A Bit More Detail

• D-Brief notes that elephants seem to count the same way humans do.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the reasons why octopus mothers maintain such long, silent vigils over their eggs.


• Happily, the mountain gorilla is now no longer a "critically endangered" species. CBC reports.


• The Crux looks at how studies of communication among other primates can help solve the question of how language developed among humans.


• D-Brief notes the determination that a collection of termite mounds dates back four thousand years, product of a sophisticated hive insect society.

• Bad Astronomer Phil Plait shares the latest from exoplanet PDS 70b, which has a gain in mass that has actually been detected by astronomers.


• The Crux considers what information, exactly, hypothetical extraterrestrials could extract from the Golden Record of Voyager. Are the messages decipherable?


• D-Brief shares the most detailed map yet assembled of Comet 67P, compiled from images taken by the Rosetta probe.


• Karen Sternheimer at the Everyday Sociology Blog writes about the way changing shopping malls reflect, and influence, changes in the broader culture.


• Hornet Stories notes that, while Pope Francis may not want parents of gay children to cut their ties, he does think the parents should look into conversion therapy.


• JSTOR Daily links to a paper examining how beekeeping in early modern England led to the creation of a broader pattern of communications and discourse on the subject.


• Language Hat shares the story of an American diplomat in 1960s Argentina, and his experiences learning Spanish (after having spoken Portuguese) and travelling in the provinces.


• Language Log shares a biscriptal ad from Hong Kong.


• The LRB Blog shares a story told by Harry Stopes about a maritime trip with harbour pilots from Cornwall.


• Roads and Kingdoms shares an anecdote of a family meal of empanadas in the Argentine city of Cordoba during the world cup.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why, in the early universe, the most massive stars massed the equivalent of a thousand suns, much larger than any star known now.


• Towleroad shares Karl Schmid's appearance on NBC Today, where he talked with Megyn Kelly about HIV in the era of undetectability.


• Window on Eurasia notes the many obstacles placed by the Russian government in the way of Circassian refugees from Syria seeking refuge in their ancestral North Caucasus homeland.

• Beyond the Beyond's Bruce Sterling mourns the death of Alvin Toffler.


• The Big Picture shares images of the Istanbul airport attack.


• blogTO notes Toronto's recent Trans March was the largest in world history.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly interviews memoirist Plum Johnson.


• Centauri Dreams considers the determination of distances to dim stars and looks at the total energies likely to be used in interstellar travel and interplanetary colonization.


• Crooked Timber notes the ordered recount in Austria's presidential elections and advocates for anti-militarism.


• D-Brief notes the exciting discoveries of Ceres, and observes that ancient tombs may have doubled as astronomical observatories.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers where warm Jupiters form, considers the stability of complex exoplanet systems, and notes a high-precision analysis of solar twin HIP 100963.


• The Dragon's Tales wonders if the shape of Martian sand dunes indicate a denser Martian atmosphere a bit more than four billion years ago.


• The Everyday Sociology Blog considers evictions and poverty in the United States.


• Inkfish notes that different honeybees seem to have different personalities.


• Language Hat notes the import of Maltese in Mediterranean history.


• Language Log talks about Sino-Japanese.


• Lovesick Cyborg shares the doubts of polled Americans with the viability of virtual lovers.


• The LRB Blog shares an article supporting Corbyn.


• The Map Room Blog notes that San Francisco was literally built on buried ships.


• Marginal Revolution notes the collapse of Greek savings and looks at Euroskepticism's history in the United Kingdom.


• Steve Munro updates readers on Union-Pearson Express ridership.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer thinks the Netherlands Antilles offer useful models to the United Kingdom, and is confused by a claim that that bias against Mexican immigrants does not exist when the data seems to suggest it does.


• Torontoist goes into the life of conservative Protestant newspaper publishing Black Jack Robinson.


• Transit Toronto notes that in a decade, GO Trains will connect Hamilton to Niagara Falls.


• The Volokh Conspiracy argues against using the Brexit vote to argue against referenda.


• Window on Eurasia notes the Russian deployment of military forces to the Belarus border, looks at Tatarstan's concern for its autonomy, observes the changing demographics of Ukraine, and notes the Russian debate over what sort of European Union collapse they would like.


• Arnold Zwicky remembers his father through ephemera.

Termites normally inspire thoughts of insect invasions, obnoxiously colored house-tents, or the Orkin man. But for a group of scientists at Harvard University, the cooperative insects inspired a whole new army of robots, described in Science.

