Do you have a plan for the zombie apocalypse? Maybe you should start by learning a little bit about the science of the zombie brain. There’s a new novel out, The Zombie Autopsies: Secret Notebooks from the Apocalypse that tackles just that.

Zombies might be fictional, but the novel was written by a real doctor, Steven Schlozman, a child psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. According to him, zombie stories are a perfect for us to look at the spread of pandemics and effects of contagious disease.

The Zombie Autopsies (which I haven’t read yet but will be adding to my list post-haste) is written as the journal of a neuroscientist studying zombies while infected by “ataxic neurodegenerative satiety deficiency syndrome” (“zombie disease”) himself. Not only that, 2/3 of the world has already been infected, and it’s up to him to get to the disease before it gets to him.

Ruth’s interests all involve making things, which means her husband and two kids have learned to watch out for stray pins and bead trays and to ask before eating anything made of fondant. By day, she's an editor over at opensource.com. Follow her on Twitter.