Posts

A theoretical study of collective escape proposes that animals can improve both speed and accuracy by treating an undisturbed neighbour as negative evidence about a possible threat.

To operate autonomously, minimal robot swarms must make timely and reliable collective decisions despite noisy individual sensing and severe constraints on communication, computation, and memory.

Researchers studying Bengalese finches found that learned birdsong develops statistical structure resembling properties of human language. Young birds segment continuous song into recurring chunks by tracking how predictably syllables follow one another, while frequently used chunks become disproportionately common and short.

Bees and flowering plants share one of nature’s most elegant and essential symbiotic relationships. This relationship goes beyond the visible interactions of bees landing on flowers and emerging covered in pollen.

Cells don’t always behave as individuals. In sheets of epithelial cells — the tightly connected cells that line and cover much of the body — researchers have observed waves of contraction and expansion spreading through the group, a little like the stop-start compression that travels backwards through a traffic jam.

This study uses a conditioned escape response to follow how information propagates through schooling fish after selected individuals respond to a threat cue.

An RFID study of stingless bees found that seemingly minor environmental cues strongly affected how reliably returning foragers identified their own colonies.

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.

A model grounded in observations of ant colonies suggests that synchronized bursts of activity can begin with a single active worker.

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.