PHOTOS: ALAMY, SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY, GETTY X2, NASA ILLUSTRATIONS: RAJA LOCKEY 13
HOW CAN I SURVIVE A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?
THE THOUGHT EXPERIMENTCats can spend 18 hours a day sleeping.
As they are solitary animals, they want a safe
hiding place to snooze.
But a cat curled in a tiny box, even out in the
open, is probably just avoiding your cold floor.
Cats are happy in room temperatures around
14°C warmer than is comfortable for humans,
and, if there isn’t a convenient sunbeam to lie in,
they will make do with a cosy shoebox. LVWHY DO CATS LIKE
SMALL SPACES?
- HEAD FOR THE HILLS
The spread of zombie disease can be
modelled using epidemiological simulations.
A 2015 study at Cornell University found that
cities would be almost completely infected
within a week, but remote mountains
would be untouched after four months.
The reproduction ratio (R0) is the average
number of new infections that each zombie
creates. If R0 is between zero and one,
the epidemic will eventually die out.
2. LAY LOW
If the zombies need to eat brains to survive,
humanity may be able to simply wait out
the crisis. A human brain only contains
a maximum of around 2,000 calories,
so even the slow and shambling kind of
zombie will need to feed every few days
just to maintain its metabolism. And any
humans that are eaten can’t rise to become
new zombies, so the disease would also
spread more slowly.
3. FIGHT BACK
Conversely, a 2009 study at the University
of Ottawa predicted that, even if a cure
for the virus is found, zombies will
eventually overwhelm the population
by infecting us faster than we can be
treated. Of the possible scenarios,
the only one with a happy ending gave
us just 10 days to destroy all the zombies,
with a series of increasingly devastating
counter-attacks.
The number of years that
orangutans can nurse their
offspring – the longest time
of any wild mammals.8
The number of seconds
(± 7 seconds) that all
mammals take to defecate,
regardless of size.12
IN NUMBERSWHAT IF EARTH HAD
TWO MOONS?The consequences of a second moon orbiting
the Earth depend on how massive that moon
is and how far from the Earth it orbits.
The most obvious effect would be that
the ocean tides would be altered. Tides could
be either smaller or higher and there could
be more than two high tides per day.
If the gravitational influence of a second moon
were extreme, it could lead to phenomenally
huge ocean tides (up to a kilometre high),
which would also result in frequent tsunamis.
It could also lead to enhanced volcanic activity
and earthquakes. AGuThe percentage of male
sheep that are homosexual.8