5 ms·

Super interesting! As a material scientist this is really interesting to me, and I'm surprised I've never seen an article on the topic. I am aware that there is

by acadien 13y ago

Super interesting! As a material scientist this is really interesting to me, and I'm surprised I've never seen an article on the topic. I am aware that there is a lot of physics that we don't understand when it comes to macro-molecular systems, let alone living macro systems. So I'm sure there's plenty to of new ideas to explore here. On a side note I am really frustrated with the NYTimes video service, I have never had one of their videos play through without freezing!

dylandrop 13y ago
When I posted this I also had a thought that despite taking standard metrics of viscosity, elasticity, etc. it seems like it would be very difficult to model something like a glob of ants since each ant is obviously a lot more complex than a molecule. Perhaps, as a material scientist, you could speak to the difficulty of doing this?
- acadien 13y ago
  This is off the top of my head and with no knowledge of the progress of the work done already on the topic... so please take this with a grain of salt! I would be inclined to try to develop a model of the system and see if I could reproduce the measured viscosity and elastic properties from a simulation. From there you can do things like free energy calculations and figure out which ant-phase is the most stable under which conditions. You're right that in reality each ant is much much more complex than a molecule. But since we're scientists we get to approximate (hooray for spherical cows). To build the model you just treat each ant as an elastic ellipsoid with directional bonding properties. You start off by ignoring the legs and ignoring or greatly simplifying the motion of each individual ant. The first hurdle would be to figure out an ant's bonding properties as this is crucial to the stability of the total structure's properties. Play around with that until your simulation starts reproducing reality; add complexity as necessary; iterate and repeat. As far as experimental measurements, I couldn't even guess what to do next without reading some of their publications.

by acadien 13y ago

dylandrop 13y ago

When I posted this I also had a thought that despite taking standard metrics of viscosity, elasticity, etc. it seems like it would be very difficult to model something like a glob of ants since each ant is obviously a lot more complex than a molecule. Perhaps, as a material scientist, you could speak to the difficulty of doing this?

acadien 13y ago
This is off the top of my head and with no knowledge of the progress of the work done already on the topic... so please take this with a grain of salt! I would be inclined to try to develop a model of the system and see if I could reproduce the measured viscosity and elastic properties from a simulation. From there you can do things like free energy calculations and figure out which ant-phase is the most stable under which conditions. You're right that in reality each ant is much much more complex than a molecule. But since we're scientists we get to approximate (hooray for spherical cows). To build the model you just treat each ant as an elastic ellipsoid with directional bonding properties. You start off by ignoring the legs and ignoring or greatly simplifying the motion of each individual ant. The first hurdle would be to figure out an ant's bonding properties as this is crucial to the stability of the total structure's properties. Play around with that until your simulation starts reproducing reality; add complexity as necessary; iterate and repeat. As far as experimental measurements, I couldn't even guess what to do next without reading some of their publications.