Ant Traffic Flow, Natural Reactors, David Quammen. August 17, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 17 August 2018

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

Worker ants keep the nest alive. They look for food, take care of the eggs, and dig all the tunnels. Fire ant colonies, for example, have hundreds of thousands of worker ants. You’d think traffic jams happen all the time. But they don’t! The majority of the ants aren’t working, according to a study published in Science this week from the Georgia Institute of Technology. They remain idle to stay out of the way, leaving only 30% of the ants to dig a new hole. The researchers also believe the dynamic between idle and active ants could be applied to teaching small robots to dig together at an earthquake site or find shelter underground during a natural disaster. Long before humans enriched uranium to create nuclear fission, the Earth was doing it on its own. Two billion years ago, some natural deposits of uranium contained enough Uranium-235 to undergo spontaneous fission reactions. Those deposits are no longer undergoing fission. But, new research of the Oklo natural nuclear reactor in Gabon has found something curious. Not all the cesium (a toxic waste product of fission reactions both natural and man-made) was released into the environment. Rather, some remained bound in the reactor, with the help of other molecules. How could this finding help lead to safer nuclear waste storage? In The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, science writer David Quammen tells the tale of the microbiologist Carl Woese, who discovered in 1977 that a certain methane-belching microbe was not a bacterium, but instead belonged to another, altogether new branch of the evolutionary tree, the Archaea. The news shook up scientists’ understanding of the tree of life, Quammen writes—and our human place in it.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.
0:03.1	Worker ants keep the nest going. They look for food, take care of the eggs, and also dig an intricate tunnel system for the nest.
0:12.3	In fire ant colonies, there can be thousands of ants moving around trying to do their job.
0:18.3	While all these ants coming in and out of the tunnels, now traffic jams should be happening all the time, right?
0:23.5	But they don't.
0:25.1	This is because more than half of the ants aren't actually working.
0:30.3	Well, it might sound like they are just lazy.
0:32.9	They're really just staying out of the way.
0:35.3	My next guest was curious about the perfect ratio of worker ants to idol ants and whether it could help swarm robots work in close quarters. Dr. Daniel Goldman is professor of physics at Georgia Institute of Technology, and his study appears in the journal Science this week. Welcome to Science Friday.
0:55.9	Thank you for having me.
1:00.1	So you're a physicist, but you're curious about how ants build tunnels.
1:01.6	Correct.
1:10.8	All my life, I've been interested in animals, in particular when I was a kid, I liked lizards and snakes and even played with ants to some extent.
1:20.1	But when I was training, I decided that it was more serious to become a physicist and study dynamical systems and pattern forming systems.
1:27.2	But in my later training, I learned that there were people who actually were interested in understanding the mechanics of organisms.
1:32.8	And so for the last 12 years, I've combined those trainings to be a professor of physics at Georgia Tech,
1:40.3	whose group largely focuses on problems of organisms, including lizards, snakes, and more recently, ants,
1:42.2	with complex environments.
1:44.6	Say you how to actually learn how an ant builds a tunnel.
1:45.9	How does it do that?
1:46.9	Correct.
1:53.6	Well, I should say right off the bat that we didn't study tunnel nest formation in natural environments.
	...

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