I’ve mentioned the bee apocalypse before, and it hasn’t resolved. Now Congress is getting involved which is, frankly, never a good sign. The disappearing colonies are being described as suffering from “Colony Collapse Disorder”… so now we’re ascribing disorders to entire hives instead of individuals. The real cause is still unknown, but is speculated to be “stress”. Those honeybees better cut back on their Starbucks and their corporate meetings… get a massage once in while. Stop to smell the roses. Or maybe they finally evolved enough smarts to figure out that they shouldn’t be able to fly.

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You can start breathing again - the real trailer for “28 Weeks Later” is now up on Apple’s Quicktime trailer site, in glorious hidef or old-fashioned resolutions for the grandparents. This is one is a lot better than “sneak peak” I posted about a couple of weeks ago.

The new trailer still has lots of people running and Robert Carlyle winking, but it also shows the quarantine of London, repopulating and then of course, everything going tits up (as they say in England). And no ads for other films!

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Apocalyptically speaking, the US often has it easy. Sure we have tornadoes, hurricanes; most zombie outbreaks seem posited in the US, and most people anticipating the Rapture are probably in the US, but generally it’s the poorer countries in the world that we expect will suffer most from the pandemic or global climate change.

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New Scientist reports on pressure placed on climate scientists by the Bush administration and editing done on climate reports to increase uncertainty and tone down statements on consequences of climate change.

US fudging of climate science - details revealed - earth - 20 March 2007 - New Scientist Environment
[tags]us government, bush administration, climate, global warming[/tags]

Let’s take a trip in the wayback machine allll the waaaaay back to 2006. Remember the E. coli outbreak with the contaminated spinach? The outbreak which caused people to recommend not even buying fresh spinach from local farms even though if they were two thousand miles from the farms which were the source of the spinach?

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Bangladesh is having what appears to be its first outbreak of bird flu in a small town called Savar near its capital of Dhaka. There are a couple of unusual risk factors here in that Bangladesh has a high human population density near its farms and it’s also on important migration routes for birds.

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According to CNN, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization” (there are such things?) called the Trust for America’s Health has issued a report that not only suggests that a flu pandemic in the US could cause a recession, it quantifies its predictions with numbers. For instance, they say that a pandemic could kill 2.25 million people and make 87.75 million people miss work for three weeks (a whopping 263.25 person-week loss!). They predict that the loss would cause the US gross domestic product to drop by $683 billion, or 5.5 percent (in contrast, in an average year the GDP crows by 3.5 percent).

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Okay, I promise not to let this turn into a big zombiefest in the coming weeks, but I’m excited about the release of 28 Weeks Later this spring and of course as we come closer to its release date, there’s more to post about it. “28 Days Later” was a refreshing take on the whole zombie apocalypse thing, making the zombies scary again at a time when the word “zombie” seemed a good description of the American public. Given a chance to revisit that territory, I’m hopeful and enthusiastic.

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Best get a head start on building your bunkers and Faraday cages. NASA has used their classified time machine to confirm predictions of solar storm activity in 2012, during the peak of the next sunspot cycle.

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The poster - “one-sheet” as people involved with film call it - for “28 Weeks Later”, the sequel to “28 Days Later”, is now out.

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