"The Department of Health determined there was no biohazard threat with a body being inside the water tank."

The body of a woman last seen on January 31st at the Cecil Hotel was discovered yesterday in the hotel's rooftop water tank. Guests were complaining about low water pressure.

How is there "no biohazard threat"? Can anyone explain the science of the health department's assurance?

"Experts are puzzled by the unexpected find of such a large number of skulls at what appears to have been a small, unremarkable shrine...."

"The heads were carefully deposited in rows or in small mounds, mostly facing east toward the rising sun, sometime between 660 and 860 A.D., a period when the nearby city-state of Teotihuacan had already declined but the Aztec empire, founded in 1325, was still centuries in the future."

[Georgia State University archaeologist Christopher] Morehart said some of the skulls were found with finger bones inserted into the eye sockets. “It was common enough that it was intentionally placed there in the eye socket,” Morehart said, though the ritual significance of that remains unclear.

"He was the only guy who was ever nice to me."

Explanation a woman gave for why she kept the dead body of a man in her house for what the police say was 18 months.

She kept the body clean and dressed and talked to it while watching NASCAR on television.

And she cashed his Social Security checks.

"A green alternative to cremation... dissolving the body in heated alkaline water."

"Body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system. Mr Sullivan, a biochemist by training, says tests have proven the effluent is sterile and contains no DNA, and poses no environmental risk. The bones are then removed from the unit and processed in a 'cremulator,' the same machine that is used to crush bone fragments following cremation into ash. Metals including mercury and artificial joints and implants are safely recovered."

Or... try Promession:

Coffins are fed in one end [of a machine], and the body removed from the coffin within the unit and then treated with liquid nitrogen.

The body is then vibrated until the body fragments, after which the remains are dried and refined further, and then passed through filters to remove metals, including dental amalgam. The remains are then poured into a square biodegradable coffin, again automatically, for shallow burial.

And the whole thing is supposed to become soil fairly quickly.

Here's my question: Isn't old-fashioned burial greener? It's carbon sequestration, right?

Copulating corpses.

The science exhibit.

It is one thing to ask whether dead bodies should be plastinated and dissected to various levels and posed and displayed for the public and another to ask whether the parts to be displayed and the poses can be sexual. But...

The way a plastinate is exhibited can vary from country to country to reflect local sensibilities. A vote of local employees decided that one of the copulating female cadavers should wear fewer clothes in Zurich than was the case in Berlin.

"Switzerland is the first country that already said from the outset that we could show whatever we wanted," said [Gunther] von Hagens.

"Zurich is ready ... but it's maybe not so easy in every other town," he said. "We have discussed whether it is proper to show homosexuality and in what way. This is a very delicate subject."

... it is quite another matter to conform the display to local preferences and prejudices that require different degrees of exposure for the male and the female and restrictions about different kinds of sexual activity. Just because something is a "delicate subject" doesn't mean you have to track local taste — especially when your whole enterprise challenges convention.

Carcass disposal in Europe. Feed the starving vultures.

"Environmentalists describe the birds as 'nature's cleaners.' But many vultures have been starving to death since European rules aimed at tackling mad cow disease forced all dead livestock to [be] cleared away. This forced the birds to embark on some rather long-haul trips - one was even spotted recently perched on top of a bus shelter in Brussels."

Oh! A vulture on a bus shelter in Brussels! Well, then, screw the human beings and their fussy worries about the spongiform degeneration of their brains.

"Artist Lishan Chang uses road kill in art to highlight tension between man, nature."

Artist receives publicity in Daily News to highlight tension between taste and my last shred of patience.

If I'd been blogging on September 17, 2002, I'd have blogged "Feces, dead horses, and fleas: evolution of the hostile use of biological agents."

This is an article by Emil Lesho, David Dorsey, and David Bunner, and I know I would have blogged on that date because it's in an old email file. Back in the days before blogging, I'd send out interesting things I found to a few select correspondents. I've so often regretted not blogging in the years before 2004, and I think from time to time I'll pull an old should-have-been-a-blog-post out of the email. This is really interesting:

Scythian archers in 400 BC and Hannibal in 190 BC were probably the first to "weaponize" biological agents. The former did it by dipping their arrowheads in feces or decaying cadavers; the latter, by launching pottery filled with poisonous snakes onto the ships of King Eumenes during the Second Macedonian War. Plague-infected cadavers were hurled into the fortifications of adversaries during medieval battles and during the famous Mongol siege of the Ukrainian city of Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in 1347.

Later, the development of the trebuchet, an enhanced catapult, made it possible to accurately launch several-hundred-pound loads of manure or large piles of bodies that previously had been too heavy. Although some authors believe cadavers were not competent plague vectors, the prevailing scientific establishment of those times lacked the epidemiologic sophistication to realize this. Biological projectiles had some strategic value--if only psychological--because their use persisted into the 20th century during the Russian Revolution, various European conflicts, and the South African Boer wars.

And consider the horrible Dr. Ishii:

Shiro Ishii, a Japanese Army physician who rose to the rank of general, epitomized physician involvement in the biological war effort. Ishii dreamt of "doctors in combat alongside the glorious infantry." "Alongside" implied offensively using biological agents, not caring for the wounded. Dr Ishii is reported to have offered chocolates filled with anthrax bacteria to children in the Chinese town of Nanking (Nanjing).... Authors credit Dr Ishii with having launched perhaps the most gruesome series of biological weapon experiments in history.

As many as 10,000 prisoners died as a result of having been fed, sprayed, injected, or bombed with a long list of biological and chemical agents, including but not limited to plague, glanders, anthrax, dengue, cholera, and tularemia. Prisoners were given seawater intravenously or horse blood in plasma exchange replacements or deliberately frozen to death to ascertain the effect of temperature on the various pathogens. To determine the effects of barotrauma, they were pressurized until, as one eyewitness put it, "their eyes ruptured and bled." At specifically designated research facilities under Ishii's purview, no prisoners were allowed to survive. If they survived the initial series of experiments, they were then "sacrificed" to determine the progress of the iatrogenesis.

Plague fascinated Ishii. He believed it held great strategic potential and so masterminded the flea bomb, a porcelain structure filled with plague-infected fleas and oxygen. Oxygen sustained the fleas during high-altitude releases, whereas porcelain required less heat and force to shatter during detonation, allowing more fleas to survive. The brittleness of porcelain and a secondary charge ensured that the shell turned to dust, leaving no physical evidence of spent munitions. About 15 million fleas were released per attack. Previously classified documents revealed that at least 11 Chinese cities were attacked with plague, anthrax, and paratyphoid.

From 1940 to 1942, as many as 700 Chinese civilians died because of direct attacks. More than 120 deaths resulted from the aerial dissemination of plague-infected fleas over the cities of Ch'u-hsien (Qu Xian) and Ning-po (Ning-hsien). Because of the indiscriminate nature of biological weapons and the limited experience militaries had in using such weapons, aggressors occasionally succumbed to the diseases that they were trying to inflict on their enemy. During a Japanese assault on the Chinese city of Ch'ang-te in 1941, Japanese forces incurred 10,000 casualties and 1,700 deaths as a result of biological agents.

ADDED: I've inserted some paragraphs into the text above. And let me connect those historical tales to the recent news that about al Qaeda and the plague.

Film dead, 2008.