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This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science.'m Karen Hopkin. Got a minute?

Next time you need directions, maybe ask an ant, because these clever little critters are such

masters of navigation that some can find their way home whether they're walking forward, backward,

or sideways. That's according to a study in the journal Current Biology. Ants often travel long

distances, well for them, when they're searching for food to bring back to their nests. And their

built-in GPS appears to function just fine even when they wind up having to travel in reverse,

because they're dragging a huge morsel. But how do these backward bugs know where they're going?

To find out, researchers went to Spain to mess with some desert ants. They found an active nest and surrounded it with

barriers that forced the foraging ants to follow a particular path back home. Once the ants were

familiar with the maze, the researchers would scoop them up, hand them a cookie crumb, and put them back in a different

location, one that required taking a 90-degree turn to get to the nest.

What the researchers saw was that the ants that were carting a small, easy-to-carry crumb

would dash forward with confidence and were able to hook a right and head on home,

presumably because they could see where they were going and recognize the route. But some of their nestmates were given a cookie crumb so large that they had to

travel aft first, pulling their prize behind them. These ants would set off in the correct

general direction, but those that stuck with going in reverse would miss the turn off to the nest.

Some of the rearward ants, however, stopped to get their bearings.

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