardi), causing them to become zombie-like and to die at a spot that has optimal reproduction conditions for the fungus. The multinational research team studied ants living high up in the rainforest canopy in Thailand. A paper describing the research was published in the BioMed Central open-access journal BMC Ecology on May 9.

"The behavior of these infected zombie ants essentially causes their bodies to become an extension of the fungus's own phenotype, as non-infected ants never behave in this way," said David P. Hughes, the first author of the research paper and an assistant professor of entomology and biology at Penn State.

Using transmission-electron and light microscopes, the researchers were able to look inside the ant in order to determine the effect of the fungus on the ant. They found that the growing fungus fills the ant's body and head, causing muscles to atrophy and forcing muscle fibres to spread apart. The fungus also affects the ant's central nervous system. The scientists observed that, while normal worker ants rarely left the trail, zombie ants walked in a random manner, unable to find their way home. The ants also suffered convulsions, which caused them to fall to the ground. Once on the ground, the ants were unable to find their way back to the canopy and remained at the lower, leafy understory area which, at about 9 or 10 inches (25 cm) above the soil, was cooler and moister than the canopy, provided ideal conditions for the fungus to thrive.

The scientists found that at solar noon, when the Sun is at its strongest, the fungus synchronised ant behavior, forcing infected ants to bite the main vein on the underside of a leaf. The multiplying fungal cells in the ant's head cause fibres within the muscles that open and close the ant's mandibles to become detached, causing "lock jaw," which makes an infected ant unable to release the leaf, even after death. A few days later, the fungus grows through the ant's head a fruiting body, a stroma, which releases spores to be picked up by another wandering ant.

Grisly voodoo masks found in Steinway mansion.

This sounds like a good beginning to Ghostbusters III. From NY Post:

Auctioneers clearing out the historic Steinway Mansion have made a grisly discovery -- a voodoo doll and voodoo masks hidden in the fabled Astoria landmark.

Experts made the chilling find in the Queens mansion, which was home to the Steinway piano family until the 1920s, as they cleared the attic following the death of its last owner, Michael Halberian, who lived there for 82 years and died in December.

Halberian's children brought in auctioneer Michael Capo to sell the mansion's contents, including items left behind by the Steinway family. He told us, "It is eerie. We were clearing out the far reaches of the attic when we came across what looks like a late-19th-century wooden box or trunk.

"We broke the lock and inside we found five voodoo masks and a doll surrounded by rusty nails in a little coffin. I don't know if the masks are made out of wax, pigskin or even real skin. This thing has some energy, and I am not sure that it's good energy.

"Everyone went silent. We are professionals, but nobody wants to go near this thing. It is scary. Clearly, somebody used this in some sort of ceremony, because there's a mirror inside the lid so the image could be reflected to others in the room.

"The Halberians do not think one of their relatives would have owned this. I think it had been there since the late 19th century. It was hidden away in an area where the owner wouldn't necessarily go, so perhaps a member of the domestic staff kept it there."

The 27-room palace, packed with such objects as telescopes, barometers and old maps, was built by Benjamin T. Pike Jr. in 1858. In the early 1870s, Pike's widow sold it to the Steinway family, which had begun moving its piano-making facilities to Astoria from Manhattan. Tailor Jack Halberian bought the mansion at auction in the 1920s after the Steinways moved out. It's now up for sale for $2.5 million.

Capo will auction off the first lot on March 26 but adds, "I don't know if we are going to sell the voodoo masks yet. I think we'll hold on to [them] and get some research done. There's a dark story here."

Zombie ants controlled by fungus.

Anyone else horrified by the last paragraph? Yeah, let's find zombie fungus and bring it back to civilization to study. What could go wrong? From National Geographic:

A stalk of the newfound fungus species Ophiocordyceps camponoti-balzani, grows out of a "zombie" ant's head in a Brazilian rain forest.

Originally thought to be a single species, called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus is actually four distinct species—all of which can "mind control" ants—scientists announced Wednesday.

The fungus species can infect an ant, take over its brain, and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow and spread their spores.

All four known fungi species live in Brazil's Atlantic rain forest, which is rapidly changing due to climate change and deforestation, said study leader David Hughes, an entomologist at Penn State University.

Hughes and colleagues made the discovery after noticing a wide diversity of fungal growths emerging from ant victims, according to the March 2 study in the journal PLoS ONE.

"It is tempting to speculate that each species of fungus has its own ant species that it is best adapted to attack," Hughes said.

