It's a question as old the zombie genre itself: If humans suddenly turned into contagious flesh-eating undead monsters, where should the survivors hide? In a paper to be presented at the March meeting of the Academy of Physical Sciences, a team from Cornell University made a dynamic statistical simulation of a zombie outbreak, and it turns out the best place to be is where people aren't.

While zombies are happily fictional (for now), there are many very real fatal infectious diseases spread by human contact, so there is some basis for modeling an outbreak like this. The model, which was done for a population of 300 million, gave humans four possible states of being: normal, infected, functioning zombie, dead zombie. It also took into account the density of human populations, so cities with lots of humans and human interactions would see rapid rates of infection compared to more remote and rural areas.