Collaborate Disseminate
The success of a colony of ants is one big exercise in collaboration, with the insects known to share all manner of responsibilities, from forming conveyor belts for food transport to construction of their nest. Scientists have now discovered a fascina… Continue reading Army ants build safety scaffolds to catch their falling friends
It’s a quandary – leafcutter ants cause a great deal of damage to tropical crops, but applying pesticides to those crops harms the environment. Scientists have developed a possible solution, in the form of a high-tech material that uses an odor to trap… Continue reading “Molecular sponge” could replace the pesticides used for ant control
Thanks to the wonders of neural networks and machine learning algorithms, it’s now possible to do things that were once thought to be inordinately difficult to achieve with computers. It’s a combination of the right techniques and piles of computing power that make such feats doable, and [Robert Bond’s] ant …read more
Humans and insects think on a different scale, but entomologists study the behavior of these little organisms, so they’re not a complete mystery. There isn’t much intelligence in a single ant or a cubic millimeter of gray matter, but when they all start acting together, you get something greater than the sum of the parts. It is easy to fall into the trap of putting all the intelligence or programming into a single box since that’s how we function. Comparatively, itty-bitty brains, like microcontrollers and single-board computers are inexpensive and plentiful. Enter swarm mentality, and new tasks become possible.
[Kevin …read more
It is sort of an electronics rule 34 that if something occurs, someone needs to sense it. [Bblorgggg], for reasons that aren’t immediately obvious, needs to sense ants moving over trees. No kidding. How are you going to do that? His answer was to use graphene.
Actually, his super sensitive sensors mix graphene in Silly Putty, an unlikely combination that he tried after reading (on Hackaday, no less) about similar experiments at Trinity College resulting in Gputty. The Gputty was highly sensitive to pressure, and so it appears is his DIY version called Goophene. At Trinity they claimed to be …read more
Continue reading DIY Graphene Putty Makes Super Sensitive Sensor
Setting fire ants ablaze from above. Continue reading This Guy Created an Ant Killing Death Ray With an Old TV
The robotics engineers were inspired by the strength and teamwork of ants. Continue reading Watch These Ant-Like Robots Pull a 3900-Pound Car