forum Yellow Plague - Worldwide Zombie Apocalypse (Open; 8/12)

Started April 10, 2018 by @Peter_Duende language

tune

(also there is no science to zombies.)

(You wanna really wanna bet?)
First things first: How does the zombie disease infect its victims? Many stories in the genre talk about biting, but Schlozman's novel imagines a deliberately engineered virus whose particles can travel in the air and remain potent enough to jump from one person to another in a single sneeze.

Now, then, to the brain-eating. The zombie virus as Schlozman describes it basically gnaws the brain down to the amygdala, an almond-shaped structure responsible for the "fight or flight" response. The zombies always respond by fighting because another critical part of the brain, the ventromedial hypothalamus, which tells you when you've eaten enough, is broken.

The brain's frontal lobes, responsible for problem-solving, are devoured by the virus, so zombies can't make complex decisions. Impairment in the cerebellum means they can't walk well, either. Also, these humanoids have an unexplained predilection for eating human flesh.

"The zombies in this book are stumbling, shambling, hungry as hell," Schlozman said. "Basically they're like drunk crocodiles; they're not smart, they don't know who you are or what you are."

Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies

How a zombie virus would be made

So the bloodthirsty undead wander (or crawl) around spreading a lethal illness ominously called ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome, or ANSD, for short.

"When something really terrifying comes along, especially in medicine or that has a medical feel to it, we always give it initials. That's the way we distance ourselves from it," Schlozman said.

The virus has several brain-destroying components, one of which is a "prion," meaning a protein like the one that causes mad cow disease. In real life, prions twist when they are in an acidic environment and become dangerous, Schlozman said. How our own environment has changed to make prions infectious – getting from the soil to the cows in mad cow disease, for instance – is still a mystery.

Now here's something to send chills up your spine: In Schlozman's world, airborne prions can be infectious, meaning mad cow disease and similar nervous-system destroyers could theoretically spread just like the flu. Swiss and German researchers recently found that mice that had only one minute of exposure to aerosols containing prions died of mad cow disease, as reported in the journal PLoS Pathogens. A follow-up described in Journal of the American Medical Association showed the same for a related disease that's only found in animals called scrapie. Of course, these are mice in artificially controlled conditions in a laboratory, and humans do not exhale prions, but it could have implications for safety practices nonetheless.

Like mad cow disease, the zombie disease Schlozman describes also progresses in acidic environments. In the book, a major corporation doles out implantable meters that infuse the body with chemicals to artificially lower acidity when it gets too high. But, sadly, when acidity is too low, that also induces symptoms that mimic the zombie virus, so it's not a longterm solution. Everyone who gets exposed eventually succumbs, Schlozman said.

As for the unknown component of the zombie disease that would help slowly zombifying researchers in their quest for a cure, that's up for the reader to figure out – and the clues are all in the book, Schlozman said.

How we'd fight back

You can't ethically round up fellow survivors to kick some zombie butt unless the undead have technically died. And in Schlozman's book, a group of religious leaders get together and decide that when people reach stage four of the disease, they are basically dead. That, of course, permits zombie "deanimation," or killing.

The 'zombie theology' behind the walking dead

And how do you kill a zombie? Much of zombie fiction knocks out zombies through shots to the head. That, Schlozman said, is because the brain stem governs the most basic functioning: breathing and heartbeat.

A zombie-apocalypse disease like the one he describes probably wouldn't evolve on its own in the real world, he said.

But, as we've seen, individual symptoms of zombies do correspond to real ailments. And if they all came together, the disease would be creepily efficient at claiming bodies, Schlozman said.

Bad news, folks: Even if people contracted a zombie virus through bites, the odds of our survival aren't great.

A mathematician at the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (who uses the question mark to distinguish himself from other Robert Smiths, of course), has calculated that if one zombie were introduced to a city of 500,000 people, after about seven days, every human would either be dead or a zombie.

