an iron padlock around his foot.

In this excerpt from "Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World" (Princeton University Press, 2025), author and historian John Blair reveals the impact the printed press had on the spread of vampiric lore — and the grizzly purported practice of ingesting the blood and organs of a vampire to prevent other people becoming one.

With the invention of printing, the circulation of European stories about restless corpses moved up several gears. Occasional early references were followed by a clutch of theological and philosophical discussions during c. 1580-1610, and then — from the 1670s — a steadily growing volume of printed academic and historical debate and commentary, reaching a climax in 1732.

Another landmark came in 1746 when the Benedictine scholar Dom Augustin Calmet published his survey of supernatural beings, which was quickly reissued in several editions, including an English one of 1759. This book's section on vampires was the most influential academic work on the subject ever published. Its straightforwardly evidence-based approach was a breath of fresh air after a long series of increasingly derivative works.

It achieved its remarkable popularity because it entered the market at the right point: saturated with so much fragmented and repetitive discussion of "vampires" (still a relatively new word), the reading public wanted a textbook. Calmet inspired a huge progeny of followers and popularisers, bringing the stories to a much wider readership; a good example of the genre is the Histoire des vampires et des spectres malfaisants [History of Vampires and Malevolent Specters] of 1820, a pocketbook that re-packages Calmet for the mass market.

Calmet's book remains the ultimate source of much modern vampire literature in Europe and America, both fi­ctional and supposedly historical, and was transformative in bringing the topic to a wider reading public. There and elsewhere, stories were now frozen on the printed page, where later generations could read them. But they were stories still: not necessarily more reliable, and by no means stable in transmission.

The complexity of interactions between learned discourse and popular practice is illustrated by one particularly bizarre and repellant (not to say dangerous) strand in the belief-system. This is the practice of ingesting blood or organs from a supposed vampire corpse, or ashes derived from burning them, as a remedy for vampire-induced illness.

Although not wholly dissimilar from the idea that victims will recover as they watch the smoke rise from burning vampire organs — already known in 11th-century England — its shocking physicality sets it apart. Did people in pre-modern Europe really do this?

A complicating factor is the medicinal use of human blood and bodyparts, in accordance with the theories of the physician, philosopher, and alchemist "Paracelsus" (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, c. 1493–1541). A brilliant experimenter, Paracelsus believed that substances healed through occult 'influences' or 'spirits,' the most powerful being those derived from what they were meant to cure: the human body.

The fact that medicine now rejects these hypotheses should not make us view them patronizingly: in the early modern period, ingesting or anointing with substances from Egyptian mummies or the blood of executed criminals seemed as rational as doing the same with any other substance. These Paracelsian ideas entered popular practice: at a beheading in Vienna in 1668/9, a man ran forward and caught the spouting blood to cure his epilepsy.

The tangled story of consuming blood from vampire corpses starts in a different and very unexpected place. In 1687, a major ethnographical account of parts of West Africa by the Capuchin missionary Giovanni Antonio Cavazzi was published in Bologna. In it, Cavazzi describes magical and medical practices among the Mbundu of Angola, including a method of obtaining vital curative fluid from undecayed corpses:

When they are in a fresh and intact state when unearthed, their heads are cut from their bodies, from which it is said that blood flows out (which may happen through some illusion or deceit). It is collected and made into poultices for the sick, or mixed into their food, which infallibly guarantees health. Thereafter the dead person, having lost his strength, will no longer be able to harass them.

From Angola to Paris: in May 1693, a story appeared in the society magazine Mercure Galant. The author was the courtier and polymath Pierre des Noyers (1607–93), who spent several years in Poland in the entourage of Queen Louise-Marie. Much earlier, in 1639, he had written to a friend about the being known as upior (Ruthenian) or striga (Polish): born with teeth; eating its shroud and then its hands and arms in the coffi­n; causing successive deaths of family members; and extinguished by decapitation and release of pent-up blood.

This story is rather highly coloured (eating the hands and arms is unusual), but it does probably originate in genuine oral accounts of the shroud-chewer belief.

Very different is des Noyers’s account from 1693. Now the striges and upierz have become corpse-hijacking demons: 'It is said that the demon takes this blood from the body of a living person, or from certain animals, and carries it into a dead body; for it is alleged that the demon goes out from this corpse during a certain period, between noon and midnight, after which it returns and stores there the blood that it has gathered.'

