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Now, Goldman and his colleagues have been able to study

June 9, 2017 by Ella Pickett

Now, Goldman and his colleagues have been able to study the ants' tunneling behavior by analyzing their brains. Using their computer models, they have found that the ants behave without any of the aforementioned "phantom" traffic jams. Instead, the ants' ability to control their behavior is just as important.

"This is the first time we've been able to find how ants form tunnel-like tunnels, rather than an average of traffic flows, which is a prerequisite for complex system biology," Goldman told Science.

The ants used to congregate in the open spaces of a tunnel between three lanes of traffic. Instead, they congregate in open spaces, where the traffic flows can get much more chaotic.

In their study, Goldman and his colleagues showed just how much of a problem tunneling could be for a human being if you had multiple people in a busy city, with many drivers making up the rest of the crowd. But, unlike humans, there is a limit to tunneling in traffic. The ants don't want to stop. Instead, they want to get out of the way of the traffic flow. They simply move. And, as if this were not bad enough, they also "pulled a lever". But there are two ways to get out of the way of the traffic flowing in.

"A lever is a special mechanism that lets you carry the momentum that you want to pull the other traffic from, and then, it pulls the other one back into the system," Goldman explained.

"People have been fascinated with the problem of parking lots and traffic jams since the 1950s, and I think this is a great example of how people have used it to drive out of their way in traffic," said lead author Thomas Kipman, an associate professor of physics and physics at the University of California at San Diego.