A group of children near Cerro Azul saw the creature leave its cave, and suspected it of being an alien. Other observers wondered if it was a yeti — but the creature has been revealed as a shaved sloth. This revelation came too late to save the poor creature, which the children beat with sticks out of unreasoning fear. The kids then threw the corpse into the water and fled. Why must we always destroy what we don't understand?

[Telemetrovia Gawker]

Evolutionary biologist David Rollo and a team of scientists at McMaster University in Canada stumbled upon the universal death stench while studying how cockroaches avoid their dead. After observing that the insects would avoid fluid extracted from dead cockroaches, they surmised that smell is what allowed them to recognize and avoid these dead bodies. It turned out that they were right - after an animal or insect dies, its cells release fatty acids that carry a distinct odor. This same odor acts as a repellant in ocean-going crustacians too.

And the avoid this "death stench" of fatty acids goes back over 400 million years, around the time that insects and crustacians diverged. Rollo and his colleagues believe this because insects and crustacians share the aversion, which means it most likely evolved before the two families of species split off from one another. In fact, death stench avoidance probably evolved in the ocean.

Why would this be such an ancient trait?

Says Rollo:

Recognizing and avoiding the dead could reduce the chances of catching the disease, or allow you to get away with just enough exposure to activate your immunity . . . As explained in our study, fatty acids-oleic or linoleic acids-are reliably and quickly released from the cells following death. Evolution appears to have favoured such clues because they were reliably associated with demise, and avoiding contagion and predation are rather critical to survival.

Even if the death stench was emitted from a severed limb instead of a dead body, it is still useful as a warning. Rotting limbs could be diseased - or could be a sign that predators are nearby.

So does this mean that the fear of death evolved after the lust for sex? After all, there had been millennia of humping before the proto-crustacian-insects started avoiding the death stench.

via Evolutionary Biology

Assassinated in the Act

The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross: Some people have a monkey on their back; Ramona Random has a succubus. If Ramona doesn’t have sex, the demon gnaws at her mind. If she does have sex, it devours her partner. It makes her questionable girlfriend material, but a highly effective assassin.

Goldeneye: Bond henchwomen often use their seductive powers to get what they want, and what Xenia Onatopp wants is a good orgasm. Unfortunately for her partners, she nothing brings Xenia to ecstasy quite like squeezing a man to death between her powerful gams.

Worshipping the Queen of Sheba (American Gods by Neil Gaiman): Bilquis, an incarnation of the Queen of Sheba, doesn’t get loving any more from the worshippers who once prayed to her and held sexy fertility rites in her temples. So she maintains her power the best way she knows how: by posing as a prostitute, having sex with her johns, and promptly devouring them with her vagina. Judging by the screams of ecstasy, it’s not an entirely unpleasant way to go.

Getting it on with Alien-Possessed Women

Torchwood “Day One”: Cardiff is ground zero for alien mischief, so when a beautiful woman leads you into the bathroom for some anonymous love, stay on your toes. She might have a fetish for sexy time in the stalls, but she might also be possessed by an alien gas that wants to suck the sperm – and all the energy – from your body.

The Outer Limits “Caught in the Act”: Chaste Hannah wants to wait until marriage before going all the way with her boyfriend Jay. When an alien lifeform takes control of Hannah’s body, premarital abstinence flies quickly out the window as she starts seducing every man on campus. But this isn’t sexual liberation; it’s a hunger for man-meat that goes way beyond genitalia. When Jay starts tailing his suddenly unfaithful love, he discovers that she’s absorbing men into her body during the act.

Death by Snoo Snoo (Futurama “Amazon Women in the Mood”): After all the men died out on Amazonia, the Amazon women devised a method of punishing male trespassers that fulfills the needs of the hetero sex-starved population: Snoo Snoo. Evidently, dying of a crushed pelvis only sounds like fun.

Alien Sex Vampires

Liquid Sky: The aliens who land on the roof of artist Margaret’s loft find human endorphins especially tasty. Initially, they’re content to nibble on the endorphins released during heroin use, but they quickly learn that the orgasmic variety is far more satisfying. So they start murdering Margaret’s partners at the height of their sexual pleasure, leaving Margaret behind to deliver avant-garde monologues in her neon makeup.

Lifeforce: When a beautiful naked woman found imprisoned in the tale of Hailey’s Comet crawls on top of you and starts kissing you wildly, it’s probably not because she thinks you’re neat. It’s much more likely that she’s searching for a convenient orifice through which to suck out your soul, leaving you a desiccated, undead ghoul.