The blood comes out of the mouth, nose, and ears of the corpse, the corpse swims in blood, and it starts to eat its shroud. The demon especially troubles former associates and relatives of the dead 'host,' appearing to them in the guise of parents or friends, and does not leave until all the family members have died in succession. The remedy is to exhume the corpse, which is found soft, flexible, bloated, and red:

When they are found in that state, having the likeness of those who had appeared in dreams, their heads are cut off and their hearts are opened, and a quantity of blood flows out. It is collected and kneaded into flour, which is made into bread, which is a certain remedy to guarantee against such a terrible affliction. After the heads [of the dead people] have been cut off, those whom the Spirit torments at night are no longer troubled by it, and are well thereafter.

This narrative has problems. The idea of the demon using the corpse as a safe-deposit for its hoard of blood seems to be unique; so, probably, is the time-slot between noon and midnight. These read like clerical rationalizations, perhaps fed to des Noyers by some Polish priest and overlaid on his earlier, more authentic observations. But more fundamentally, it seems obvious that des Noyers’s account of Poland shamelessly re-works Cavazzi's account of Angola, published eight years previously.

It might not be quite so simple. An earlier common source, still unidenti­fied, remains possible. The descriptions of mixing blood into food and poultices look remarkably close to Paracelsian ideas, extended from ordinary corpses to undead ones: was even Cavazzi's account distorted by his own medical learning? But in any case des Noyers’s account is a piece of unprincipled plagiarism, worthless as evidence for Polish folk-belief.

Even so, it has bounced down through the echo-chambers of vampire literature ever since. The following year, a lawyer called Marigner built on the narrative — which he took at face value — with long philosophical musings on the nature of vampires. Inevitably, in 1746, it was republished in Calmet's book, which made it permanently available to vampire-aware readers.

While otherwise faithful to des Noyers, Calmet's version irons out the motif of demonic corpse-possession by calling this predator a vampire 'or a demon in its form.' This process of moulding to a more familiar template culminates in a recent version that presents the story as straightforward ethnographic reporting, omitting the demonic motif completely.

So far, this has just been a morality tale of plagiarism and uncritical copying. But in 1713, at Dąbrówka (now western Ukraine), some villagers were tried in the Uniate episcopal court for exhuming a woman's corpse and mutilating it in inventive ways. They admitted to the exhumation (because the dead woman had been walking around and attacking people), and to drinking the corpse's blood mixed with vodka. They denied cutting out the heart, mixing the blood into flour, and baking cakes with it, but the judges were sceptical and made them swear an oath.

This will sound very familiar to readers of early modern witch trials, where suspects were regularly bullied into admitting bizarre fantasies formulated by the persecutors. In this case, it seems clear that at least the idea of the blood-cakes was suggested by the judges; the same could be true of the blood-drinking, even though the accused were induced to confess that. It is distinctly possible, not to say likely, that an ordinary corpse-killing was embellished with luridly fi­ctitious detail by judges who knew des Noyers's report from twenty years earlier.

Killing The Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. Copyright © 2025 by John Blair, published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.

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'> How purported tales of consuming vampire blood and organs spread in the 18th century

It's unclear who won this stellar stare-down. If the bird appeared to blink, that's only because its eye is really the triple-star system HD 53367, a flickering trio of very young and energetic stars actively shaping the cloud around them.

The Rubin Observatory, meanwhile, had to avert its gaze quickly; this image is just one of about 16,000 exposures taken of the night sky between Oct. 24 and Dec. 11, 2024, according to the National Science Foundation, which co-manages Rubin along with the U.S. Department of Energy. Taken with the aforementioned Commissioning Camera (ComCam), the deep-space photos served as an early test of the observatory's hardware, software and image-processing capabilities.

ComCam's test image is remarkably crisp — but what's even more impressive is that Rubin has since upgraded to a camera with more than 20 times the field of view. The Legacy Survey of Space and Time Camera currently mounted on the observatory's Simonyi Survey Telescope takes 3,200-megapixel images of the night sky every 30 seconds, completing a full scan of the entire southern sky every few nights, Tony Tyson, Rubin's chief scientist, previously told Live Science.

Now that the Legacy Survey of Space and Time has officially begun, Rubin will spend the next 10 years photographing the sky night after night, creating a time-lapse movie of the universe that is expected to reveal millions of cosmic wonders, from exploding supernovas to newfound comets and exoplanets. Perhaps it will even spot another bird.

Like what you see? Take a look at the hidden details in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's debut images here.

'> Cosmic 'seagull' locks eyes with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in long-awaited test image

It's "very difficult to say with any certainty, as we have no direct evidence documenting interactions between Gigantopithecus and human ancestors," Renaud Joannes-Boyau, director of higher-degree research training at Southern Cross University in Australia and an archaeologist who has conducted extensive research into human evolution, told Live Science in an email.

"That said, if we look at the broader pattern of human evolution, our lineage [Homo] has consistently behaved as an apex predator," Joannes-Boyau said. "Humans and our ancestors have shown a remarkable tendency to explore, exploit and, at times, eliminate large animals that shared their environment. I think it is reasonable to imagine that those interactions may have involved a mixture of indifference, curiosity and violence, depending on the circumstances."

