Collective behavior as a research area investigates how large ensembles of interacting agents—such as cells, animals, humans, or artificial units—generate emergent spatiotemporal patterns and coordinated dynamics that cannot be trivially inferred from individual-level rules. It integrates concepts and methods from statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, complex systems theory, network science, and computational modeling to characterize phenomena such as synchronization, swarming, flocking, consensus formation, and phase transitions in social or biological systems. Research focuses on identifying local interaction rules, quantifying macroscopic order parameters, understanding robustness and criticality, and developing predictive, often multi-scale, models of group-level organization and decision-making.
A team of physicists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Center for New Technologies at the University of Warsaw and Emory University (Atlanta, U.S.) analyzed how atoms' mutual interactions change ...
Optics & Photonics
Oct 15, 2025
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Even in an environment as seemingly simple as a drop of water, bacteria can organize themselves into complex patterns or arrangements. Through experiments, theory, and computational modeling, scientists from Caltech and Princeton ...
Cell & Microbiology
Oct 14, 2025
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When animals move together in flocks, herds, or schools, neural dynamics in their brain become synchronized through shared ways of representing space, a new study by researchers from the University of Konstanz (Germany) suggests. ...
Ecology
Oct 13, 2025
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Naked mole-rats are one of the rare examples of eusocial mammals. Eusocial animal species are those in which a single female within the group is tasked with reproduction, along with a select group of males, while the rest ...
Simulation results highlight how team composition shapes stress, health, performance, and cohesion in long-duration space missions, according to a study published October 8, 2025, in the open-access journal PLOS One by Iser ...
Space Exploration
Oct 8, 2025
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33
The waggle dance, performed by successful forager honeybees (Apis mellifera) inside the hive, is a well-known form of symbolic communication that informs nestmates about the location of resources. It is well known that the ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 29, 2025
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80
Researchers at Seoul National University and Kyung Hee University report a framework to control collective motions, such as ring, clumps, mill, flock, by training a physics-informed AI to learn the local rules that govern ...
General Physics
Sep 26, 2025
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As I walked along Bolivar Flats, just across from Galveston Island in Texas, I watched flocks of sanderlings forage along the frothy wavefront as it surged and retreated. Nearby, Caspian terns, American avocets, and black ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 18, 2025
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Researchers peered inside the brains of huntsman and crab spiders using microCT scanners and found that while spiders' brains don't have to be bigger for them to live in groups, social spiders are wired for better memory, ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 18, 2025
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Worker ants perform important tasks like gathering food, taking care of eggs and larvae and nest building. However, some species of ants cannot produce workers through reproductive means with their own species. Eggs fertilized ...
