Call of Duty: Black Ops is the seventh installment in the hugely popular series and is set during the Cold-War era.  This time, however, a heavy emphasis will be put on storyline and Cold-War era military coverops.

According to Conceptnews.com, the zombies were "originally packaged as content in Call of Duty: World at War" but that the "zombie mode in the game was so popular amongst players that 'Call of Duty: World at War: Zombies' was developed for the iPhone.  In this game play mode, players fought off an endless onslaught of Nazi zombie intruders while simultaneously trying to repair windows to the safe house that kept the undead out."

We're all left wondering how different the new game will be from the old content?  According to Mark Lamia at Treyarch, “Zombies have been such a hit with our community that we were committed to bringing brand new zombie experiences to Call of Duty: Black Ops…”

We can’t wait to find out...and kill the zombies.  You may be asking, "Why is this bad news?"  The only answer we can find is that we'll all run the risk of becomming gamer zombies ourselves once the game is out.

Click below to see the Black Ops official trailer:

What's red, green & covered in ribbons?

A zombie baby playing with your intestines! 

(Don't worry, 8DI didn't make that up.  Our zombie baby jokes are too XXX.)

Right. Check out this associated press story...and if you live in New England, keep alert for the playful pitter-patter of tiny feet. 

______________________________________________

Mummified baby missing from NH cemetery

Associated Press - May 4, 2010 3:15 PM ET

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - New Hampshire police say a mummified body of a baby that was kept by a family for years before a judge ordered the remains to be buried has been removed from a cemetery.

Concord police said Tuesday the corpse of "Baby John," which had been buried at an unmarked grave at a Concord cemetery in 2008, has not been recovered. They say a visitor to the cemetery on Monday reported that a grave appeared to have been unearthed.

A lawyer for Charles Peavey, who last kept the mummified body, considered a family heirloom, says police searched Peavey's house on Monday. He says Peavey denies disturbing the gravesite.

Disturbance of a burial site and abuse of a corpse are felonies.

Another "slip up" by the makers of the Zombie virus....

____________________________________________________

Grandmother's Brain In A Bag Sent To Family

9:57pm UK, Thursday January 07, 2010

James Jordan, Sky News Online

A grieving family in America is suing an undertakers after their grandmother's brain was sent to them in a bag of personal belongings following the woman's death.

The grandmother was killed in a car accident

The discovery was made after family members noticed a "foul odour" coming from a bag sent to them by the DeVargas Funeral Home and Crematory in Espanola Valley, New Mexico, reported the Albuquerque Journal.

The bag had been left inside a family member's truck overnight and when family members opened it they found personal effects and a bag labelled with her name reading "brain", the lawsuit alleged.

Albuquerque laywer Richard Valle said: "No loved one's brain should ever be part of those belongings."

The brain has since been buried with the woman's body.

Funeral home owner Johnny DeVargas insisted his business was not to blame, pointing the finger at another funeral home in the neighbouring state of Utah.

He told the paper: "All I can say is DeVargas did absolutely nothing wrong and that the family was well cared for.

"The family was very meticulously cared for and they were very pleased with our service."

The woman, who was identified only by her initials in the lawsuit, was killed in a car accident in Utah in September.

If you've ever wondered what variables would affect your town during a massive brain-hungry undead attack, look no further.  The Class 3 Outbreak uses Google Maps to simulate the spread of the undead virus.  Just wait for it to load, add your town's population numbers, pick how many citizens are armed, how many police, and how good of a shot everyone is.  Then, sit back and watch the magic unfold. It's free, and it just might save your life.  Or it could show you that you don't have a chance. 

Whaat?  Sure makes the South Side of Chicago seem like a great vacation spot.

****UPDATE**** Russian police have since arrested the perps, as can be seen HERE at MSNBC.

_________________________________________________

Homeless men kill, dismember, eat victim in Russian Urals

©  RIA Novosti

Folks, it just doesn't get any better/worse than this:

______________________________________________

Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm

By Paula Devlin, The Times-Picayune

April 07, 2009

A Metairie resident is recovering after a stranger bit a chunk of flesh out of his arm and swallowed it Saturday afternoon.

Joseph Lancellotti, 67, told authorities he did not know the suspect, later identified as Mario Vargas, 48, or why he was attacked in his front yard.

Lancellotti was gardening at his home in the 4400 block of Kawanee Avenue about 2 p.m. when he noticed a man walking toward his house, shouting angrily, the report said. Lancellotti said he couldn't understand the man because he was yelling in Spanish. But when the man got within two feet, he slugged Lancellotti in the head, the report said.

Lancellotti said he tried to defend himself with a garden rake. As the men struggled over the rake, the stranger bent over and bit Lancellotti on his right forearm, the report said. Lancellotti's flesh ripped away as he fell to the ground. The man then got on top of Lancellotti and began choking him, the report said.