These robots, each about the size of your head, follow a minimal set of rules when building a structure. Instead of detailed plans, they rely on environmental cues to accomplish their task — a minimalist strategy that’s based on a principle called “stigmergy.” Conceived in 1959 by a French biologist, the term describes how termite colonies cooperate and self-organize to build massive, intricate mounds. In some places, these mounds can be 8 feet tall; they’re also air-conditioned by a network of internal tunnels, and are often oriented along the Earth’s north-south magnetic axis.

But unlike humans, termites don’t follow blueprints or plans while constructing their homes. All they know is what the finished product is supposed to be, and what to pay attention to along the way. As each termite scoops up mudballs and deposits them in various places, it leaves a trail of chemical cues for other builders. Based on these cues, the other termites modify their building behaviors and deposit their own mudballs where the stuff is needed. Boom. Termite mound.

The fleet of Harvard robots follows this strategy, too. Their minimal programming includes the ability to move forward, backward, and rotate; they can also climb, sense, pick up and deposit bricks. Where they lay those bricks depends on what the other bots are doing and what the final structure is supposed to be.

“Around here, you hear about termites destroying buildings,” said Justin Werfel, a Harvard University computer scientist and author of a study in the current issue of the journal Science. “But in Africa and Australia, they are known for building enormous, complicated mounds of soil.”

[. . .]

Each termite is an organism of fairly low complexity, but, using stigmergy, a colony can build a highly complex structure. So the team started with this simple framework: Each robot must have its own basic brain and sensors, and be programmed with certain “traffic rules” it must obey.

The sensors enable them to see bricks and robots next to them, and the traffic rules depend on the final structure. They prevent robots from placing bricks in places where they might easily collapse, or constructing a scenario in which a brick would have to be squished in between two others.

Each robot, about eight inches long, consists of internal metal gears and hardware as well as 3-D printed parts. The bricks themselves are also made in a way that helps the robots climb and align them better.

“In our system, each robot doesn’t know what others are doing or how many others there are — and it doesn’t matter,” Werfel said.

The main difference from the real-life insect is that termites don’t have a desired end product. Rather, there is a random component involved; given the same starting place, a colony will build a slightly different structure every time. But for constructing a house, for instance, the robots would need to follow a specific blueprint. So Werfel created the option for a user to input a picture of a predefined structure, and the robots will go to town on building it.

HUMAN beings like to think of themselves as the animal kingdom’s smartest alecks. It may come as a surprise to some, therefore, that Iain Couzin of Princeton University believes they have something to learn from lesser creatures that move about in a large crowd. As he told the AAAS meeting in Washington, DC, groups of animals often make what look like wise decisions, even when most of the members of those groups are ignorant of what is going on.

Coming to that conclusion was not easy. Before lessons can be drawn from critters perched on the lower rungs of the evolutionary ladder, their behaviour must first be understood. One way to do this is to tag them with devices that follow them around—motion-capture sensors, radio transmitters or global-positioning-system detectors that can put a precise figure on their movements.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to tag more than a few individuals in a herd, flock or swarm. Researchers have therefore tended to extrapolate from these few results by using various computer models. Dr Couzin has done quite a bit of this himself. Most recently, he has modelled the behaviour of shoals of fish. He posited that how they swim will depend on each individual’s competing tendencies to stick close to the others (and thus move in the same direction as them) while not actually getting too close to any particular other fish. It turns out that by fiddling with these tendencies, a virtual shoal can be made to swirl spontaneously in a circle, just like some real species do.

That is a start. But real shoals do not exist to swim in circles. Their purpose is to help their members eat and avoid being eaten. At any one time, however, only some individuals know about—and can thus react to—food and threats. Dr Couzin therefore wanted to find out how such temporary leaders influence the behaviour of the rest.

He discovered that leadership is extremely efficient. The larger a shoal is, the smaller is the proportion of it that needs to know what is actually going on for it to feed and avoid predation effectively. Indeed, having too many leaders with conflicting opinions results in confusion. At least, that is true in the model. He is now testing it in reality.

[. . .]

If the models are anything to go by, the best outcome for the group—in this case, not being eaten—seems to depend on most members’ being blissfully unaware of the world outside the shoal and simply taking their cue from others. This phenomenon, Dr Couzin argues, applies to all manner of organisms, from individual cells in a tissue to (rather worryingly) voters in the democratic process. His team has already begun probing the question of voting patterns. But is ignorance really political bliss? Dr Couzin’s models do not yet capture what happens when the leaders themselves turn out to be sharks.