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An Internet game akin to "Where's Waldo?" for tracing the movement of dollar bills has helped scientists develop a statistical model for predicting the spread of an epidemic in this country.

Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization have used the Web game "Where's George?," which monitors the geographic circulation of dollar bills by their serial numbers, to forecast how a virus would spread from human to human.

The physicists based their research on the idea that like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place.

"Since we can't track people with tracking devices, like we do animals, we needed to get data that provided us with millions of movements of individuals," said Lars Hufnagel, a post-doctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UCSB.

"We use these dollar bills as radar devices for humans," he said. Hufnagel co-wrote an article on the research in this week's Nature journal.
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Read More / Source: News.com