It was then that neighbor Chantal Lorio, a podiatrist and director of the Wound Center at East Jefferson General Hospital, came out to check on Lancellotti. Lorio said Monday that she first thought Lancellotti was having a heart attack and the other man was trying to help him.

The stranger was still gripping Lancellotti as Lorio noticed her neighbor was lying in a pool of blood. She didn't learn what happened until she began dressing the wound -- with the stranger still clutching her neighbor's shirt.

"He said, 'He bit my arm, chewed the flesh and swallowed it in front of me, ' " Lorio recalled. She said the bite measured almost 3 by 1 1/2 inches, and was less than 1/4-inch deep.

The pair tried to calm the stranger, who never made any attempt to run away. He eventually let go of Lancellotti and walked two blocks to a parking lot, where he hovered near an empty police car, the report said. The suspect was still standing there when deputies arrived and took him into custody.

Vargas, of 724 Camp St., New Orleans, was booked with second-degree battery. He was being held Monday at the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center in Gretna in lieu of $25,000 bail.

Lancellotti's wife, Bonnie, 60, said Monday that her husband was recovering from the bite, physically and mentally. She said his sense of safety in his neighborhood has been shaken.

With all the bacteria involved, Lorio said a bite from a human is worse than an animal bite.

Bonnie Lancellotti also has concerns about the suspect, who apparently had been treated at East Jefferson General Hospital earlier in the day for a finger injury. Vargas was released 45 minutes before the attack, according to the incident report.

Bonnie Lancellotti wondered whether hospital staff noticed anything amiss while treating Vargas. "This person's clearly lost his sense, " she said. "I mean, what else can you say, eating people's skin?"

Keith Darcey, spokesman for the hospital, said, "We cannot comment on any individual patient because of privacy laws. But as a matter of general hospital policy, the emergency department has behavioral health nurses available to help diagnose patients who might require mental health assistance."

_________________________________________________________________________________

Considering that Haitian "zombies" are the closest thing to the living dead that the mass media has ever reported on, we believe that this history of neurotoxins might leave a bad taste in your mouth.

We absolutely encourage viewers who laugh at this to donate relief funds for the recent Haitian disaster HERE, at the Red Cross.

_____________________________________________________

Josh Weiss Photography of Atlanta Zombie Attack

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) -- A wiry, slightly hunched man presses in a few numbers, the electronic lock gives way with a beep and the group presses into the crowded laboratory, plastered with ominous warnings about toxins and biohazards.

 

Guiding the visitors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is Mark Roth, a 50-year-old biologist with a tall forehead, thinning red hair and a perpetual wry smile. He asks his assistant, Jennifer Blackwood, if the rat is ready. It is.  She turns a dial, and the sealed enclosure starts to fill with poison gas -- hydrogen sulfide. An ounce could kill dozens of people.

The rat sniffs the air a few times, and within a minute, his naturally twitchy movements are almost still. On a monitor that shows his rate of breathing, the lines look like a steep mountain slope, going down.

At first glance, that looks bad. We need oxygen to live. If you don't get it for several minutes -- for example, if you suffer cardiac arrest or a bad gunshot wound -- you die. But something else is going on inside this rat. He isn't dead, isn't dying. The reason why, some people think, is the future of emergency medicine.

You see, Roth thinks he's figured out the puzzle. "While it's true we need oxygen to live, it's also a toxin," he explains. Scientists are starting to understand that death isn't caused by oxygen deprivation itself, but by a chain of damaging chemical reactions that are triggered by sharply dropping oxygen levels.

The thing is, those reactions require the presence of some oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide takes the place of oxygen, preventing those reactions from taking place. No chain reaction, no cell death. The patient lives. 

Roth's work was inspired in part by personal tragedy. In 1995, his world was turned upside down when his new daughter, Hannah, died after a year of painful medical problems. After that, he decided to go for broke -- to try to tackle something big. "It focuses the mind, when certain things happen to people, and it certainly focused mine."

After that, and after his conceptual breakthrough, Roth was ready to experiment. First up: developing fish embryos. He found a way to drain the oxygen from their cells, and they wouldn't die -- they'd just stop growing. When he put the oxygen back, they'd pick up where they left off. If he suspended them for a day, they took a day longer to develop. No more, no less. Nothing else was different.

Next up were fruit flies. This time, he gassed them. They seemed to die; they stopped moving. Then he returned them to fresh air, and the flies came back to life. 

The air we breathe is 21 percent oxygen. At 5 percent, those fish and flies -- like us -- would be dead in a few minutes. At 0.1 percent, it was another story. "You get a state of suspended animation and the creatures do not pass away, and that's the basis of what we see as an alternative way to think about critical care medicine," Roth says. "What you want to do is to have the patient's time slowed down, while everyone around them [like doctors] move at what we would call real time."

