Ants, through their Borg-like powers, are capable of performing complex cooperative feats that make solitary insects look useless. In an extraordinary example of this collective behavior, researchers have shown how fire ants, when confronted by a barrier, swarm together to create towers with their bodies, allowing the…
Experiments aboard the International Space Station with common pavement ants have shown just how badly microgravity impairs the insects' ability to search unexplored areas. Remarkably, however, tumbling ants demonstrated an uncanny ability to regain contact with the surface.
Individual ants are not very smart, but ants working together in a colony are capable of extraordinary feats. Case in point is this remarkable video in which a colony of ants have transformed into a daisy chain to pull a dead millipede — behavior that's never been seen before.
It wasn't until I stumbled upon this video that I remembered doing this exact thing as a child at camp. Ants are fun.
By encouraging Glass users to behave and work like virtual ants, a new game called Swarm! is showing the tremendous potential for augmented reality to bring crowdsourcing to the next level — if not to humanity itself.
Harvester ant colonies are able to decide how many foragers they need to send out of the nest by using a protocol system that's eerily similar to the one IT professionals use to determine how much bandwidth is available on the internet. This so-called "anternet" apparently proves that ant decision-making and behavior…
