I hope someone over at the National Security Agency is slacking off and reading the MIT International Review because several geography professors have developed some interesting ideas on how to find one of the most-hunted men on the planet. Yup. Osama bin Laden.

Typically, the study’s main authors, Thomas Gillespie and John Agnew, are more preoccupied with “theories that predict how plants and animals distribute themselves over space and over time.” But combine those theories with some intelligence gathered by trusty spy satellites and you may be on to something. The professors think that their work represents the first scientific approach to establishing bin Laden’s current location.

Really? Given the time and money the U.S. intelligence community has devoted to the manhunt, that seems a bold claim. But why not give the authors’ methods a shot? It’s not like anything else has worked. To see a map of one of bin Laden’s proposed locations, read this New Yorker article.