Pandemic

Five ‘Fun’ Board Games About Real Disasters to Remind You We’re Completely Doomed

There are plenty of horror board games and tabletop RPGs that thrive on fantasy, whether it’s helping a ghost solve its own gruesome murder in Mysterium, or helping to stop (or aid) the rise of evil gods with Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game. But of course, the biggest horrors are the ones humans actually…

You Need To Watch This Crazy-Ass Clip From Pandemic Right To The End

We’re all waiting for the POV insanity of Hardcore Henry, but there’s another POV movie coming: Pandemic, starring Continuum’s Rachel Nichols as a scientist dealing with a zombie plague. And here’s an exclusive clip that shows just how bonkers the exposition in this first-person zombie shooter gets. Love the whole rant about the five stages…

Watch the Super-Violent Hardcore Henry Trailer and Try Not to Get Motion Sickness

Hardcore Henry is either going to be the most awesome film of all time, or it’s going to make you puke with its POV shaky-cam action. Or both. Basically it’s like a whole movie shot by a cyborg wearing a GoPro. Can you stand it? The above trailer gives a pretty good sense of what…

This Zombie-Fighting Movie Looks Like The Worst First-Person Shooter Ever

Here’s the first trailer for Pandemic, a movie in which Kiera from Continuum goes into a plague zone in Los Angeles to find survivors. And she fights, basically, zombies. The whole thing is shot in a “first-person shooter” style, so it’s sort of an attempt to duplicate the feeling of a video game. Because that…

The Nigerian government has confirmed that there are cases of Ebola in Lagos, the country’s megacity. This represents a major expansion for the Ebola pandemic, which entered Nigeria because an infected person took an airplane into the country. It’s unknown how many people they were in contact with en route.

A History of Our Obsession with the Disease Apocalypse

The “plague plot” is a subgenre of horror that’s become as common as zombie movies . But over half a century ago, Hollywood wasn’t churning out tales of the disease apocalypse and deadly black goo viruses. Where did our love for pandemic panic come from? A look back at the history of the subgenre provides…

Will Smallpox Reemerge in Siberia as Corpses Thaw from Climate Change?

In an article primarily about the potential folly of holding onto stockpiles of smallpox virus for research purposes—a now-eradicated plague that humans no longer have natural immunity to and that would very likely cause a worldwide catastrophe should it escape from the lab—the BBC includes one awesomely horrible detail. Could the frozen bodies of smallpox…

How would a pandemic spread through our air transportation routes?

If an extremely virulent infection started in Atlanta and spread thanks to folks traveling by plane, what path would it take to reach Sydney or Madagascar? These videos represent models of imagined airplane-borne epidemics. Dirk Brockmann, a Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University Berlin, and Dirk Helbing, Chair of Sociology, in…

When humans became a “crowd species,” epidemics followed

A pandemic could begin with one infected person flying across the world, shedding pathogens along the way. It’s a terrifying scenario, but it probably wouldn’t have happened thousands of years ago. Not because we didn’t have airplanes – but because humans had not yet become a crowd species. Today in the Guardian, Alok Jha reports…

It’s still too early to freak out about bird flu

A total of eight people have now died following exposure to H7N9, a lethal new strain of bird flu that by last count had infected at least 24 people. Concern, expressed by epidemiologists and felt by people around the world, is prudent and warranted. Panic, and the rhetoric that comes with it, is not. H7N9…

Scientists Restart Work on Deadly Engineered Avian Flu

In January 2012 scientists around the world halted research on engineered avian flu viruses over concerns that the work was too dangerous. Now, those scientists are taking to labs once more to continue their work. https://gizmodo.com/scientists-will-halt-research-on-avian-flu-that-could-k-5877934 What was initially a 60-day halt to research turned into a year-long battle for the scientists, who have had…

The places where an epidemic is most likely to start spreading in the United States

When humans travel, diseases travel with them. Events like the 2003 SARS outbreak and 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic have revealed the role that air travel plays in the spread of illness on a global scale. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a computer simulation that suggests which U.S. airports are most likely to contribute to…

10 Places to Ride Out the Apocalypse

You’ve assembled your post-apocalyptic reading list. You’ve packed your bug-out bag. You’ve even practiced a little melee combat, just in case. But where should you go when the global pandemic hits or sky starts raining fire? https://gizmodo.com/survival-books-to-keep-on-your-bookshelf-in-case-of-the-5888333 If you can hang out in a self-sufficient rural community or get yourself adopted into a tribe of…

Hey everybody: cool your jets on the whole supervirus thing

Many of you probably read last week about a supervirus, engineered by dutch virologist Ron Fouchier, that has the potential to wipe out half of humanity. Is the virus potentially dangerous? Absolutely. Could it really kill off half the world’s population? That… isn’t exactly likely. And scientists in support of Fouchier think that a much…

Engineered Avian Flu Could Kill Half the World’s Humans

This isn’t a movie. It’s not a classic Science Fiction book. This is the real story of a scientist who created a virus with the power to litter the Earth with billions of dead bodies. OK, now breathe. Or maybe don’t—the virus is airborne. In his Netherlands laboratory, virologist Ron Fouchier was experimenting with the…

Revealed! Every Evil Atom of the H1N1 Flu Virus

The H1N1 flu pandemic killed 17,000 people across the globe between 2009 and 2010. Pretty terrifying. To prevent that from ever happening again, scientists have created a super-detailed computer model of the killer virus. Researchers at the Institute of Process Engineering at the Chinese Academy of Sciences generated the first computational model of H1N1 at…

The Black Death is surprisingly similar to modern bacteria

The plague that wiped out over a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century came from a bacteria known as Yersinia pestis. Now we’ve sequenced its genome…and it’s weirdly, almost worryingly identical to its modern descendants. Bubonic plague is still around, but these days it’s exceedingly rare and quite treatable. It’s hard to believe…

The origins of the Spanish Flu Pandemic go back even further than we thought

The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic was one of the worst disease outbreaks ever seen, leading to the death of some 50 million individuals across the globe. It was also the first H1N1 global outbreak — its followup in 2009 was decidedly less potent, at least in part because of advances in medical science since then.…

The bacterium responsible for the Black Death was once a mild stomach bug

We’ve suspected it for awhile now, and now it’s confirmed that the bacterium Yersinia pestis was responsible for the devastating plague that wiped out a third of Europe 650 years ago. But this ultimate killer started as something far different. The deadly plague was once Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, a minor bacterium that doesn’t do much more…

Rats were not responsible for the Black Death

The spread of the Black Death — a devastating pandemic that ravaged European populations between 1348 and 1350 — has long been attributed to the black rat and the fleas it carried from port to port, while hitching a ride on merchant ships. Now, a study examining the effects of the plague in London between…