Physics students at a prestigious British school were given a homework assignment straight out of "Night of the Living Dead" — devise a formula to determine how much time it would take for a zombie virus to infect every single person on Earth.
And sadly, the mathematical calculations of the Leicester University pupils don't look good for humans as they concluded that a zombie apocalypse could wipe out all of humanity in less than six months.
The students who studied "the spread of a zombie virus through the global population with one person infected at day 0" said they found "by day 100, the surviving population is roughly 100-200 people."
And a few months later, even those survivors are toast thanks to the insatiable hunger of the flesh-eating monsters, which are corpses that come back to life.
Of course, several variables could skewer those dismal results, the dogged student researchers admitted.
"Natural birth and death rates have been neglected since the epidemic takes place over 100 days, so the natural births and deaths are negligible compared to the impact of the zombie virus over the short time frame," they wrote.
"We also assumed that a zombie will turn one person into a zombie each day with a 90 percent probability, meaning that each zombie is able to find a person every day. As the zombie to human ratio increases, this becomes less realistic ...
"We have also not included the possibility for the humans to kill the zombies. Including this may give the humans a better chance at survival."
Among their research tools the students used were a Wikipedia page about "black death" and a livestrong.com article about how many days people can go without food.
Zombies became a hot topic back in the 1960s with the release of the classic horror film "Night of the Living Dead." They took on new popularity in recent years with the success of the AMC series "The Walking Dead."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.