Angel “Lonely Hearts”: Angel & Co. hunt down a demon that kills its host when close to another naked body. But it’s not looking to snag its host’s energy; it’s just leaping from body to body during sex, looking for the perfect body to inhabit forever.

Having Sex with Your Proxy Self (Kaiba): In a future where memories can be stored, traded, and implanted in someone else, having sex with someone who shares your memories can be a form of near-masturbation. But the experience is so intense that it can make your head (and the rest of your body) explode.

Death by Rapid Pregnancy

Fringe “The Same Old Story”: When you’re a human specially designed for rapid aging, and your sperm is similarly designed, it’s best to use protection when sleeping with a fertile female partner. But even condoms fail from time to time, and those rapidly gestating pregnancies tend to kill the mother.

Species II: The same rules apply to men infected with alien DNA. Female alien hybrids can handle nine months’ worth of pregnancy occurring in the span of a few minutes. Female humans just don’t have the wombs for it.

Magically Boinked to Death

Dresden Files: Storm Front by Jim Butcher: When Harry Dresden is sent to investigate a pair of lovers whose hearts exploded in the act, he comes across a wizard who draws his energy from sex and lust. The wizard sent his target a coital heart attack, and her unfortunate partner got his own dose of cardiac overload.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Where the Wild Things Are”: Buffy and Riley’s repeated and enthusiastic lovemaking literally wakes the dead, freeing a crew of sexually repressed poltergeists. Once freed, the poltergeists try to ensure that they’ll have a steady supply of sexual energy by getting Buffy and Riley to continue their round-the-clock shtupping until they die of exhaustion. Fortunately, the rest of the Scoobies come to the rescue with a spell to pry the lovers apart, at least temporarily.

Kryptonite Condom (Wanted by Mark Millar): Perhaps taking a cue from Mallrats’ speculation on how Clark Kent and Lois Lane might copulate, supervillain Professor Seltzer once devised a kryptonite condom to take down his own Superman-like nemesis. Apparently, the hero’s girlfriend never quite got the radioactive rubber on him, leaving us to wonder whether a kryptonite diaphragm would have been more effective.

The Classic Coital Coronary

Star Trek: New Frontier: Vulcans are known for their remarkable stoicism, which breaks down spectacularly every seven years during an individual’s pon farr, during which a maddened Vulcan must mate or perish. But not every Vulcan has the constitution for the intense consummation. The Vulcan Voltak had a heart attack while between the sheets with his new wife, Enterprise Dr. Selar, leaving Selar widowed and throwing off her pon farr cycle.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Let He Who Is Without Sin…”: Curzon was a great diplomat and a notorious womanizer. So it’s apt that he irreparably strained himself with attempting the sexual ritual of jamaharon on the pleasure planet of Risa, although he didn’t give up the ghost (or, in this case, the symbiont) until several days later.

The X-Files “Gender Bender”: The alien Kindred lead a life of quiet isolation in a rural Massachusetts community. But when one of the Kindred ventures into the outside world, their intense alien pheromones both attract a constant stream of willing partners and give them coronaries in the throes of passion.

The Tick “The Funeral”: Many superheroes hope to go out in a blaze of glory, felled by some worthy opponent. Famed superhero the Immortal meets his fate on a mattress in Captain Liberty’s apartment, felled by her vagina. Although judging from the pending paternity suits, he died pretty much how he lived.

Powers “Little Deaths”: Philandering superhero Olympia has a similar exit, albeit accompanied by a literal blaze of glory. His alter ego's wife commits suicide over the ensuing tabloid coverage, but the woman who was on top of him at the time gets half a million dollars for the TV movie rights.

Sasabuchi takes pages from fashion magazines and uses ballpoint pens and colored pencils to draw over the images. These pictures integrate images of death and decay to explore Western taboos toward death, and create a different idea of beauty.

[Galerie Zink via Neatorama]

The WHO report updates information on the global burden of disease based on measurements from 2004 and projects how disease will affect the human population through 2030. Perhaps the most significant change it predicts is a global decline in deaths from communicable diseases. HIV/AIDS, the sixth leading cause of death in 2004 worldwide, is expected to peak around 2012 and drop to the number ten position by 2030. Other communicable diseases are expected to decline more quickly; tuberculosis, the seventh leading cause of death in 2004, is expected to plummet to number 23.

