Jane Poynter and seven compatriots agreed to spend two years sealed inside a 3-acre terrarium in the Sonoran Desert. Their mission back in the 1990s: To see whether humans might someday be able to create self-sustaining colonies in outer space.
The ants may go marching one by one, but they end up forming a superstructure of thousands -- and together they can form a raft that stretches the boundaries of the laws of physics, according to new research released today.