Bulgaria's Vampire Graveyards

From the Daily Beast:

In a 7,000-year-old town in Bulgaria, over 100 graves have been uncovered, revealing skeletons with stakes through their hearts and mutilated bones. Meet the vampires that almost were. 

Vampires may be greeted with swoons today, but in medieval Eastern Europe they were dealt a metal spike through the chest. 

Last week, Bulgarian archaeologists unearthed an unusual 13th-century grave in an ancient city named Thracian. 

The bones are encrusted in dirt, revealing a bowed, partially crushed skull and a round stake emerging from the left side of the skeleton’s chest. The interred is believed to be a middle-aged man, who was incapacitated post-death—cause unknown—by a two-pound iron rod thrust through his heart and the removal of the lower half of his left leg. Both mutilations were meant to stop the man, who villagers believed was a vampire, from returning to haunt the town and prey upon its inhabitants, researchers say.

Iron was believed to have special properties against the supernatural. Anyway, read the whole thing.

Final Score: Zombies 7, Humans 0

Detroit Silverdome (Source: the Daily Mail)

Graveyard of Boats and Ships

(Source: Daily Mail)

A graveyard of ships and boats near Manhattan. After the zombie apocalypse, what else could you find?

How to Survive Falling Through the Ice

It is winter. You are panting with fatigue because for the past 30 minutes you have been running and walking to get away from a band of zombies. The zombies have been moving slowly in the cold, but so have you because the snow comes nearly to your knees. You come to the edge of a clearing. Normally you would skirt around the edges, but that would take time. You decide to risk a straight path across. A hundred feet from the edge of the woods, and you hear a large "crack". As you plunge through the ice, you realize it was not a clearing, but a frozen lake. What do you do?

The Art of Manliness has an infographic on surviving a fall through the ice, and some additional advice. Check it out at the link.

Zombie Ants

According to Live Science, experts are still baffled as to how a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis can take command of an ant's brain, turning it into one of the walking dead and guiding it to the perfect spot to spread more spores... which it does by exploding out of the ant's body. 

A 2009 study published in American Naturalist revealed that the ants, once infected by the fungus, will journey precisely toward certain plants near the forest floor – a location where the conditions are best for the fungus to reproduce – and even latch onto the leaves just before dying, in order to provide a secure spot for the fungus to spread. This is all happening while the fungus is busy digesting the ant from the inside out.

(Source)

"Play Dead"

This sounds like it would be a great little horror short movie ... dogs vs. zombies and all of that ... if only I could get it to run on my system. Well, better luck to you.

"The most comprehensive zombie classification chart we've ever seen"

io9 has a chart by Jason Thompson showing the taxonomy of more than 350 types of zombies.