The sharp decline in communicable disease death will mean an increased aging population, especially in lower income countries, which means a greater proportion of the global population will die from diseases developed later in life, such as ischemic heart disease and cancers. But changes in global development and behaviors will also contribute to increases in certain causes of death. The WHO indicates that a global increase in tobacco smoking in middle- and low-income countries will bolster deaths from cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and some cancers. And increased transportation development and more crowded roads will help increase deaths from traffic accidents.

[WHO Burdens of Disease via Foreign Policy via Metafilter]

Since 1997, space memorial firm Celestis has been sending cremated human remains into space, generally in Earth’s orbit. In 1999, it arranged to have a portion of Shoemaker’s remains attached to the Lunar Prospector, which deposited his ashes on the moon. Now, Celestis has announced that, by as soon as 2010, it will send more human remains to the moon, thanks to an agreement with two private spaceflight companies.

For $12,500, you can send one gram of ashes from one person in a capsule to the moon, or for $18,750, up to two grams of ashes from two different people. If you're looking to journey even farther from home, Celestis expects to launch a deep space mission by 2011, which will also start at $12,500. But, for the posthumous spacefarer on a budget, the memorial company will continue to offer Earth orbit services for as little as $1,295.

[Celestis via Yahoo! via Scenario Land]

The University of London grad won a $20,000 grant from the Design Museum in 2006 and spent that money to set up a design studio and delve into different ways to express death. Aside from the bird feeder, there's a ceramic urn that disintegrates over the course of three years and pencils made from the carbon in human remains. Jarvis lives in London, but her artifacts of death have been traveling all over the world, from the Paul Smith store in Milan to Funeria in the US.

Nadine Jarvis main page via NotCot

I still use this little survival mechanism to get through the scary scenes in movies. It's amazing how covering your ears, rather than your eyes, makes it all much more bearable. Plus, I wouldn't want to miss the best parts: the spatter of gore when the infected lady explodes; the crunch of the monster's gigantic mouth through the annoying dude's neck; the boiling pool of bloodslime where the ladies stab each other with rock-climbing equipment while a monster looks on; the giant alien orgy where some poor sucker gets dissolved and eaten.

So I have trained myself to watch horror movies, using little tools like fingers-in-the-ears and watching so many flicks in the genre that I know what will happen before the director does. And I'm willing to admit that I pay a little price in my electricity bills every month. That's right: I can't sleep without leaving the hall light on. I've got too many excellent eviscerations packed into my imagination to ever sleep soundly again.

Why do I do it? Why do we all do it? Here are five reasons — they may not be good reasons, but I guarantee that they are true.

To Survive
As I have already pointed out with my little story about Invasion of the Body Snatchers, part of the fun of every horror flick is getting through it alive. I am a firm believer that the right way to watch horror is not to distance yourself from it, but to plunge in and let yourself be completely credulous and scared. Sure the monster in Neil Marshall's amazing spelunking horror flick The Descent was a little cheesy, but watching those women get deeper and deeper into the dark tunnels, more and more lost, squeezing through the claustrophobic, dirty spaces and into madness — if you let yourself feel the horror of the situation, you'll be thrummingly high on relief when the flick ends.

To Take Your Secret Thoughts to Their Most Extreme — and Laugh
When I first saw Stuart Gordon's mad doctor gorefest Re-Animator, it was like a revelation. There were all these gross brain-operation scenes, and headless zombies, and people drooling blood. And that was good, but I'd been over that terrain before. But then came the moment of pure breakout genius. The headless zombie bad guy, whose body carries his head around in a bowling bag, finally kidnaps the lady he's been wanting to hook up with. His body straps the lady to a medical table, and proceeds to jam his severed head between her wiggling legs. He's giving her head! Also, holy crap what the fuck. Director Gordon WENT THERE. I mean, he wasn't afraid to just show you the most fucked up thing he could possibly imagine. How could even your weirdest private thoughts ever seem disturbing once you've laughed at the most fucked-up thing in the universe? Same goes for the moment in Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage where the main character's penis-shaped parasite hides in his jeans and pops out to eat the brains of a girl who is just trying to give him a nice blowjob. Damn. I will never feel weird about any of my random fantasies ever again, because they can't top what Henenlotter actually committed to film.

To Let Everyone in on Your Nightmares
All of us have dark thoughts, but probably some of us more than others. I'm one of the ones with the ultra-super-dark thoughts — and my dreams are even worse. But the whole situation becomes a hell of a lot more bearable, and even fun, when some of those dark thoughts are realized in film. After all, most of our dark thoughts aren't really unique or special. That's why I will always treasure David Cronenberg's mad gynecologist movie Dead Ringers. Those gynecological tools for mutant women, pictured below? Oh yeah, I imagined stuff like that about twenty million times before I saw them in his flick. And now I can force all my friends to think about them with me when we watch the movie together. Same goes for the lady impregnated by aliens in Slither, who grows to the size of a barn before exploding with all those sperm-shaped baby aliens going everywhere. Sick, but I've dreamed that one too. Welcome to my mind. Nice to have company in here!

