Ants Do Math! & Rocks Race!

Here's a fun report from the frontier of "ant science"...



So bees can dance to spell out where the food is. Ants normally leave scent trails from food back to the next to guide the others. But desert ants do something different... they count steps.

Hmm... I accept the experiment, but "counting steps" is too simple. Ants wander all over the place as they walk. What says 2000 steps of a crooked random path equal 2000 steps of another crooked random path? And how does the ant know which direction to head from the nest? There is more going on than counting. I accept the counting result, but it only accounts -- sort of -- for getting home. It says nothing about how the ant finds the food, nor does it explain how one desert ant can communicate with other ants to spell out the location. More science is needed!

A less controversial bit of science covers the phenomenon of rocks that race across a playa:



There are so many wonderful, strange, bizarre things out there in the real world. I wonder why people waste their time with "ghost stories" or the "spirit" stuff of religion.