Recommending you a new book on vampires: Emily Welkins' "Till the last drop!"

Dear Followers,

We are glad to announce that a fellow researcher, Dr Emily Welkins, published her book entitled "Till the last drop!" on what she describes as "modelling peaceful co-existence of vampires and humans.

The book is a real guide to vampiric lore (all you need to know about vampires and were afraid to ask, so to speak :)) It is a mixture of a research paper and popular science literatere and it will make you an expert on vampires (and not just the one who knows how to use silver bullets and garlic, but that kind who would be able to juggle (and fiddle) with numbers, quote respectful sources and amuse (and startle) your friends with a deep knowledge on vampyrism.

Read what one of the the readers wrote in her review of the book:

"If vampires were real and were planning their debut or coming-out party,this would probably be the book that they would cite to get everyone thinking about a peaceful co-existence. Maybe they are planning to show up spontaneously. Science and progress these days are far beyond imagination. Artificial blood may be invented soon (then there would be no reason for vampires to hide any more!).

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Till the last drop!", especially because I am a fan of watching vampire films and TV series (I knew all the
book's popular cultural references!). The tone of the book is interesting: sometimes comedic and sometimes dry ... but this balances out well and keeps interest levels high.

I highly recommend this book! Congratulations on a job well done, Emily Welkins!"

We greatly recommend this book to you too!

Best regards,

WS and EL

When Zombies Attack!

And now let us look at a completely different (but also supernatural) topic – zombies. Do you think zombies exist?

Well, we do not mean those voodoo-like zombies (we will come back to voodoo later), but the good old fellows depicted in films starting from Romero’s timeless classic “Night of the Living Dead” from 1968 or most recent Boyle’s “28 days later” (or its sequel “28 weeks later”), a British parody “Shawn of the Dead”, and of course “Resident Evil” starring Mila Jovovich.

What science has to say about the existence or inexistence of zombies is the following: if scenarios shown in most of zombie films were real, pretty soon the world would have been taken by zombies. A mathematician from the University of Ottawa named Robert Smith? (yes, with a question mark – he says it have made lots of bureaucrats very upset) does his research on zombies and even published a book on that topic. He claims that zombies (if they existed) would have eventually taken over the world unless quick and aggressive attacks are made (aim for the head!). The progression of zombie infection is fast and unless isolated, quarantined and (even better) killed, very soon everyone will become a zombie (and then dies, as far as there is nothing left to eat). What a gloomy perspective of an end for the human civilization!

Another interesting academic paper dealing with zombies (and also ghosts and vampires) was written by a theoretical physicist from the University of Central Florida, professor Costas Efthimiou (in cooperation with Sohang Gandhi from Cornell University). What they claim is that zombiefication might be just “a skilful act of poisoning” when the person is loosing the thinking process of the brain, a process “that makes his human”.

So, what the conclusion would be? Unlike vampires, who are smart and have their thinking process working very well (too well indeed), zombies (if they existed) would have revealed themselves very quickly. Have you seen a zombie recently? And I do not mean your colleague who always seem to be asleep (even he types something on his computer) or these guy at the local pub who sits over his beer and watches football on the TV screen. Well, if you did not that might mean they do not exist (at least yet).