"This potentially means thousands of zombie fungi in tropical forests across the globe await discovery," he said. "We need to ramp up sampling—especially given the perilous state of the environment."

Voodoo sex romp sets Brooklyn apartment on fire.

From NY Daily News:

A couple engaged in a voodoo sex romp in Brooklyn set off the weekend blaze that killed a woman and left dozens homeless, sources said.

A woman paid $300 to a voodoo priest on the fourth floor of the apartment building on E. 29th St. She wanted him to perform a mystical ceremony that would bring her luck, the sources said.

The voodoo priest placed candles on the floor around the bed on Saturday. He lit the candles then the couple began having sex. Candles were accidentally knocked over, igniting bed sheets and their recently discarded clothes.

Instead of calling 911, the man conducting the ceremony tried to put out the fire using water from the bathroom sink, the FDNY said in a statement.

Someone else in the apartment opened a window and a door leading to the building's hallway, creating wind gusts that "shot the flames back inside, creating a blowtorch effect," fire officials said.

Flames tore through the fourth, fifth and sixth floors, causing one of the floors to collapse. A resident on the top floor, Mary Feagin, a 64-year-old retired teacher, died in the blaze.

Twenty firefighters and 11 residents were injured and 47 families were left homeless.

Without referring to the sex, Fire Commission Salvatore Cassano lamented the series of errors that lead to the fire.

"Time and time again we respond to tragedies that could have been so easily prevented," he said. "This fire had so many of those elements - candles left on the floor near combustible material, one of the occupants trying to douse the flames before calling 911 and an open door, which allowed fire to spread into the hallway."

No one has been charged.

"Hopefully others will learn from this tragedy," Cassano said.

Utah army base loses vial of military's most lethal nerve agent.

It's still legal to use weaponized nerve agents? From the NY Daily News:

The Army gave the all-clear Thursday after loosing track overnight of a vial of lethal VX nerve agent at a Utah base.

An emergency lockdown went into effect around 6 p.m. Wednesday at the sprawling Dugway Proving Grounds when the vial turned up missing during a routine inventory check.

More than 1,000 employees were held at the base southwest of Salt Lake City as military officials launched a frantic search.

The missing vial was found on the base around 3 a.m.

A military spokesman said "all personnel are uninjured and safe. The public is safe as well."

The vial contained less than 1 milliliter, or roughly a quarter-teaspoon, of the VX, considered the deadliest agent in the military's arsenal.

Earlier in the day, military officials mysteriously said the shutdown went into effect amid a "serious concern."

Armed sentries blocked the entrances while Army officials refused to say what prompted the lockdown.

"No one is in immediate danger but these steps are required," Col. William King IV, the base commander, said at the time.

Dugway is used by the Army Reserves and the U.S. National Guard for training, and the base also serves as a bombing range.

The Army Test and Evaluation Command center also conducts training and tests of defenses against biological and chemical weapons attacks.

Ultra-rare lunar eclipse tomorrow.

From AOL News:

As many as 1.5 billion people worldwide will be able to watch when the Earth's shadow creeps across the moon's surface early Tuesday morning, the first time in hundreds of years that a lunar eclipse will fall on the winter solstice.

With the full moon high in the winter sky, the lunar eclipse will be visible from four continents, with the best views from North America and Central America if weather permits, scientists say.

"It's a really democratic event," Andrew Fraknoi, the chairman of astronomy at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, told the San Francisco Chronicle, "because you don't need an expensive telescope or any other sophisticated equipment to enjoy the spectacle -- just your eyes or, if you like, a pair of binoculars."

Unlike a solar eclipse, eclipses of the moon can usually be observed anywhere in the hemisphere where the moon is above the horizon.

This particular lunar eclipse also may be seen in totality from northern and western Europe, some of northeast Asia, Hawaii and New Zealand, according to Space.com. In total, some 1.5 billion people may have a chance to see the full eclipse, the website reported.

Total lunar eclipses during winter in the northern hemisphere are fairly common, NASA says. However, a lunar eclipse falling precisely on the date of the solstice is quite rare.

Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory inspected a list of eclipses going back 2000 years for NASA.

"Since Year 1, I can only find one previous instance of an eclipse matching the same calendar date as the solstice, and that is 1638 DEC 21," Chester said, according to NASA. "Fortunately we won't have to wait 372 years for the next one ... that will be on 2094 DEC 21."

Meteor fireball spotted in skies over Britain.

From BBC News:

Stargazers throughout the UK have reported seeing a meteor-like streak of light in the darkened skies.

