biology

If you're familiar with the Logo programming language, how would you like to graduate to using thousands of turtles all at once. This book describes the StarLogo system that allows you to write programs where many different agents act together in concert. There are some great examples of how seemingly complex "social" behaviors can spring from a large number of agents using very simple rules. My favorite chapters describe "Artifical Ants" and "Traffic Jams".

See also "The Ants"

Quoted: Amazon.com: Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds (Complex Adaptive Systems): Books: Mitchel Resnick by Mitchel Resnick

This one's for Kristen

Quoted: The three-dimensional puzzle, which became a huge success in the early 1980s, is among toys being given to the intelligent sea creatures to determine whether they favour a particular tentacle, or if they are octidextrous.

Dr. Peggy Porter's profile.

Way cool

Quoted: Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

Quoted: sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

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This is huge

Quoted: Biologists can now observe the workings inside our cells in full color, 3-D—and soon to be real-time. As this ScienCentral News video explains, scientists ha...

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The ant-equivalent of the disaster of Pompei - this one human made - reveals the structure of an underground ant colony.