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"  Tuesday&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Unearthed&amp;quot; was the first of the Fringe double-episode week and dove into the paranormal with a brain-dead teenager, a murder victim and a Russian invasion of the mind.  Agent Olivia Dunham, along with ex-mad-scientist Walter Bishop and son Peter, is called in after a young girl wakes from the dead. The girl, Lisa, was pronounced brain dead after suffering an aneurysm, but wakes up on the operating table, just before her kidneys were to be harvested as donations.  At the hospital, the Fringe team learns that it wasn&amp;#039;t the girl&amp;#039;s startling resurrection that garnered the most concern; it was that she woke and immediately started to scream out Russian phrases and classified military alphanumeric codes--codes that just happened to link her to a missing military officer. (There&amp;#039;s also an appearance of an already-dead Agent Francis, which, if you hadn&amp;#039;t figured it out by now, makes this episode officially a season one cast off.)  As Olivia and Peter follow the trail of the missing Officer Andrew Rusk (who they soon figure out has been murdered), Walter tests his theory that Rusk&amp;#039;s energy was transferred to Lisa after her aneurysm, which somehow enhanced her psychic ability and sponged up Rusk before waking--a near-death experience with a little bit of ghost magnetism.  Scientists have little concrete proof for the existence of near-death out of body experiences. Neurologist and University of Toledo neuroscience researcher Dr. John Greenfield says the evidence is &amp;quot;weak at best.&amp;quot;  Greenfield speculates that near-death or out-of-body experiences are combinations of experiences the brain has in the process of recovery, interacting with ideas floating around in popular culture and the person&amp;#039;s expectations--so it&amp;#039;s probably best to think of such experiences as dreams, rather than hallucinations.  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s interesting that people who want to believe in near-death experiences as a spiritual experience, proof of the soul, etc., use the fact that the brain is inactive during the near-death state as an argument that it must be a spiritual experience, since the brain couldn&amp;#039;t generate activity during the near dead state,&amp;quot; Greenfield says. &amp;quot;The problem with this argument is that we only know about the experience after the person wakes up and has a functioning brain, which could have generated the experience during the waking process. In normal sleep, the dreams we actually remember are the ones that occur just before waking, and our sense of dreamtime is notoriously poor.&amp;quot;  He also says that these additional memories could be ones generated by the brain from past experiences or derived from the brain&amp;#039;s own creative ability to generate entertaining dream stories.  But to come back from a brain-dead state? That&amp;#039;s an entirely different matter. According to Greenfield, brain death occurs when the brain has no evidence of function at all and requires that the EEG be flat, indicating no superficial cortical activity. The body is also void of all brainstem reflexes (the ability to breathe, constrict the pupils or turn the eyes in response to a head turn and the gag reflex). &amp;quot;If you look at blood flow to the brain in someone who is brain dead, there isn&amp;#039;t any,&amp;quot; Greenfield says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s dead.\u00C2 So the idea that someone recovers from brain death, on its face, does not make much sense.&amp;quot;\u00C2  When patients do recover from brain death or a persistent vegetative state, the usual assumption is that the initial diagnosis was wrong, Greenfield says, that in fact the patient had a much milder or less permanent brain condition.\u00C2 These cases are incredibly rare.\u00C2  &amp;quot;Recovering from correctly diagnosed brain death would be like getting up from your coffin,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just not likely to occur.&amp;quot;  In Thursday&amp;#039;s episode, the deaths of three cops and a strange young boy with a mutated face draws the Fringe team out to the tiny town of Edina, where stories of creature sightings are a little bit more than mere legend.  The boy, Teddy, is picked up by a state officer, who offers to give him a ride home from his failed runaway attempt. But halfway through their trip, Teddy&amp;#039;s face morphs into a deformed monster&amp;#039;s. Unfortunately for the officers on Teddy&amp;#039;s case, a few more &amp;quot;creatures&amp;quot; come to rescue the boy and make sure there are no witnesses left. The boy, more so than the deaths, spurs a call to Agent Dunham&amp;#039;s team. It partners with Edina&amp;#039;s local sheriff, who tells them about legends of the creatures around the area, while Walter and Astrid attempt to decipher Walter&amp;#039;s self-laid evidence about his involvement in the area decades ago.  To kick off the monster fact-finding, Dr. Jeff Meldrum of the Department of Biological Sciences at Idaho State University says that creature legends are usually based on some real occurrence that is reinterpreted by different people to fit their own ideas or needs to explain an experience.  &amp;quot;The Wildman is an archetype of the human frame of reference,&amp;quot; Meldrum says. &amp;quot;Anthropology now recognizes that there is not just one path to human life, and that there may be many types of pre-human existence.&amp;quot;  After the Fringe team&amp;#039;s prying results in a confrontation with a shotgun-toting creature, Peter kills the attacker in a gunfight. But, when the body is recovered, it seems mysteriously human. As Walter runs tests on a corpse that still seems to be transforming in and out of its monster state, his clues lead them to a classified military experiment called &amp;quot;Project Elephant&amp;quot; that has gone horribly wrong. As a result, an entire town&amp;#039;s population and its descendants have become mutated creatures who camouflage themselves under a strong electromagnetic pulse that alters the eye&amp;#039;s perception.  &amp;quot;Intentional and unintentional radioactive poisonings can cause all sorts of birth defects and mutations in the inhabitants of the environment,&amp;quot; Meldrum says. But the extents of the changes that are livable vary by species.  Amphibians, for example, have a sensitive barometer to the environment that can lead to their physical alteration if they soak up the right chemical. Most of the time, the chemical would act as an infection in the tissue, seeping through eggs. Common types of these chemical substances would be radioactive waste, Meldrum says.  And radiation doesn&amp;#039;t just manifest in animals. In Kerala, located the southern tip of India, the sand of the beach is full of radioactive black sand. The residents there are said to be exposed to ten times the radiation dosage than the average person. Scientists there have found a mutation in their DNA&amp;#039;s mitochondria, but without a visible effect. It is much more likely that the poisoning of an animal would produce physical effects or mutations first.  &amp;quot;These things to happen many times to the creatures living in the environment near [Kerala], but they aren&amp;#039;t publicized,&amp;quot; Meldrum says. Furthermore, human DNA is tough to crack--even when it is altered, physical changes don&amp;#039;t always take root. Changes are much more likely to occur in less complex animals, like amphibians, who are heavily influenced by their habitat. Which is all to say that Fringe&amp;#039;s human mutation by way of military meddling is complete fiction. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/a5480/4342687/>