For the past three decades Deborah Gordon has devoted herself to studying ant colonies in the Arizona desert. Although her chosen subject – the red harvester ant – isn’t much to look at, when they ...

Imagine you're a member of the Cephalotes goniodontus species, an arboreal ant with a Darth Vader-like head that has inspired humans to call you "turtle ants." You're moving along a branch of the ...

New drugs often fail because they cause undesirable side effects. Researchers have now developed simulation software that predicts the properties of active agents and virtually builds new ones. The ...

Modern agriculture has quietly become one of the most data-intensive industries on the planet. Fields dotted with soil sensors, drones overhead, automated irrigation lines, and networked greenhouses ...

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks. Ants are capable of remarkable feats of ...

This chapter introduces ant colony optimization as a method for computing minimum Steiner trees in graphs. Tree computation is achieved when multiple ants, starting out from different nodes in the ...

An analysis of ant colony behavior could yield better algorithms for network communication, say investigators. Biologists have long suspected that ants base their population-density estimates on the ...

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Ants are capable of remarkable feats of coordination. They can forge complex paths through the jungle, build sophisticated structures, and adapt ...