4.3 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2019
⏱️ 3 minutes
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0:00.0 | If you could go back in time, would you save the world or yourself? The BAFDA winning series The Lazarus Project returns. |
0:12.3 | Watch this epic and action-packed sci-fy thriller |
0:15.0 | to see if George and the Lazarus agents can save the world |
0:18.0 | from an infinite time loop, |
0:20.0 | starring Papa Essie Edo and Caroline Quentin alongside a stellar British cast. |
0:24.8 | Watch all episodes of the new series of The Lazarus Project on Sky. This is a scientific American 60 second science. I'm Suzanne Bard. |
0:39.0 | Anyone who commutes by car knows that traffic jams are an inevitable part of life, |
0:45.3 | but humans are not alone in facing potential backups. |
0:48.7 | Ants also commute between their nest and sources of food. The survival of their colonies depends on doing this |
0:55.4 | efficiently. The more they are, the more food they're going to bring back, but at the same time |
1:00.1 | they might end up with traffic jam because there are too many of them. |
1:03.2 | Arizona State University mathematician Sebastian Much. |
1:07.0 | When humans commute, there's a point at which cars become dense enough to slow down the flow of traffic causing gridlock. |
1:15.0 | Much and his colleagues wanted to know if ants on the move could also get clogged, |
1:20.0 | so they manipulated traffic density by constructing bridges of various widths between a colony of Argentine ants and a source of food. |
1:29.0 | Then they waited and watched. |
1:32.0 | The goal was to try to find out at one point they're going to have a traffic jam. |
1:35.2 | But it appears that that never happened. |
1:37.6 | They never at one point just stopped. |
1:39.3 | They always managed to avoid traffic jam. |
1:41.8 | The flow of ants did increase initially as ants started to fill the bridge and then leveled off at high densities. |
1:49.8 | But it never slowed down even when the bridge was nearly saturated with ants. The researchers then took a closer look at how the behavior of individual ants impacted traffic as a whole. |
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