How the Science of Swarms....

[cronus]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/ ... warms/all/

How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future

he first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he kept his locusts was the smell, like a stale barn full of old hay. The second, third, and fourth things to hit him were locusts. The insects frequently escaped their cages and careened into the faces of scientists and lab techs. The room was hot and humid, and the constant commotion of 20,000 bugs produced a miasma of aerosolized insect exoskeleton. Many of the staff had to wear respirators to avoid developing severe allergies. “It wasn’t the easiest place to do science,” Couzin says.

In the mid-2000s that lab was, however, one of the only places on earth to do the kind of science Couzin wanted. He didn’t care about locusts, per se—Couzin studies collective behavior. That’s swarms, flocks, schools, colonies … anywhere the actions of individuals turn into the behaviors of a group. Biologists had already teased apart the anatomy of locusts in detail, describing their transition from wingless green loners at birth to flying black-and-yellow adults. But you could dissect one after another and still never figure out why they blacken the sky in mile-wide plagues. Few people had looked at how locusts swarm since the 1960s—it was, frankly, too hard. So no one knew how a small, chaotic group of stupid insects turned into a cloud of millions, united in one purpose.

Couzin would put groups of up to 120 juveniles into a sombrero-shaped arena he called the locust accelerator, letting them walk in circles around the rim for eight hours a day while an overhead camera filmed their movements and software mapped their positions and orientations. He eventually saw what he was looking for: At a certain density, the bugs would shift to cohesive, aligned clusters. And at a second critical point, the clusters would become a single marching army. Haphazard milling became rank-and-file—a prelude to their transformation into black-and-yellow adults.

(continued)

[FBM]

Everyone read this!! Quick!!

[cronus]

Everyone read this!! Quick!!

Rum should read this, anyway.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I am sure this could be applied to Daily Mail readers and UKIP...

[cronus]

I am sure this could be applied to Daily Mail readers and UKIP...

If they are gonna line up anyway it is best to be in the first wave rather than be in the second wave...third and perhaps on the outside...

[Audley Strange]

I do love to get stoned on hot summer nights and watch the murmurations of starlings over Central Station.

[Audley Strange]

A game version of one of the experiments in the article. cursors to move, space to eat.

http://www.ryanchisholm.com/games/locusts/Locusts.html