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It's Tuesday, October 18th, 2022. I'm Jackson Bird today.

Could vampires exist, mathematically speaking?

Plus, an update on COVID variance of concern as we head into winter.

And the United Kingdom has ruled that gifts are still relevant and meta can't hog them all.

Here's some cool stuff for your ride home.

Around Halloween, even academics like to get into the holiday spirit.

Archaeologists might share medieval recipes or supposedly

cursed artifacts. Historians might explain how various creature myths came to be, and mathematicians,

well, they'll explain exactly how long the human species would survive if vampires were real.

Or at least some mathematicians, and more than you would think.

Ella Morton over at Atlas Obscira published a roundup of several

actually published in legitimate journal studies using mathematical modeling to show humans' prospects in a world also inhabited by vampires.

So, as Morton explains, each of these studies used specific examples from literary or film

sources to determine their constraints on vampire behavior. And the earliest study Morton found

comes from 1982, an Austrian mathematician's Richard

Hartle and Alexander Melman. Their first paper on the subject, yes, they published more than one,

...