Almost like actual science

The crew of the U.S.S Dead Space was kind enough to scatter little audio and text logs around the ship as they were being torn apart by ravenous alien zombies, kind of like their ship was a big facebook wall. They’re there, I presume, to build “atmosphere,” that intangible quality of experience that can be nurtured but not bought. I just found kind of an infuriating one, from one “scientist” to another:

Like bacteria, the organism infects other cells through osmosis, then mutates and reproduces agamogenetically.

Agamogenetically is a real word, not a made-up sci fi word, so they’re in the clear there. But if there’s one thing I learned in high school biology, it’s the definition of osmosis: the diffusion of water across a semi-permeable membrane. It is certainly not a means for anything to infect anything else… unless by infect, you mean hydrate. Bacteria don’t “infect other cells” this way because they’re not water molecules. Also, because bacteria don’t “infect” other cells, seeing as they are single cells themselves. Cells are into some kinky shit, but they don’t enter one another.

It’s kind of funny: I’ve come to accept and expect a sub-7th-grade understanding of science from our news media, but for some reason, I feel like the nerds at EA should know better. If nothing else, this kind of glaring error in a “scientific” document achieves the opposite of immersion in a medium that’s striving for it.