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Just how ants create the highly efficient network of trails around their nests has never been fully understood. Now researchers think they've cracked it

They say the structure of ant trails can be entirely explained if the ants's response to a pheromone droplet concentration is linear. "One ant will turn to the left in proportion to the difference between the pheromone it has on its left side and the pheromone on its right," say Perna and co. They also point out that this is exactly what Weber's law predicts.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1201.5827 :Individual Rules For Trail Pattern Formation In Argentine Ants (Linepithema Humile)

test of new formation-flying and rendezvous technologies

relatively low-cost technologies

autonomous formation-flying, meaning that we regard these two satellites as one entity

Lima and Vanzella joined with George Matsas of São Paulo State University in their latest work to examine a model of the highly-curved spacetime that appears during formation of an ultradense neutron star. For some reasonable values of the mass and size of the star, they predict that the vacuum energy will grow within milliseconds for some values of the coupling parameter. At this point the vacuum energy would begin to induce additional gravitational effects, which they haven't yet calculated, so they don't know how the star would be affected. If further research shows such a neutron star to be unstable, the existence of stable neutron stars of particular sizes could rule out the existence fields of the type they modeled.

WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

That's the question John Brockman, editor of the Web site edge.org, posed to about 160 cutting-edge minds in his 11th annual Edge Question. As in years past, they responded with bold, often thrilling, sometimes chilling, answers.

“superb from a science standpoint,” but beyond Europe’s current budget

There was some questioning of the cost estimate for Euclid, but at some point you have to decide: Either you don’t believe the estimates that [ESA science program managers] produced, or you assume their estimates are credible. Euclid was the one mission where costs were debated, but the consensus was to use the cost estimates presented to us.