The BBC was contacted by people in Scotland, the Midlands, Wales, and northern and south west England who saw the display at about 1740 GMT.

One witness driving home from work in Coventry said the light was a bit scary because it was so "incredibly bright".

Astronomers said the brightness of the meteor, a chunk of space rock burning up in the atmosphere, was unusual.

Dr David Whitehouse, astronomer and former BBC correspondent, said: "It's a bright meteor called a fireball, extraordinarily bright.

"This a chunk of space rock perhaps the size of your fist, perhaps a bit larger, that is burning up as it comes through our atmosphere at an altitude of 60 or 70 miles or so.

"So it sounds extraordinary if you're very lucky enough to have seen it. It's quite rare."

Dr Edward Bloomer, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said the fireball was probably part of the Geminids meteor shower, which happens every year, appears to radiate from the constellation Gemini and will peak on 14 December.

"We are passing through the trail of the comet, and the material that's in the tail burns up when it comes into contact with the Earth's atmosphere," he said.

"A fireball is rather exotic and because it is bigger, it glows brighter and takes longer to break up."

Coozer-Bits.

ZombieWatch: 10 uses for your body after you die.

ZombieWatch: Spirit of the dead alive and well in Haiti.

Science: Hints of lightweight dark matter particle found in space.

Misc: Stewart/Colbert rally schedule revealed.

Awesome: Time traveler talking on cell phone caught in 1920s Charlie Chaplin film.

Zombies invade NYC during morning rush hour.

From Yahoo! News:

NEW YORK – As if the morning commute wasn't odd enough, intrepid New Yorkers trying to make their way to work on Tuesday had to battle past hordes of the walking dead. Two dozen zombies, their clothes spattered with fake blood, were staggering up and down the block outside Madison Square Garden. Downtown, others shuffled across the Brooklyn Bridge.

Some pedestrians looked startled or amused by the ghost-white actors with bruised-looking eyes. Some people ignored them entirely. Others whipped out their cell phone cameras.

Horror movie fan Linda Emery was thrilled to see the creatures.

"I'm into zombies, anything with zombies," said the 58-year-old home care provider from Brooklyn. It made a change from her usual commute.

"You see a lot of stuff, but not this stuff," she said.

Erik Machado, an audio engineer heading to work in New Jersey, was unfazed and passed by the scene with nary a glance at the nightmares walking around.

"Gotta commute, gotta go where I gotta go," the Queens resident said.

The stunt was part of a campaign in 26 cities worldwide promoting the Halloween premiere of the AMC television series "The Walking Dead." The show is being broadcast outside of the United States on Fox International Channels.

At one point, about 15 zombies crawled on the roof, hood and trunk of a parked, off-duty taxi.

Taxi driver David Pollack managed to escape from the horde, scrambling out of the back seat, playing along with the drama of it all.

"I think I'm going to be walking over the George Washington Bridge and heading over to Jersey, hopefully they haven't gotten there yet," he said.

He added, "I'm a tough New Yorker, but I don't mess with zombies."

Zombie Watch: Decomposing corpse wakes up.

From News.com.au:

An elderly woman police found "dead" on the bathroom floor of her Maryland home woke up several hours later as an employee from the State Anatomy Board went to collect her remains.

The woman, 89-year-old Ruth Shillinglaw Johnson, lay on the floor for three hours while officers notified her family, doctor and the medical examiner of her death, The Capital in Annapolis reported.

According to the police report, they noticed an odor "similar to a decomposition smell" in the house on October 1 after being called by a neighbour who had not seen the woman for a few days.

When they found Ms Johnson she was reportedly blue and not breathing. The officers did not check for a pulse because they believed she had been dead for a number of days.

Police learned from her son that Ms Johnson had made arrangements with the State Anatomy Board to donate her body for science - and it was when the board's employee came to collect her that she woke up.

Ms Johnson was taken to the Baltimore Washington Medical Center for medical treatment and was discharged on Wednesday.

Colorado ghost town marks 100th anniversary.

From the Denver Post:

DEARFIELD — All that remains of the house where Albert Groves once lived is a pile of weathered lumber close to the still- standing home of the man who founded this long-dead African-American farming community.

"I learned to drive a car up and down this dirt road," Groves, 83, told a small group of people who came to help celebrate the ghost town's 100th anniversary.

On Sunday, re-enactors dressed as Buffalo Soldiers — African-American soldiers who served in the Southwest and the Great Plains during the Indian Wars — assembled at the settlement to help unveil a granite marker in honor of its history.

