MicrobeWorld

What looks like a Native American dream catcher is really a network of social interactions within a community. The red dots along the inner and outer circles represent people, while the different colored lines represent direct contact between them. All connections originate from four individuals near the center of the graph. Modeling social networks can help researchers understand how diseases spread.

Courtesy of Stephen Eubank, a physicist at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. Featured in the July 19, 2005, issue of Biomedical Beat.