The 22nd edition of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, running from April 3 to 17, 2010, features a special event, Meet the Medics and Vets, with the contribution of:

Epidemic Planet - explore how H1N1 influenza travels around the world and how intervention measures may help

Epidemic Planet  is the visualization application developed in the context of the Epiwork Computational Modeling Platform, which enables its users to interactively compare and learn about the effect of a number of intervention scenarios on a pandemic, simulated using GLEaM (Global Epidemic and Mobility model). Its first public appearance was at the 3 months long INFECTIOUS Art & Science exhibition at the Science Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.

In collaboration with the British Society for Immunology, Epidemic Planet lands at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. In this installation, visitors will observe the evolution of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic since its early origin in Mexico, and will discover how the air traffic and commuting flows determined the spreading patterns of the flu worldwide.

Moreover, through a large screen coupled with a touch-screen interface, visitors will be able to explore different scenarios of propagation of the H1N1 pandemic according to different initial conditions (what if the flu started in Edinburgh? what if it were more contagious?) and different intervention measures. In this way, they will learn how the flights ban or the early distribution of vaccines could have affected the spreading of the pandemic.

The venue of the Epidemic Planet exhibition will be Hawthornden Court, in the National Museum of Scotland. Check out the programme of the Festival!

Come and visit the Epidemic Planet in Edinburgh!

Ever wonder where your dollar bills travel after you plop them down for a cup of coffee? The Web site Where’s George? allows you to do just that: Record your bill’s serial number and then track its journeys as other people spend it across the country. But it’s more than just a game. Because every time a dollar is spent in a new place, it means someone moved it there. Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, have been using the Web site’s data to study how people move within the United States.

They produced this video to explain their project and animate the results.

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The February 2010 issue of Physics World presents a special focus on Complexity and challenges in Network Science. From mapping the rise of the field, to examples of applications rooted in our everyday life, to charting the field’s possible future evolution, the special issue explores the key topics of Network Science - a field where physicists have been playing a major role.

A special feature is dedicated to infectious diseases, how they rapidly spread in our modern society, and what weapons we have nowadays to fight them. The article titled The Flu Fighters by Vittoria Colizza and Alessandro Vespignani (ISI Foundation and Epiwork coordination) describes the contribution of physicists to an interdisciplinary area where complex systems are the main ingredients, and modeling human behavior and biological contagion is the ultimate challenge.

Physics World, February 2010 issue.

D. Brockmann, "Follow the money"

V. Colizza, A. Vespignani, "The Flu Fighters"

In another special feature, Dirk Brockmann (Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-organization) reveals how information garnered from the geographical movement of banknotes and the location of mobile phones can reveal patterns in how people travel
The cover of the special issue shows an illustration by B. Goncalves et al. of the multiscale worldwide mobility networks used in the GLEaM model.