It's Friday, November 30th, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date from Inquiring Minds.

I'm And I'm Kishontas.

And I'm Kishore Hari.

Any news catch your eye this week?

Well, the news in my kitchen, it's been raining, which has been a huge salve, of course,

in the Bay Area after all of our wildfires and the air is really clean.

But what happens when it

rains, especially for the first time in a long time, is that my kitchen becomes inundated with

ants.

Ants just sort of flooding in to avoid the rain. Yeah. I mean, they seem to find like the one crumb

that I didn't clean up, although I do have small children, so they're not that hard to find. But yeah, and then, you know, you wake up in the morning and there's like

literally thousands of ants crawling all over and it's terrible. And they go away just as quickly.

But every time I see them, I really marvel at sort of the social aspects of the ant colony,

how organized they are. Because what you see first are these little

forager ants, like one or two ants, you know, coming here. And then once they find something

and they let the colony know, you have this very orderly progression of ants. And they take,

you know, they find a root. And they, it's not always the most direct route, but they all follow that route, you know, because find a root and they, it's not always the most direct root, but they

all follow that route, you know, because they leave little chemical signals showing that,

you know, showing the other ants where to go. And, and so they follow these, you know, and so it

always, I always fascinates me. And so this week in science, one of the papers that caught my eye was about sort of this

social behavior of ants, one of my favorite topics. And this was a study between groups

at two different institutions, one in Austria and the other at the University of Lausanne.

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