Zombies from World War Z

Like that scene from World War Z, the relentless horde of the undead has breached the walls of the ivory tower of academia and is now feasting on the brainiest of humans.

"It is clearly now acceptable to study zombies seriously," said Kyle Bishop of Southern Utah University's English department. Bishop, now the chairman of the department, has used zombies to conduct academic research. He turned his dissertation into an academic treatise called American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture.

According to Erica Phillips of The Wall Street Journal, there are now 20 new scholarly books with "zombie" in the title or topic category. JSTOR, an online archive of academic journals, reported that there are 39 articles featuring the undead since 2005, versus 7 in the preceeding 10 years.

Cal State Northridge economics professor Glen Whitman is working on the "Economics of the Undead," in which he explored the issues of the use of resources in an apocalyptic event. Professor Robert J. Smith? (yes, the question mark is part of his name - don't ask) of the Department of Mathematics and Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa has written a mathematical paper on how humanity could survive a zombie outbreak.

Similarly, colleges are offering more and more courses on zombies. Philosophy professor Christopher Moreman of California State University, East Bay, has taught a class in which students examine Buddhist imagery in zombie movies, which reflect the religion's meditation on mortality.

Warning Zombies Inside Wall Decals from the NeatoShop's Zombie Shop

There is a backlash from other academics, who considered the zombie trend as ominous. "They end up invariably turning their attention away from the tradition," said English professor Mark Bauerlein who also penned the book "The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future." Nevertheless, zombie scholars defend their subject of study as a valid one given the preponderance of the living dead as a theme in human history and its ubiquity in modern literature and culture.

Read the rest over at The Wall Street Journal.

Jupiter moon Europa. Image: NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOUR EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

That warning, as given in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two novel, was pretty explicit but apparently it is going to go unheeded by NASA.

According to Space.com, NASA wants to launch a mission to Europa by 2025. Yesterday's White House 2015 federal budget request allocates $15 million to develop a space program to visit the icy moon of Jupiter, which has a potentially life-supporting ocean of liquid water underneath its icy exterior.

"Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high radiation environment, and there's lots to do to prepare for it," said NASA chief financial officer Beth Robinson. "We're looking to launch sometime in the mid-2020s."

Artist's concept of the Europa Clipper mission. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While the space program is wide open, one candidate project is NASA's Europa Clipper, a probe that would orbit Jupiter and make flyby trips to Europa to study the moon's environment. An exciting potential is to have the probe cruise through Europa's 125-mile-high water plumes, spotted by Hubble back in December 2013, to collect and analyze samples.

Artist's concept of Europa water vapor plume. Image: NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI

Image: The New England Journal of Medicine

Doctors have removed teeth from the brain of a 4-month-old infant. In what is believed to be the first in medical history, the teeth are formed as a result of a rare type of brain tumor.

"It's not every day you see teeth in any type of tumor in the brain," Dr. Narlin Beaty, a neurosurgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center who performed the surgery, said to Live Science.

The tumor, according to Beaty, is a craniopharyngioma, a rare brain tumor that can grow to be larger than a golf ball and is known to contain calcium deposits. "But when we pulled out a full tooth ... I think that's something slightly different," added Beaty.

The child is doing well, all things considered. Live Science has the full story.

Can't open the door? Use the side entrance, Luke. I suppose this is one way to weed out those who don't belong to the Jedi Academy.

Via Neatorama's Facebook page, where we have tons more of these kind of neat pics!

Youtuber Smoukahontas doesn't understand Finnish, Swedish, Estonian, French, Portuguese, UK English, Japanese, Spanish, US English, Hindi, and Arabic, but she speaks 'em well! Watch as the young lady "speaks" the various languages by simply mimicking their tones of speech (Too bad she doesn't speak Cantonese - that sounds like berating to me).

I think she nailed "Pizza," which I believe is spoken by Mario and Luigi.

If you like that, here are a couple from our previous posts on Neatorama:

Remember how John Travolta butchered Idina Menzel's name during the Oscars? Ever wonder how he'd do with your name? You won't have to wonder any longer, thanks to this Adele Dazeem name generator from Slate.

So. What's your Travoltified name?

If you need a refresher, here's Travolta's introduction of Menzel:

Photo: SAT0725/reddit

Maybe we should take the stairs instead.

To advertise its new show in Brazil, National Geographic commissioned this optical illusion advert that shows a 3-D crocodile waiting at the bottom of the escalator. The ad campaign for Wild World with Richard Rasmussen asked the escalator users "Ready for ad adventure through the Brazilian forest?"

Well, at least it's only one croc. That's nothing compared to what Australians have to deal with:

Are you a geek or a nerd? Wait. Before you answer that, be sure that you know where those words actually come from.

Thanks to this entertaining YouTube video clip from our pal Today I Found Out, we now know the origins of the words "geek" and "nerd" (hint: Dr. Seuss made one of them up, see which one.)

