It's a know phenomena of self-organization in birds and an example in emerging phenomena in complexity:
How do flocking birds move in unison? https://earthsky.org/earth/how-do-flocking-birds-move-in-unison/
"We’ve all seen flocks of birds wheeling and swooping in unison, as if choreographed. How do they do this? Zoologists say they aren’t simply following a leader or their neighbors. If they were, the reaction time of each bird would need to be very fast. In fact, it would have to be faster than birds can react, according to scientists who’ve studied the reaction times of individual birds in laboratory settings." #complexity#self-organization #flocking#birds#biology
"Our findings highlight the significant effects of #ALAN for soil bacterial and fungal communities, nutrient cycling and #urban#plant health. Moreover, our results suggest that vanishing darkness due to the expanded artificial illumination are likely to have long-term consequences for soil #microbiomes and ecological functioning in urban #ecosystems."
"Scientists have identified one of Australia’s first long-distance walkers: a 250kg marsupial with “heeled hands” that roamed across the continent’s arid interior 3.5 million years ago.
"… the general struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials—these, for organisms, are air, water and soil, all abundantly available, nor for energy which exists in plenty in any body in the form of heat, but a struggle for entropy, which becomes available through the transition of energy from the hot sun to the cold Earth."
I'm reading Eugenie Clark's memoir The Lady and the Sharks about starting her marine laboratory in Florida in the 1950s.
My favorite story is that they accidentally sent (for IDing) a box of snails to an plant expert and a box of plants to a malacologist.
They both identified them correctly, but the plant guy asked why he had to scrape plant matter from snails, and the malacologist asked why they included so much plant matter with that one little snail 😄
Reading about a lot of wins lately in the medical/science fields where #AI has been applied to work through complex problems after being trained on sample training data.
The speed at which AI can solve these problems can surely only result in more breakthroughs like this as it evolves further. We live in exciting times!
Oh! I really love how today's #inkyDays drawing turned out. I didn't start out with cell biology on my brain, but once I got started I leaned heavily into the Golgi Body pattern as it developed.