'Walk this way': Model explains how ants create trails to multiple food sources
Nov 2024, phys.org
"If an ant has access to multiple food sources from its nest, it will initially make multiple trails to each of the sources."Using computational simulations of ants searching for food, stochastic modeling and a system of partial-differential equations, and two subpopulations of foragers who wander around in search of food and returners who always return directly to the nest after finding food, the researchers observed that ants will selectively travel to the food source that is the shortest distance from its nest in an environment with multiple sources.They found this collective behavior resides in the fundamental pheromone concentration gradient, where the returning ants would secrete less pheromones depending on how close the food source was to the nest, whereas more pheromones created a stronger scent.
via Florida State University Institute of Molecular Biophysics and Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Cleveland State University: Sean Hartman et al, Walk this way: modeling foraging ant dynamics in multiple food source environments, Journal of Mathematical Biology (2024). DOI: 10.1007/s00285-024-02136-2
Image credit: AI Art - Black Hole - 2025
The brain's processing paradox: Study quantifies the speed of human thought
Dec 2024, phys.org
This is pertinent to the article but such an important statement for understanding the brain, the body, evolution and of course chemosensation as the origin of brains:They applied techniques from the field of information theory to a vast amount of scientific literature on human behaviors such as reading and writing, playing video games, and solving Rubik's Cubes, and quantified the speed of human thought at 10 bits per second. However, our bodies' sensory systems gather data about our environments at a rate of a trillion bits per second, which is 100 billion times faster than our thought processes.But this question: Why does the brain process one thought at a time rather than many in parallel the way our sensory systems do?"Human thinking can be seen as a form of navigation through a space of abstract concepts." Research suggests that the earliest creatures with a nervous system used their brains primarily for navigation, to move toward food and away from predators. If our brains evolved from these simple systems to follow paths, it would make sense that we can only follow one "path" of thought at a time.
via California Institute of Technology: Jieyu Zheng and Markus Meister. The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?, Neuron (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008.