Though Groves' home has been destroyed, at least three of the buildings that remain have been stabilized. Some restoration work has been done on the home of founder Oliver Toussaint "O.T." Jackson, said Bill Garcia, chairman of the Dearfield Centennial Committee.

The committee — composed of representatives from the Black American West Museum, the city of Greeley, the Greeley Museums, Weld County, Colorado Preservation Inc. and others — has worked to illuminate Dearfield's history.

The Black American West Museum has been working to stabilize and restore the few remaining structures in the town, which sits about 30 miles east of Greeley off U.S. 34.

Six buildings still stand, Garcia said.

Jackson filed a homestead claim for 320 acres in Weld County in 1910. Dr. J.H.P Westbrook named the colony Dearfield, saying the fields and homes "will be very dear to us."

The first settlers arrived in 1911. By 1920, as many as 300 people lived in the area.

The population began to dwindle after World War I, when men who went off to fight chose to move to larger cities rather than return home.

The Great Depression and the drought that created the Dust Bowl in the nation's heartland dealt the death blow.

Coozer-Bits.

Creepy: Japanese girl stabs 81-year-old to death on subway.

ZombieWatch: Scientists explore cannibal bacteria.

Lame: Race, insurance status cited in uneven death rates among pedestrians hit by cars.

Science: New bee species discovered in downtown Toronto.

Yipes: 70s superstar dies in freak hay bale accident.

Awesome: Scientists discovery why fish oils work well against inflammation and diabetes.

Boozalicious: Ancient civilization drank beer as antibiotics.

Untreatable superbug hits UK.

From Orange:

A 'superbug' that is resistant to the most powerful antibiotics has reached the UK.

Scientists are warning the bug, an enzyme called New Delhi-Metallo-1 (NDM-1), could spread across the world as nothing is being developed to treat it.

There has been 37 reported cases in the UK, mainly among patients who travelled to areas of Asia for cosmetic surgery, transplants and cancer treatment.

The bug can exist inside different bacteria, like E.coli, and cause infections in other parts of the body.

It can also move from one bacterium to another and experts are concerned it may attach itself to more dangerous diseases and cause them to become resistant to antibiotics.

The scientists, writing in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, said: "It has an alarming potential to spread and diversify."

Dr David Livermore, one of the researchers and who works for the UK's Health Protection Agency (HPA), said: "The NDM-1 problem is likely to get progressively worse in the foreseeable future.

"The potential for wider international spread and for NDM-1 to become endemic worldwide are clear and frightening."

Infections have already been passed from patient to patient in UK hospitals.

Researchers say the way to stop NDM-1 is to identify and isolate any patients who are infected.

Woman fakes own cremation with mannequin, cow parts.

From CBS News:

A former Los Angeles mortuary employee has been convicted of defrauding insurers by staging a fake funeral and attempting to cover it up by cremating a mannequin and cow parts she placed in the casket.

The U.S. attorney's office said Monday that 67-year-old Jean Crump was found guilty of two counts of wire fraud and one count of mail fraud.

Prosecutors say she and three accomplices took out bogus death certificates, purchased a burial plot, buried an empty casket and staged a funeral, then billed $1.2 million to insurance companies.

They say that when insurers investigated, Crump and her cohorts exhumed the coffin, filled it with a mannequin and cow parts and cremated it.

Her accomplices have pleaded guilty in the scam. Crump is to be sentenced Nov. 29.

Zombie Watch: German nobles created their own mummies.

From Der Spiegel:

When they died, Germany noble families of the 18th century did what the Egyptians had done before them: They had themselves mummified. As an increasing number of such well-preserved corpses are found, scientists are trying to find out why.

Baron von Holz had a difficult lot. During the Thirty Years' War, von Holz fought in the Swedish army as a mercenary, but he was not granted a hero's death on the battlefield. He was cut down, rather less heroically, at the age of 35 by either the flu or blood poisoning. And it was only in death, that his situation really improved.

His family dressed his mortal remains in precious calf-leather boots with nailed soles. The warrior was then laid out in a kind of luxury crypt under the castle of Sommersdorf near Ansbach, in modern-day Bavaria. In those vaults von Holz's corpse was privileged with an honor previously reserved primarily for Egyptian pharaohs: His body did not decompose.

More than 370 years after his untimely death, the nobleman still lies in his casket, well preserved. Von Holz was a giant of a man, standing 1.80 meters (around 5'10"), at a time when most humans were far shorter. To this day, his feet are still shod in those smart leather boots that his clan had made for him almost four centuries ago.