Cornell University researchers are not just enriching their brains, they’re preserving them: Perhaps through pickling, purportedly from zombies.

A graduate statistical mechanics class joined with a group of researchers to model exactly how a zombie plague would spread through the United States.

Their work will be revealed at the 2015 American Physical Society March Meeting next week.

It’s not entirely frivolous.

Not that any zombie apocalypse is likely ever to be real.

VIRAL SIMULATION

Applying the characteristics of your typical monster with a hunger for human flesh to statistical mechanics does challenge many of the skills used to model real diseases. Not to mention inspire.

“Not that zombies are an everyday occurrence, but most people can wrap their brains around them,” graduate student Alex Alemi told the phys.org blog.

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“At their heart, the simulations are akin to modelling chemical reactions taking place between different elements and, in this case, we have four states a person can be in — human, infected, zombie, or dead zombie — with approximately 300 million people.”

So once a standardised set of zombie characteristics were established, these were plugged into an epidemiology simulation usually used for mapping the behaviour of disease susceptible, infected and resistant subjects.

“Each possible interaction — zombie bites human, human kills zombie, zombie moves, etc — is treated like a radioactive decay … we tried to simulate the times it would take for all of these different interactions to fire, where complications arise because when one thing happens it can affect the rates at which all of the other things happen,” he says.

So essentially, they programmed the following scenarios:

Zombie bites human, human gets infected, two zombies move on

And the less common:

Human kills zombie, human moves on.

WALKING DEAD

So they unleashed the zombie plague on the US.

What did the simulation find?

The books, movies and TV series all have it wrong.

“If there is a zombie outbreak, it is usually assumed to affect all areas at the same time,” Alemi says. “But … it doesn’t seem like this is how it would actually go down.”

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The simulation reportedly agrees with one aspect: The cities will become festering hives of undead fast.

So what happens if you take to the hills?

YOU’D BETTER RUN, RUN, RUN

It’ll buy you more time.

An escape to less heavily populated country areas will gain you several weeks. Taking to the mountains will give you months.

“Given the dynamics of the disease, once the zombies invade more sparsely populated areas, the whole outbreak slows down — there are fewer humans to bite” he says.

As zombies are created at a slower rate, the spread of the infection itself slows.

So a country holiday shack may not be such an extravagant idea after all.

Especially as Australia has so few mountains.

The broader implications of an outbreak of zombie on the world could potentially be the subject of a future study.

“Given the time, we could attempt to add more complicated social dynamics to the simulation, such as allowing people to make a run for it, include plane flights …”