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Maybe, but it's not going to be easy. In West African and Haitian vodou, zombies are humans without a soul, their bodies nothing more than shells controlled by powerful sorcerers. In the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, an army of shambling, slow-witted, cannibalistic corpses reanimated by radiation attack a group of rural Pennsylvanians. We are looking for something a little in between Haiti and Hollywood: an infectious agent, a zombie virus if you will, that renders its victims half-dead but still-living shells of their former selves. An effective agent would target, and shut down, specific parts of the brain, says Steven C. Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and author of The Zombie Autopsies, a series of fictional excerpts from the notebooks of "the last scientist sent to the United Nations Sanctuary for the study of ANSD," a zombie virus. Schlozman explained to PopSci that although the walking dead have some of their mot...

There’s a scritching sound in the darkened bedroom. Your eyes spring open, your breathing rapid and shallow, with every muscle tensed and ready to run...only to find that all is still and silent. You start to drift back to sleep. Rustle. Every nerve in your body is now on high alert, and you turn on the light just in time to see a flash of fur dart into the crack under your closet door. You scream an undignified “YEEAAARRGGEETTTOUTTTTT,” which, roughly translated from panicked shrieking, means: “Hello, you are a mouse. Please leave.” Do I have a mouse in the house? “Something I’ve noted over the years is that you know someone has a mouse when you hear the very distinct scream the person makes when they’ve seen a mouse.” Michelle Niedermeier jokes. “Male, female, old, young—it's the same screech.” Niedermeier works with the Pennsylvania Integrated Pest Management Program, helping communities deal with pest problems. She says that often, for her, the first sign of a mouse i...

Part of Netflix's appeal is that it just works—whether you're on a phone, a tablet, or a smart TV, just fire up the streaming service and pick up where you left off. Dig a little deeper under Netflix's simple interface, though, and you'll find a number of ways to tweak and customize your viewing experience, as well as a selection of handy add-ons to make use of. Discover how to get more out of the popular streaming service with this list of tricks. This is one of Netflix's newest features and one that you'll find enabled in the latest apps for Android and iOS. If something can be downloaded to your phone or tablet—ready to watch when you don't have a strong internet connection—it will have a small arrow icon next to it. Whether or not your favorite movies and shows can be cached for offline viewing depends on the deal  Netflix  has struck with their creators, but all of the original  Netflix  content can be downloaded, plus plenty more besides. ...

If you're like me and you have a visceral reaction to the image above—if it makes your skin crawl, your hair hurt, and your stomach turn—you can count yourself among the trypophobic. According to its Facebook page, which is more than 4,000 members strong, trypophobia is fear of clustered holes. It is usually small holes in organic objects, such as lotus seed heads or bubbles in batter, that give trypophobics the extreme willies, triggering reactions like itchy skin, nausea and a general feeling of discomfort. (A picture of a candy bar with a pattern of small air bubbles did me in. Goodbye, dear chocolate. For now.) It turns out that I'm not alone. I contacted roughly 10 psychologists for this story, and of those who got back to me, none had heard of it. The evolutionary psychologists I emailed were unwilling to speculate on the potential biological underpinnings for a fear of small, clustered holes. Trypophobia is not an official phobia recognized in scientific literature. ...