If the patient's time -- the process of your death -- were slowed down, doctors would have more time to fix you. In medicine, time is key. An analogy is the history of open heart surgery. For years, surgeons had the technical tools to make simple repairs on the heart, but they couldn't help patients until the development of the heart-lung machine made it possible to preserve the body for more than a few minutes without a heartbeat.

In rolled-up sleeves and blue Converse sneakers, Roth doesn't look the Army type, but by 2001, he had caught the attention of the U.S. military, through the lens of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA was looking for a way to protect soldiers on the battlefield from death by catastrophic blood loss.

With more than a quarter-million dollars of DARPA money, Roth tried hydrogen sulfide on mice, and it worked. It wasn't quite the same experiment -- he didn't give the mice enough gas to shut down their metabolism entirely, or to kill them, but enough to drop their breathing rate to less than 10 percent of normal. When he reversed the process six hours later, the mice were fine.

That success landed Roth in the pages of Ripley's Believe it or Not, got him a MacArthur Genius Grant and helped him win more than $600 million worth of venture capital funding for Ikaria, the company he co-founded.

But after that, the ride hit a bump. It's been harder than expected to get large animals, like swine, into anything close to suspended animation. Ikaria had to develop an injectable form; the current drug in development is based on sodium sulfide, which dissolves to become hydrogen sulfide in the blood. Trials to test its safety in humans are under way in Canada and Australia. 

"[Using hydrogen sulfide] is so simple, it's genius," says David Lefer, a researcher and cardiothoracic surgeon at Emory University, who is now experimenting with hydrogen sulfide in his own lab. "But the failures with larger animals have been a big disappointment. To make this effective for humans may take a combination of sodium sulfide and additional agents. We're just not sure what form it will take."

Animal trials that test sodium sulfide have produced some striking results. Lefer found that it protects mice's hearts during simulated heart attacks. He gave each mouse a dose so small that it was gone from the body 15 minutes later. A full day later, he would induce a heart attack. Subsequent examination found that in the mice that were given sodium sulfide, cells suffered 72 percent less damage than in unprotected mice.

Other researchers are exploring different approaches to tweak metabolism in a critical care setting. A group in Minnesota is developing a drug based on chemicals found in hibernating squirrels. Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of San Francisco Hospital, is also studying animals, including whales and dolphins -- mammals like us, except that they can hold their breath for two hours underwater even during vigorous activity. Bickler says, "There's a lot of potential there. It hasn't been studied in extreme detail, but there may be new ways to protect human tissue from injury. 

The white rat on display in Roth's lab isn't being suspended -- by his description, it's more like a slow-forward button, or a dimmer switch on a light. About 50 minutes after giving the animal a dose of hydrogen sulfide, Roth tells Blackwood to turn off the gas. Normal air flows back into the glass case. The zigzag lines on the monitors shoot upward. In a few minutes, the rat is scurrying around as if nothing had happened.

Roth says he'd be happy to simply develop a drug that can be used in a conventional medical setting. But with a hint of mischief, he admits he doesn't really know how far this could go. Would it work on people? "There are almost certainly reasons it would not, but I don't know what they are yet," he said.

In the meantime, he's having fun trying to change the way we look at life itself. "With those fish, I turn off the heartbeat so they are clinically dead. But I can bring them back. So they must not have been dead, after all."

Ugh.

_________________________________________________________________________

Biomass-Eating Military Robot Is a Vegetarian, Company Says

A steam-powered, biomass-eating military robot being designed for the Pentagon is a vegetarian, its maker says.

Robotic Technology Inc.'s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that's right, "EATR" — "can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable," reads the company's Web site.

But, contrary to reports, including one that appeared on FOXNews.com, the EATR will not eat animal or human remains.

Dr. Bob Finkelstein, president of RTI and a cybernetics expert, said the EATR would be programmed to recognize specific fuel sources and avoid others.

“If it’s not on the menu, it’s not going to eat it,” Finkelstein said.

“There are certain signatures from different kinds of materials” that would distinguish vegetative biomass from other material."

RTI said Thursday in a press release:

"Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone (Cyclone Power Technologies Inc.) has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips -- small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI."

EATR will be powered by the Waste Heat Engine developed by Cyclone, of Pompano Beach, Fla., which uses an "external combustion chamber" burning up fuel to heat up water in a closed loop, generating electricity.

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

Upon the EATR platform, the Pentagon could build all sorts of things — a transport, an ambulance, a communications center, even a mobile gunship.

In press materials, Robotic Technology presents EATR as an essentially benign artificial creature that fills its belly through "foraging," despite the obvious military purpose.