Quorum Sensing
Part 4: The dangling conversation In the previous article, we saw bacterial populations defend themselves collectively. Cyanobacteria formed protective flocs, while dying E.
View seriesFeatured
Part 1: From Little Things Big Things Grow
This is a part one of a four part series of emergent microbial communication.
19-Jul-2026
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Series sampler
Algorithms on Display
(See the original demos announcement at the link). We have added more algorithms to the website to try out and tweak.
View seriesArtificial vs Natural Intelligence
Over this 7-part series, we’ve explored how natural systems — ants, bees, birds, and brains — solve problems through emergence, not instruction.
View seriesAgentic Swarms - Lessons from Nature for Enterprise AI
A great article to capture the principles we use at adaptive-emergent. Lessons forgotten in the cloud.
08-Jun-2026
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Watching Information Ripple Through a Fish School
This study uses a conditioned escape response to follow how information propagates through schooling fish after selected individuals respond to a threat cue.
13-Aug-2026
Read moreStingless Bees Show How Spatial Cues Stabilise Colony Traffic
An RFID study of stingless bees found that seemingly minor environmental cues strongly affected how reliably returning foragers identified their own colonies.
13-Aug-2026
Read moreSchooling Fish Selectively Filter Social Information
Researchers used a closed-loop biohybrid system in which robotic agents interacted dynamically with schooling fish, allowing them to probe how individuals respond to neighbours rather than merely observe naturally occurring schools.
13-Aug-2026
Read moreOne Ant Can Trigger a Colony-Wide State Change
A model grounded in observations of ant colonies suggests that synchronized bursts of activity can begin with a single active worker.
13-Aug-2026
Read moreNoise May Help Hold Insect Swarms Together
A theoretical model of flying insect swarms proposes acoustic interaction as a local communication mechanism, with each insect attracted toward a weighted mean field generated by nearby swarm members.
13-Aug-2026
Read moreHow Simple Thresholds Turn Birdsong into a Collective Wave
A mathematical model of the dawn chorus shows how synchronized singing can emerge without central coordination.
13-Aug-2026
Read morePart 4: The dangling conversation
Part 4: The dangling conversation In the previous article, we saw bacterial populations defend themselves collectively. Cyanobacteria formed protective flocs, while dying E. coli released enzymes that helped surviving cells withstand antibiotics. Throughout this series, communication has been the recurring theme: signals accumulate, populations respond, and collective behaviour emerges.
08-Aug-2026
Read moreThe Ocean as Clock: How Sperm Whales May Keep a Signal in Time
Male sperm whales produce exceptionally powerful slow clicks that may remain detectable across roughly 70 kilometres of deep ocean while maintaining remarkably precise intervals of five to ten seconds.
08-Aug-2026
Read moreMore Ants, Harder Problems: Collective Intelligence Scales With the Team
Longhorn crazy ants cooperatively transporting awkward loads through mazes reveal a striking scaling effect: larger teams solve geometrically difficult problems much more effectively than smaller ones, even when the physical burden per ant is held constant. Simple gravity-like simulations reproduce easy cases but fail on harder puzzles unless researchers add distributed, ant-like rules such as shifting force directions and responding to nearby openings. Unlike the simulations, the ants appear to apply broadly useful behavioural rules without retuning them for each maze.
08-Aug-2026
Read moreWhen Sperm Stop Competing and Start Rowing Together
A comparative study across arthropods finds that sperm cooperation is far more widespread and evolutionarily recurrent than previously assumed.
06-Aug-2026
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