Ants coordinate highly complex foraging and traffic systems without any leaders, relying entirely on local interactions and chemical cues. Pheromone trails encode information about distance, food ...

Ants have evolved an acute sense of smell, which requires each sensory neuron to choose one scent receptor out of hundreds. In a new study published in Nature, researchers at New York University have ...

This efficiency has fascinated engineers, computer scientists, and urban planners, who have spent decades trying to understand how ants achieve it. The secret is communication—though not in the way we ...