Friedemann Schrenk, a professor of paleobiology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, thinks Gigantopithecus would have likely tried to avoid humans. "Humans were and are the most aggressive primates ever on earth using tools and weapons and were probably encroaching on Gigantopithecus habitats," he told Live Science in an email. Homo erectus made use of hand axes and possibly hafted spears.

Schrenk envisions the hypothetical interactions as similar to those between modern-day humans and orangutans, which has resulted in humans encroaching on orangutan habitats and the apes' populations declining. "After all, Gigantopithecus was a gigantic orangutan," he said, noting that if there was hostility in a direct encounter, early humans would have been the aggressors.

Different environments?

Yet it's also possible that Gigantopithecus and hominins lived in different environments in Southeast Asia, which would have minimized the number of interactions they had, said Hervé Bocherens, a professor of biogeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

The "carbon stable isotopic ratios measured on some teeth of both taxa suggest a different habitat, closed forests for Gigantopithecus and open savannah for Homo erectus," Bocherens told Live Science in an email. However, because of limited data, "we cannot exclude that some hominins were also present in more forested environments," he added. Grinding patterns in their teeth suggest that Gigantopithecus' diet was essentially plant-based and may have included bamboo.

In a 2024 study, scientists investigated the demise of Gigantopithecus and found no evidence that hominins contributed to Gigantopithecus' extinction. Instead, they determined that the main cause was environmental change that resulted in a reduction in the forested environment where Gigantopithecus lived and foraged. In fact, hominins and Gigantopithecus may not have encountered each other at all, Yingqi Zhang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and first author of the paper, told Live Science in an email.

We can only imagine what hominins would have thought when they glimpsed these gigantic creatures. It’s not clear how hominins and Gigantopithecus would have interacted, if they ever did, said Frido Welker, a professor of biomolecular paleoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He thinks they would have avoided each other but they may have "been in awe when they did happen to run into each other."

See how much you know about early humans with our human evolution quiz!

'> What happened when humans encountered Gigantopithecus? government healthcare website. If we are not careful, it's only a matter of time before one of these incidents causes large-scale, real-world harm, like shutting down an electricity grid or municipal water system, or a mass misdiagnosis in a health system. If this trend continues, the entire industry could become tarnished.

But there is a blueprint for self-regulation in a risky business: the nuclear industry, which has built up layers of oversight, controls and self-scrutiny over decades.

Frontier AI may require something similar: private regulation among competitors that do not trust one another but have a mutual interest in preventing outcomes that could damage them all. This does not appeal to the better angels of human nature — it's self-preservation for the industry itself.

There is a historical precedent for this kind of arrangement. The nuclear sector did not become safe because every actor suddenly became benevolent. It became safer through a layered system of peer scrutiny, technical standards, information-sharing and external oversight. International organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was established in 1957, emerged to coordinate monitoring and verification, while national regulators and industry bodies gradually built professional norms around catastrophic risk.

The result was not perfect safety, as the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 clearly attests. But nuclear governance architecture is designed around the recognition that in high-risk technological systems, one actor's failure can become everyone's problem. This was seen following Chernobyl: global nuclear safety increased significantly after the disaster, with upgrades to reactor designs, improved training and international monitoring networks.

And this movement to self-regulation also occurred in the U.S. nuclear sector, following the Three-Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. The reactor suffered a partial meltdown after a relatively minor cooling malfunction. Investigations later revealed design flaws in instruments and alarms, along with inadequate emergency response training, were the root cause of the incident.

The event nearly killed the nuclear energy industry in the U.S., causing public support to fall from a record high of 69% in 1977 to 46%t in 1979. The entire industry suffered because of failures at one facility. In response, the U.S. nuclear industry established the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) in December 1979 to improve operational safety.

The analogy to AI should not be overstated. Nuclear materials are easier to count than algorithms, and nuclear facilities are harder to hide than model weights. The outcomes of a catastrophic AI blunder are also less existential, although its use in weapon systems is not without risk. In September, an AI hallucination almost led to the U.S. intercepting a Chinese ship suspected of carrying nuclear material to Iran.

Yet the comparison remains useful because the core governance problem is similar. In both cases, competitors operate in an environment where the downside risk of unchecked rivalry is borne by society while the upside is private gain for these firms. The challenge is to create institutions that make restraint the rational default — even when no actor fully trusts the others, and the inner workings of the industry are not readily visible to outsiders.