Despite what you may have seen in the movies, Godzilla is actually pretty cool. Except when he's hungry - so let's keep Tokyo safe from destruction by having some snack handy when you're out partying with the king of kaijus, as shown in this Snickers commercial.

A couple of trailers of the upcoming Godzilla movie:

(Photo: Marvin Muller)

In a battle of snake versus crocodile, who'd win*?

Witness Tiffany Corlis observed a 10-foot snake (probably a python) and a crocodile's fight to the death at Lake Moondarra, near Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and took these amazing snapshots of the battle.

(Photo: Tiffany Corlis)

Corlis told the BBC, "We saw the snake fighting with the crocodile - it would roll the crocodile around to get a better grip, and coil its body around the crocodile's legs to hold it tight. The fight began in the water - the crocodile was trying to hold its head out of the water at one time, and the snake was constricting it. After the crocodile had died, the snake uncoiled itself, came around to the front, and started to eat the crocodile, face-first."

(Photo: Tiffany Corlis)

The fight, according to snake expert Bryan Fry of University of Queensland's School of Biological Science, is actually not unusual. Water pythons, Fry said, usually target smaller animals and rodents and have been known to attack small fresh water crocodiles. "Crocs are more dangerous to catch but easier to sneak up on, "Fry mentioned to Brisbane Time, "The problem is they are risking being injured or killed, so they have to be judicious."

We've told you about the awesome AT-AT rocker that our multi-talented pal Jen Yates of EPBOT and Cake Wrecks in our big The Best Geek-Themed Baby Nurseries and Nursery Decorations post over at Homes & Hues, but the completion of this epic project warrants another look here.

Jen has finished painting the AT-AT rocker, and the result is awesome! The rocker looks like it's ready for the Battle of Hoth.

Jen said:

We added a seat back and extra sturdy T-bar handle for safety, plus some extra-long bumpers on the bottom rails to prevent the rocker from rocking too far.

The rail bumpers might not be necessary for an older and/or more adventurous child, but our 4-year-old test subject Isaiah was afraid of rocking backward, so the stops helped him feel more secure. The bumpers are glued on with construction adhesive, so they're quite strong, but in the future they can be popped off with a hammer.

And if you're salivating for the build pics, Jen won't disappoint you:

It's your lucky day: you've just found a $20 bill. What would you spend it on? Would you get yourself a hot lunch? Maybe a video game?

Eight-year-old Myles Eckert was so excited when he found a $20 bill in the parking lot of his neighborhood Cracker Barrel restaurant. "I kind of wanted to get a video game," the young boy told CBS news, "but I decided not to."

Myles changed his mind when he saw Lt. Col. Frank Dailey in uniform, having an early lunch at the same restaurant. The soldier reminded Myles of his late father.

"Because he was a soldier, and soldiers remind me of my dad," Myles explained why he wrapped the $20 he found with a green note that said:

Dear Soldier -- my dad was a soldier. He's in heaven now. I found this 20 dollars in the parking lot when we got here. We like to pay it forward in my family. It's your lucky day! Thank you for your service. Myles Eckert, a gold star kid.

After lunch, Myles asked his mom to make one more stop. "He wanted to see his dad," the boy's mom Tiffany said, "And he wanted to go by himself that day."

Steve Hartman of CBS Evening News has the story:

The caption is a bit small, so let me spell it out for you:

Gordon College student Brenda [lastname] settles down to work in her dorm in Lynn, where she takes part in the Wenham school's outreach program.

Guess what kind of work she's settled down to do - Via Bad Newspaper

Paul Gauguin once remarked that the reason he became a great painter was because of all the suffering he has endured, so we're confident that Latvian photographer Kaija Straumanis is on her way to become a great artist by the looks of her photography series "Stuff Being Thrown at My Head."

Like it said on the tin, Kaija photographs herself, capturing her facial expressions at the moment of impact of being hit in the head by various objects.

I'm no computer programmer, but even I know that Stanford computer scientist Donald Knuth is legendary. And now, thanks to his view on email, I'm proud to count him as one of my heroes.

Here's Donald Knuth's awesome relationship to email, which he explained in his website under an article titled Knuth versus Email:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

If you want to communicate with Knuth, you'd have to do so by snail mail, which he will read and perhaps respond to in about three months:

On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months.

Hate snail mail? There's the fax machine, but Knuth added, "be warned that I look at incoming fax mail last, perhaps only once every six months instead of three."

Email, that form of electronic communication, has unfortunately become a public to-do list that anyone can add to. Perhaps Umberto Eco has the best perspective on email when he said, "I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages."

See also: Alphabet of Computing | Fun and Unusual Units of Measurements (where Knuth coined the unusual measurements of potrzebie and whatmeworry).