Military Developing Blood Farming Machine, Zombie Apocalypse Coming Soon

This looks like the beginning of a George Romero’s film, but it’s real. It seems like one of the US Army’s X-Files technologies is coming to us sooner than most skeptics expected: DARPA is developing now a portable blood farming system that could infinitely produce universal donor red cells from umbilical cord blood, right there in the battlefield. And yes, there’s exactly where things go really wrong and soldiers are transformed into mad, blood-seeking, fresh-human-biting but really lovely zombies, ready to spread some kind of weird blood disease all over the world.

The new system is being developed from a technology created at Johns Hopkins called Nanex. It uses a nano-fibre structure that replicates bone marrow, which is where red cells are manufactured. While their objective is to have a machine that could be moved to any camp and produce RBC units ready to be infused in wounded soldiers, and thus avoiding transportation and storage of blood, this research will obviously have important implications for everyone. Until then, maybe you can do a good action and donate some of your blood today. Or at least, buy a vampire a drink. [Cnet]