Scientists have discovered how thousands of starling birds can fly in formation without colliding with each other.
Naturally, they're now applying what they've learned to make ... swarms of robots:
... it turns out that the secret is for each bird to track seven others, says the first detailed direct observations to have been reported by STARFLAG - Starlings in Flight - a European project involving biologists, physicists, and economists. [...]
The team also concludes that the birds are smarter than was thought. “An interaction based upon the number of neighbours, rather than their distance, implies rather complex cognitive capabilities in birds,” adds Irene Giardina, a fellow researcher, of the Centre for Statistical Mechanics and Complexity in Rome.
Link - via Environmental Graffiti, thanks Chris Ingham Brooke!
Comments (4)
I love Michael Crichton... Currently I'm reading "Next". It's good (so far!)
http://www.revver.com/video/140234/birds-flying-strange-formations/
I cannot wait to see it with robots. Let's go, Science!!
You can ask the same things to the same people worded slightly different ways, and still get rather different results. For example, changing a question from asking did humans develop other animals to did animals and plants develop from other species can give a large difference, or explicitly including God in a question about a process will change the results compared to asking about the same thing without naming God.
People are kind of fickle when it comes to asking questions, even without all of the religious and political baggage that comes up in such surveys. A project researching how to teach basic physics once found, for basic homework questions, asking a person a question, then asking them "What answer would a smart student give?" caused some people to change their answer...