Collections of ants are both solid-like and liquid-like | Hacker News Reader

Collections of ants are both solid-like and liquid-like

phys.org

64 pointstdurden24 comments

Open articleView on HN

In a sort of similar notion, this is a really interesting read on how large crowds of humans behave like a liquid:

https://np.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arab...

Perhaps we should put them in a rheometer too?

That post was insightful. Thanks for sharing.

Almost anything will behave like a liquid with enough momentum/energy distributed throughout the system.

If you find ants interesting, I recommend The Superorganism. It is an in depth a look at ants, bees, and termites through social lens.

Link: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3426920-the-superorganism

As someone with a biology background, it's really funny when physicists dip their toes into studying life. It's like: "hmmm, what massive oversimplification can we make!"

They're intelligent agents that can choose whether or not to hold onto their neighbors, so of course they are both solid-like and liquid like.

I'm kind of expecting the next headline to be: "wood can be both solid-like and liquid-like, depending on how much we pulp it."

somebody had to say it

"Imagine the window were made of ants..."

Top work.

I have been saying the same thing about bees for years: they're a semi-solid

The first photo looks not very humane as for me, don't know why...

Unfair to ants.

This is trivial. It's also borderline inhumane.

They're ants. I get where you're coming from, but they're ants. Your cellphone is smarter.

I don't disagree but it always makes me wonder if aliens are out there tearing a few of us limb from limb and saying... they're only humans.

To confirm, you literally spend time wondering if humans are being torn limb from limb by alien species?

Whoa, this is a pressing situation, here.

How do you know? I know a lot about brains, I like brains and I am not certain that I can quantify the degree of suffering likely to be felt by an ant.

"your cellphone is smarter" -- I'd like to disagree without being disagreeable! I'd say ants are at least an order of magnitude smarter than a cell phone. Ants are less intelligible to humans maybe, as their intelligence is not of service to us, but they are most definitely more useful to us than phones as well.

The Ant has possibly the largest brain/body mass ratio in the entire animal kingdom. Which is possibly why there are 10 million more ants per human on the planet. That's a smart brain in my book.

Having said that I am all for mass ant sacrifice to figure out the magic.

Sure, but cellphones don't actually have any level of intelligence and could never solve a task it wasn't programmed to do.

http://brainblogger.com/2015/06/26/do-insects-have-emotions-...

It's not trivial. Imagine trying to computationally model this. And this does have practical applications too, better understanding of how ants flow in aggregates could have applications in modular robotics and claytronics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claytronics

I believe the proper term is an Army of Ants ;)

This seems to be incredibly cruel. Poor ants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com