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Nearly 40% of the food supply in the United States goes to waste, according to a new study, and the problem has been getting worse.

Rather than building a single model and seeing how well it could recognize visual objects, the team constructed thousands of candidate models, and screened for those that performed best on an object recognition task

This pattern of interactions matches how humans share information on social networking sites like Facebook, says the study's lead author, biologist Noa Pinter-Wollman. Most Facebook users are connected to a relatively small number of friends. A handful of users, however, have thousands of friends and act as information hubs.

computer simulations of the ants' social networks showed that information flows fastest when a small number of individuals act as information hubs. Fast-flowing information allows ant colonies to respond faster to threats such as predators and weather hazards, Pinter-Wollman says.

These well-connected ants might have an advantage in responding to threats, but they are also more vulnerable to infectious diseases, which can spread quickly through the colony.

A new experiment reported in Physical Review Letters shows that—contrary to popular wisdom—paddling can be as effective in air as it is in water. This could imply that insects evolved their flight capability from some earlier swimming trait.

Using high-speed video cameras to track wing motion, the team observed certain cases where the flies paddled their wings forward and backward. To confirm that this was indeed drag-based motion, the team plugged their wing data into an “insect flight simulator” and found that they could reproduce the fly’s overall movement. The authors constructed a simple model of paddling, which seems to support the theory that insect wings evolved in water.