SAN ANTONIO – Some Cornell University students are using zombies to show how real diseases spread.
Alex Alemi, a graduate student of physics, along with his colleagues Thursday presented a zombie apocalypse simulation at the American Physical Society March Meeting in San Antonio.
"I was trying to learn more about techniques used in epidemiology," Alemi said. "And so, to get a better handle, I tried and simulated zombies."
Using sophisticated models, the students have simulated a zombie outbreak in the United States.
Alemi and his colleagues used data from the 2010 U.S. Census, which reports a population of 306 million people.
The simulated outbreak started in New York City.
However, Alemi said that San Antonio would still not fare well.
"I don't think San Antonio does particularly well," Alemi said. "It's the cities, places where there is dense population, that do the worst."
Alemi's colleagues have also created an online simulator where you can adjust the "bite to kill ratio," how fast the zombies walk and where the outbreaks start.
"They spread very fast when they have lots of people around," Alemi said. "Once you get outside major urban areas and there's fewer people, they tend to sort of slow down."
According to their models, the Northern Rockies and the depths of Nevada are the last areas to get hit.
However, Alemi said there's no reason to start planning for survival.
"We're not too worried ourselves about actual zombies," said Alemi. "We mostly just thought it was a fun thing and hopefully people think it's interesting to check out some of the techniques that people use to study real diseases."
