Entomologists use a particle accelerator to image ants at scale | Hacker News Reader

Entomologists use a particle accelerator to image ants at scale

spectrum.ieee.org

145 pointsgmays28 comments

They’re all muscle inside, fascinating

That was my first impression. But then I thought in humans, and concluded ants have less muscle % of volume

Less muscle than us by ANY measure would be mindblowing for beings who can carry up to 100 times their weight, compared to ~ 1-2 we can.

I can't give any appreciation of muscle % of weight. I don't know how heavy is chiting armor/exoskeleton.

https://sites.nd.edu/biomechanics-in-the-wild/2024/11/06/ant...

"Scaling laws indicate that smaller organisms, such as ants, benefit from a greater strength-to-size ratio, partly due to the favorable scaling of muscle cross-sectional area relative to body mass. A 2023 study by Clemente and Dick emphasizes that while larger organisms have more total muscle mass, the strength per unit mass decreases with increasing size due to scaling effects."

To me it hit home when i recognized that high frequency 200Hz+ wing beat by say a bee - which we tend to think about as extremely "fast" - still have only about 5m/s wing tip speed - which is actually very slow and thus extremely efficient, and orders of magnitude more efficient than say helicopter blades (or even small drone props) having tip speed at 200m/s. (Note: that is even without taking into account different air viscosity, Rayleigh number, at that scale. Different air and fluid viscosities at those scales and different relative scales of surface tension and capillary forces - microfluidics so to speak - are also what insects are heavily optimized for and take advantage of.)

To illustrate - similar to bee efficiency at the scale of the human body - human powered helicopter - 150 feet span https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zNrCbcQVmuE . Note that while similar to the bee wing efficiency is achieved at that scale, the human power density is lower than the bee's, so it can fly only for short periods of time that that top cyclist can produce his highest power.

The scaling laws also dictate exoskeleton being more efficient than internal skeleton for the small bodies like the insects' ones, and also the breathing by the decentralized system of spiracles than by the centralized internal lungs.

specifically head, and it is that big for that reason. I mean it is logical, yet i have never even thought about that until seeing those images. They are basically working and killing machines.

You should see bull ants and stinger meat eating black ants perfectly peeling an unripe mango peel. Both the work finesse of the work and the fact they eat precisely the part which I don't.

(Sometimes they also eat the pulp. But they always eat more peel than anything)

Local rat does something similar to citrus trees. Eats the peel clean off leaving the skinless fruit still on the tree. The fruit doesn’t even rot right away as it is still connected to the tree.

2 days late to this post so not sure anyone's here, but what fascinates me is finding out how the different segments (or other such insects) are connected. Like, at each of those junctions it seems like a bottle-neck scenario where everything has to be condensed into some "wire" form to then connect to the next segment.

Interestingly, despite the lack of an identifiable brain, these creatures _still_ manage to be more intelligent than my dog

Looking forward to a three.js visualization

E.O. Wilson would be thrilled.

Them? I think we've seen this movie

Next-level futuristic-sounding title

I can't be the only one who imagined ants whizzing around the Large Hadron Collider wondering what the heck was happening to them.

Under surveillance capitalism, this is the future that awaits humans, too.

"Ok, but what if we could get the biggest possible magnifying glass to use on the ants?"

When AI is done consuming (and it basically has, except for redundant human-human social network interactions), then will there be a renaissance of re-exploring the natural world? Without understanding its complexities I would posit we're doomed to short and ugly end. Perhaps AI is just what we need to start to re-appreciate it "at scale".

>When AI is done consuming (and it basically has, except for redundant human-human social network interactions), then will there be a renaissance of re-exploring the natural world?

Whatever nature that is left after the massive energy and water needs of AI are met.

> renaissance of re-exploring the natural world

I wonder if there was a period of time where people who were inclined to do that were able to dedicate themselves to exploration instead of working to pay for healthcare.

I know that's a gross oversimplification, and that quality of life is better now, but when it came to academic pursuits was it more feasible in the past?

Or am I just subconsciously reacting to constant negative economic news and wondering if the grass was greener on the other side of the timeline?

Yes. Read up on "gentleman scholars" from before the 20th century. An astonishing amount of all our foundational knowledge about the universe comes from wealthy dudes (or with wealthy patrons) exploring science for the sheer hell of it.

And when I say astonishing, I mean it. Almost all the foundations of every field were built this way.

Did wealthy dudes stop doing science at some point?

Yes, for the most part they took up "being wealthy" as an occupation and "grifting" as a hobby.

If you don’t know the canopy raft, prepare to enjoy:

https://www.reforestaction.com/en/magazine/francis-halle-and...

Francis Halle dedicated his whole life to forest, I recommend any of his book if you find one in your language.

More pictures as videos here https://rainforestslefilm.wordpress.com/forests-canopy-raft/

I think that in some senses it was easier in most of the previous century simply because there were fewer distractions. A young person (or indeed any person) interested in science, engineering, literature could spend hours at the local public library digging into whatever subject interested them without that nagging feeling that they were missing out on something all the time. We didn't have that firehose of interesting stuff just a click away from us all the time.

A good chunk of early science was basically funded by nobility sponsoring scientists as sort of… conversation pieces, basically, right? I’m not sure if that gig is still available.

One could argue all science is still funded that way. My team is funded by a philanthrophist. NSF "royalty" re-distributes the peasant's taxes to do science. Etc.

As if by magic from here on HN - https://www.science.org/content/article/can-wealthy-family-c...

The majority of early explorers and researchers sought philanthropist to support their desire to explore. They sold the dream to pay for their plan. The frontiers are more specialized now. Getting funding to "explore Africa" would be a hard sell.

This was also National Geographic’s modus operandi. They kickstarted exploration. Much of it would have happened eventually but it’d nice to have historical glimpses of what used to be.

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