For AI, that could mean reciprocal evaluation of frontier models before deployment, secure mechanisms for sharing safety information, agreed red lines around certain capabilities, and independent third parties empowered to audit compliance. Such mechanisms would not replace government regulation. They would instead serve as an intermediate layer: stronger than voluntary ethics statements but more adaptive and technically informed than legislation alone can often be in fast-moving domains. The state would act as a background enforcer.

AI executives appear willing to look for solutions too, with Elon Musk recently suggesting a peer-review system before advanced model release, and Demis Hassabis, co-founder and chair of Google DeepMind, putting forward a framework for an AI Standards Body, similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.

Skeptics will object, with reason, that industry-led governance can become cartel behavior or public-relations theater. Companies may use "safety" language to entrench incumbency, slow rivals or deflect binding regulation. Those are real dangers. The lesson from nuclear history is not that private coordination works automatically. It is that private coordination works only when nested inside a broader system of transparency, verification and public authority. Without those elements, private regulation becomes little more than trust-me rhetoric.

Still, dismissing private regulation altogether would be a mistake. Governments do not yet possess the technical capacity, speed or international alignment needed to oversee frontier AI on their own. And if the leading labs already see themselves as bound together by shared exposure to catastrophic risk, that recognition can become the basis for institutional design. The question is how to turn mutual fear into durable rules.

That is where the nuclear analogy is most powerful. It reminds us that industries facing existential hazards do not need perfect trust in order to cooperate. They need mechanisms that make cooperation preferable to defection. In practice, that means inspections, peer review, incident reporting, professional norms and a state-backed enforcement perimeter. AI governance is often discussed as if the only choices were laissez-faire innovation or heavy-handed state control. History suggests a third path: structured private coordination under public shadow.

The real opportunity, then, is not to celebrate the newfound (apparent) prudence of technology executives, it is to recognize what their comments reveal. When even fierce rivals begin to argue for mutual scrutiny, they are admitting that competition alone cannot govern the frontier. That admission should be treated not as reassurance but as evidence that the risk has become collective.

The policy task now is to build institutions that fit that reality. Governments should push for mandatory reporting, independent evaluation and legal backstops. But they should also encourage enforceable forms of peer oversight among the handful of firms whose systems may shape the trajectory of the technology. Frontier AI is becoming an industry in which the leading actors are hostages of one another. The nuclear age showed that such conditions can produce serious governance. The hope is that AI firms learn that lesson before they learn the cost of ignoring it at the peril of the public at large.

Opinion on Live Science gives you insight on the most important issues in science that affect you and the world around you today, written by experts and leading scientists in their field.

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'> AI giants are one big mistake away from catastrophe. They could learn a lot from the nuclear industry.

Although it officially turns full at 12:11 a.m. EDT on Monday (Oct. 26), the Hunter's Moon will appear almost perfectly full as it rises on both Sunday (Oct. 25) and Monday evenings, giving skywatchers two opportunities to observe it.

October's full moon is nicknamed the Hunter's Moon because it was traditionally a signal for hunters to prepare for the coming cold winter by hunting, slaughtering and preserving meat, according to Time and Date. That's an Anglo-Saxon name; Native American names for October's full moon include the Drying Rice Moon, the Falling Leaves Moon and the Freezing Moon.

The first chance to see the Hunter's Moon comes just before sunset on Sunday, when the almost-full moon will rise in the east. The second opportunity comes on Monday, when the moon — still essentially 100% illuminated — will again rise just after sunset. Because it will be in a slightly darker sky, Monday's moonrise will likely be more dramatic.

As it rises Sunday, the moon will appear in the constellation Aries, and Saturn will be to its upper right. On Monday, it will rise above the Pleiades open cluster (M45).

For the best view on either evening, find somewhere with a clear view low to the eastern horizon and be in position shortly before moonrise where you are. An elevated viewpoint, open field or coastline is ideal because buildings, trees and hills can delay the moment the moon becomes visible.

Although the full moon will look magnificent with the naked eye, a backyard telescope or good stargazing binoculars can help you zoom in on various lunar features.

The Hunter's Moon may appear unusually large thanks to the "moon illusion," which makes the moon seem bigger when it's seen beside familiar objects, such as trees and buildings, near the horizon. The illusion stems from the fallacies of how our brains use distance to perceive size.

October's Hunter's Moon isn't a supermoon, but it comes immediately before a notable sequence of four consecutive supermoons. The first will be the next full moon, the Beaver Moon, on Nov. 24, followed by full moons in December, January and February. A supermoon occurs when a full moon happens while the moon is relatively close to Earth in its slightly elliptical orbit, making it appear somewhat larger and brighter than average.

How much do you know about the moon? Test your lunar smarts with our moon quiz!

'> Watch the full 'Hunter's Moon' rise next to Saturn this weekend