For the past three decades Deborah Gordon has devoted herself to studying ant colonies in the Arizona desert. Although her chosen subject – the red harvester ant – isn’t much to look at, when they ...

New drugs often fail because they cause undesirable side effects. Researchers have now developed simulation software that predicts the properties of active agents and virtually builds new ones. The ...

Ant algorithms A species of ant could lend important clues to solving problems in telephone networks, traffic circulation and computer networks. An international team of scientists, who have been ...

Ask who invented the Internet and you’ll spark off an argument with everyone championed from DARPA to Nikola Tesla. However, two Stanford scientists claim that the inventor may have had six legs, ...

The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks. Ants are capable of remarkable feats of ...

When ants raid a family picnic to pick away at leftovers, it might look like pure chaos. But, that's really not the case. (Flickr / Dawn Camp) In fact, it's the opposite. And, new research suggests ...

When it comes to groups that work together to get a job done, ants have pretty much got the process perfected. That’s why computer scientist Marco Dorigo studied the creatures’ behavior, and created ...

Observing ants in the trees of a tropical forest, researchers recorded how, without a plan, the ants make and maintain their networks -- and how they repair the network when it is ruptured. Imagine ...

University of Nottingham provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation UK. Take a set of chess pieces and throw them all away except for one knight. Place the knight on any one of the 64 ...