"We're in big, big trouble if this ever happens," Smith? said. "We can kill the zombies a bit, but we're not very good at killing zombies fundamentally. What tends to happen is: The zombies just win, and the more they win, the more they keep winning" because the disease spreads so rapidly.

The best solution is a strategic attack, rather than an "every man for himself" defense scenario, he said. It would take knowledge and intelligence, neither of which zombies have, to prevail.

Why study zombies?

In his day job, Smith? models how real infectious diseases spread. But he's already reaped benefits from his work on zombies. For instance, while many mathematical models only deal with one complicated aspect of a situation at a time, he tackled two – zombie infection and zombie-killing – when it came to speculating about outbreaks.

When it came time for modeling of real-world human papillomavirus (HPV), then, Smith? felt equipped to handle many facets of it at the same time, such as heterosexual and homosexual transmission of HPV.

"Knowing what we knew from zombies allowed us to actually take on these more complicated models without fear," he said.

Studying zombies is also a great way to get young people excited about science. Smith?, who was on a zombie-science panel with Schlozman through the National Academy of Sciences' Science and Entertainment Exchange in 2009, has also seen math-phobic people get interested in mathematics by reading about his work with zombies.

"There are insights that we gain from the movies, and from fiction, from fun popular culture stuff, that actually can really help us think about the way that science works, and also the way science is communicated," he said.

And as to why people like reading about zombies and watching zombies so much, Schlozman points to the impersonal nature of things in our society, from waiting in line in the DMV to being placed on hold on a call with a health insurance company.

Think about all the situations in daily life where you sense a general lack of respect for humanity, and zombies make a little more sense.

"The zombies themselves represent a kind of commentary on modernity," Schlozman says. "We're increasingly disconnected. That might be the current appeal."

SO HOWS THAT FOR SCIENCE OR DO I HAVE TO BE MORE SPECIFIC!?!)

//…damn you are amazing

( If this doesn't change your mind, I went around asking people about what they thought. You remember that forest survival rp you joined a week ago. Well you can check it out there.

(I'm not huge on Zombies, but as I understand it, the whole concept on Zombies is that they are dead people whose souls have moved on, leaving the corporal body behind with no inkling of what's going on. They are totally clueless without souls, and so revert to what seems to make sense. Finding a food source to keep going is the only thing that remains of a thinking system. Does that make sense?) - @The Lavender Owl

(Do the zombies have their spirits back, because if not, they wont be able to work or even think) - @TheGoldenLegend

(Make sure to keep things cool, guys/gals, we don't want the next world catastrophe to happen on here. Wait….didn't I technically do that by starting this RP? :P - @Nerd_Girl2.0, if you accidentally post something, you can always delete the post to avoid confusion.)

Cash looks wildly in the direction the motorcycle went. The sounds of the Infected, the zombies, fade. Surely the kids who climbed the building aren't there anymore. He hopes so. He can't climb worth a hoot.
One of them had said something about the countryside. Fields. Something like that.
He wishes he had time to make his presence known to them all before chaos had started. He readjusts his backpack and in a moment's decision, heads in the direction that the motorcycle went.

( Also are we allowed to ship characters, it's been bugging me for awhile now?)

//I always ship people

(Cash is movin' fast! He hasn't seen people in so long. Not wanting to be alone again, you can be sure he's going to go as fast as he can to try to find you guys.
Yeah, though, the idea of zombies evolving and all that, we should scrap it. Abigail Dara, here's my advice. Either scrap your current character, or have her advance through the stages of the Plague (that'd be interesting), and you can have her killed off. Remember, you can have up to 3 characters at a time.)

Cash takes a greedy gulp from his water bottle without stopping his run; he grimaces at the warm liquid. His ears keep tricking him, telling him he hears voices, real, un-Infected voices, but when his eyes seek out their sources: nothing. He reaches a field just as a pain in his side grows to an extreme from the running. "Countryside." He says out loud.
He chooses a direction, praying all the way that it is right.