To Speak the Unspeakable
It may be hard to articulate what's wrong with your city, your sexuality, or your relationship with your boss. That's why horror does it for you, in grisly, unsparing detail. While the movie Akira is usually billed as pure scifi, anybody who has watched the grotesque physical mutation-explosion of the gangster-psychic Tetsuo at the end knows that it's also a terrifying look at the unspoken but well-known psychological consequences of poverty in the city. And anyone who has ever quietly suspected her boss might be controlling the fabric of reality was rewarded by that scene in The Matrix when Neo is kidnapped by Agent Smith, told to be a good little worker, and then tortured and implanted with a tiny robot while his mouth is sewn shut. In a few months, when Frank Henenlotter's latest movie Bad Biology hits theaters, we're about to get a good dose of inexpressible sexual panic in a tale of a guy whose giant cock is both detachable and addicted to drugs — so it's always running away to score some dope. I know the feeling. But I wouldn't have been able to tell you about it without the help of Henenlotter's film.

To Shove a Big Spiny Stick Up Rationality's Ass
The great part about science horror, full of mad doctors doping themselves with Hyde serum and physics experiments gone wrong, is that they are a slap in the face to so-called rationality. How many times have you heard someone describe the "rational thing to do" and known that it was also the worst, scariest thing to do? Sure, it was "rational" to try to get samples of those aliens in the first Alien flick; and it was "rational" to put that futuristic Prozac in the air of that planet in Serenity that created the rapin, cannibalizin' Reavers; and it was rational to genetically engineer dinosaurs for a cool new theme park in Jurassic Park. All those things were done with pure science in mind (and a little profit). My point? Scientific rationality is great and all, but scifi horror is here to remind you suckas that sometimes you need to check with your ethics and all that mushy crap before experimenting on people's brains or messing around with outer-space superweapons that you don't understand. Your science won't save you when the Hulk comes around to beat your sorry ass.

• Spock in Star Trek: There's no doubt that Spock was one of the best characters on Star Trek, which is what made his death so awesome. However, when he returned to life by having his body shot onto the Genesis planet, it just lost credibility for the science-hardened. How did Spock's dead body get injected into the Genesis life matrix anyhow? Good thing he'd downloaded his brainfiles into Bones, eh?
• Ripley in Alien: Ripley was brought back to life in Alien: Resurrection as a clone, although with spotty memories of herself and a DNA strand laced with Alien bits and bobs, so she ends up as a freaky post-human mommy. It was creepy enough seeing all of the failed Ripley clones inside the vats, and the tied up Ripley who wants you to kill her, but the Ripley/Mommy clone was just devoid of everything we've loved about Ripley from the previous films. Yes, that's including Aliens 3.
• The Cylons in Battlestar Galactica: The Cylons aren't just exactly clones in BSG, they're identical copies that take on the personality of their previous self upon death, and "rebirth" into wet, gooey, slimy, and slightly sexy birth tubs. They have to fly giant "Resurrection Ships" within reach of their "bring me back to life, I'm dead" signal, which sort of defeats the purpose. Couldn't their memoryfiles just be stored until they're close enough to get zapped into a new body? Why is it a finite process? Why are we asking so many questions about a show we love?
• Just about any Jedi in Star Wars: When you die in Star Wars, and you have the power of the Force, you have the option of appearing as a glowing, transparent spectre. It's hinted that this is due to the research that Qui-Gon Jinn did sometime before he died, and it gets picked up by Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin so everyone can reunite and glow with pleasure around fires and dispense knowledge to your Jedi-kin. In fact, if you're lucky, you might get your own green glowy action figure.
• The Doctor in Doctor Who: If you ever need to keep bringing in actors to play the lead in your extremely long-running BBC science fiction show, what better way to just have them die and come back as the exact same person, who just happens to look completely different? The Doctor can resurrect or "regenerate" himself up to 12 times, although we're sure the writers could figure out some way around that. They might start working on that too, since we're already on the 10th model. Maybe we can get a new Doctor altogether? What about bringing back Romana?
• Captain Kirk in Star Trek: If you remember your Star Trek storyline, then you'll recall that Captain Kirk dies in Star Trek Generations, putting an end the The Shat in the series. Or so you thought. Shatner went on to write a book called The Return, which features the Borg and the Romulans teaming up to bring Kirk back to life. Sort of like your worst nightmare. It inspired several further novels, all co-written by Shatner, proving that the man will probably never die.

