Physics Colloquium with Lakshmi Mahadevan on The Wisdom of the Swarm

Physics Colloquium with Lakshmi Mahadevan on The Wisdom of the Swarm

Lakshmi Mahadevan (Hosted by Tikhonov) from Harvard University will be presenting the colloquium "The Wisdom of the Swarm: Physics and Behavior"

Super-organisms such as social insects solve complex physiological problems collectively, sans plan or planner, on scales much larger than the individual. Motivated by observations in the field and in the lab, I will describe our attempts to understand how insects actively regulate their micro-environment in such contexts as termite mound morphogenesis, active ventilation, mechanical stabilization and thermoregulation in bee clusters, and collective escape in ants. These everyday examples link physics and behavior on multiple scales using local sensing and action mediated by global physics, with lessons of relevance beyond the world of social insects. 

 

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