Physics Buzz

Traffic scientists study ants because they manage traffic better than humans. Originally published: May 11 2015 - 12:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Joel N. Shurkin, Contributor ( Inside Science ) -- The old children's song about marching ants is a good explanation for why traffic engineers love them. Ants -- most are teeny creatures with brains smaller than pinheads -- engineer traffic better than humans. Ants never run into stop-and-go-traffic or gridlock on the trail. In fact, the more ants of one species there are on the road, the faster they go, according to new research. Image credit: Clicksy via flickr | http://bit.ly/1G06cyj Rights information: http://bit.ly/NL51dk Researchers from two German universities, the Universities of Potsdam and the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg, found a nest of black meadow ants (Formica pratensis) in the woods of Saxony. The nest had four trunk trails leading to foraging areas, some of them 60 feet long. They

For the past week my kitchen has had an ant problem.  Any normal person would get some ant traps and be done with the problem.  Not being a normal person I've spent the past week learning about ant behavior.  I learned that they only focus on one bowl of cat food, even though I have two in my kitchen.  They rarely form lines of ants unless there is something really good at the other end like a used lollypop stick.  If they can't find the cat food, they love the cat's water dish but I can't figure out why.  Leaving a path of ants killed by Windex doesn't stop them, just slows them down for a day.  Killing ant "scouts" is of no use.  My goal has been to deter the ants from coming in the house and I've had little luck.  After much office discussion and memories of my thesis, I've decided that if I can't beat them, I'll use them.  I will use them to learn about the topology of various surfaces.  When describing curvature of surfaces one ofte