We're still on the fence about this flick, but it looks marginally like Signs 2. Only this time the aliens are the plants that we've been sharing the planet with all these years. Looks like they finally got pissed off about all the pollution and the vegetarians. Watching this reminds us that Shyamalan's Unbreakable was a great movie that got slammed for being too slow and unexciting, but in retrospect is well worth a second (and third) viewing. However, Signs never stops us from asking why aliens would come to a world coated in something that is severely lethal to them. We hope The Happening doesn't have similar plotholes in it.

Dying humans can etch their last words directly onto the urn or stick memorabilia into the slit at the top after they pre-purchase a pod. Then their relatives can throw them in the ocean, where the pod will eventually dissipate and their bone powder will sink to the bottom and stay there. And we don't have to worry about space. Image by Lots Design

Lots Design via Yanko Design

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That put any sort of plane crash scripts into a tailspin, although the project now appears to be back on track. Attached director Francis Lawrence has been spending the past several months directing the Will Smith meets Home Alone (really alone) epic I Am Legend. That film will be hitting screens soon, and Lawrence is moving on to adapting Survivor as his next film.

The book is set in the near future and is told in reverse order, counting backwards from the opening in chapter 47. Since the novel is told from the point of view of the main character Tender Branson, it means he's sitting alone in the cockpit of a plane, talking to himself. Francis Lawrence might just be planning on making a career out directing desperate loner films. After all, he also directed the adaptation/trainwreck Constantine, based on Alan Moore's comic book of the same name.

I Am Legend Director Developing Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor Movie Adaptation [/Film]

• 
  
• Massive quantities of helium were discovered leaking out of the ground in Nevada. This mysterious gas emission is even stranger because usually geologists only see this kind of thing near volcanoes. Is Nevada about to become a volcanic hellhole? [Discovery News]
• 10,000-year-old trees were discovered during a construction project on a farm in Michigan. They are among the best-preserved fossilized trees ever found, and scientsts speculate that they were crushed under the last glacier to stretch across North America. [Science Daily]
  

• A Japanese court ruled today that a grieving widow would receive compensation from Toyota because the company killed her husband with overwork. The 30-year-old man died after working 60 hours/week for a month, and then 70 hours/week for an additional month. In Japanese, there is a word for death from overwork: karōshi. [Autoblog]
  
• Scientists have just announced a "map of genetic aging" in mice. The map shows a series of genes whose behavior changes as the mice age. Since human and mouse genomes are fairly similar, researchers hope to use this map to find similar "aging genes" in humans, and perhaps tinker with those genes to reverse the aging process. [PLoS Genetics]
  
• If you're thinking of getting a genetic test, think again. Most experts say the tests are a total waste of money and tell us next to nothing. Even though there are more and more genetic tests every day, they aren't getting any more accurate or reliable. [Reuters]
  

Death Race 2000, the original, was about a genetically engineered superdriver named Frankenstein (David Carradine), who is forced to compete in a race across the country where you can earn points by running down pedestrians, babies and the elderly, who are worth up to 100 bonus points! He's hell-bent on ending both the race and the life of "Mr. President." Pretty gritty stuff.

In the remake Jason Statham plays Frakenstein, but this time he's a family man trying to get out of prison and back to his daughter on the outside. Plus the Death Race now occurs in prisons, and on closed-circuit television. Talk about missing the point entirely, and with our current fixation on reality TV this should have been a no-brainer. It's like remaking Star Wars and having the Rebels and the Imperials sit down at a negotiating table and work things out nicely.

Director Paul W.S. Anderson, who is also helming the supercar movie Spy Hunter, will be directing this, giving us even more cause for concern. Do yourself a favor next year and rent the original. At least it wasn't afraid to put the pedal to the metal and run you down.

Says Moron:

This implies that ant workers adjust their threshold for engaging in risk foraging according to their life expectancy.

Knowing when you'll die sounds like a nightmare, but ants have managed to turn it into functional altruism. Knowing when it will die lets each ant make a rational decision to face danger that could benefit the rest of the nest. After all, it's going to die pretty soon anyway, so it might as well do a bunch of potentially fatal things beforehand. Image by Bill Hails.

A Story of Ants, Ageing, and Altruism [via The Independent]