How honey bees as a group decide on things, such as where to build their nest, mimics the operation of the human brain, with each bee in the “superorganism” acting like a neuron in the gray or white matter, researchers at the University of Sheffield, in the UK, have announced. Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. This has implications not only for neurology and entomology, but robotics and A.I. as well.
Psychophysics is the study of how the human brain processes a stimulus through the senses and how it makes decisions based on input. This field has been around for about a couple of centuries. Modern neuroscience has until recently eclipsed it. While the field of psychophysics has been used to better understand how the human brain operates, a few remarkable studies have applied it to other animals, to see if they’re guided by the same or similar processes.
Several species from single celled amoeba and slime molds, to more complex organisms, such as fish, birds, and mammals, display behavior associated with psychophysical laws. But until this study, these laws have only been applied to singular organisms, not superorganisms. Andreagiovanni Reina is a collective robotics researcher in Sheffield’s computer science department. He was the lead author on this study.
Reina told Newsweek,
Psychophysics studies the relationship between the intensity of a stimulus and its perception in the human brain. This relationship has been explained through a set of psychophysical laws that hold in a wide spectrum of sensory domains, such as sound loudness, musical pitch, image brightness, time duration, weight. Recently, numerous studies have shown that a wide range of organisms at various levels of complexity also obey these laws.
A “superorganism,” colonies of bees are so in sync they actually make decisions much like a human brain does. Credit: PollyDot, Pixababy.
It’s important to note that psychophysical laws apply, not to individual neurons but the brain as a whole. When making decisions, honey bee colonies and the human brain adhere to three different laws. These are Piéron's Law, the Hick-Hyman Law, and Weber's Law. Piéron's law states that humans make decisions more quickly when they have high quality information than when they have low-quality information. In other words, it’s easier to pick between two choices of high quality than of low quality.
The Hick-Hyman law states that the more options one has, the more difficult it is to make a selection. And Weber’s law says that the less distinction between the quality of two options, the more difficult it is to make a decision. In the human brain, such decision-making comes down to a group of neurons firing in a distinct pattern. Whereas with a bee colony, scouts return to the hive to communicate what they’ve found, through a series of wiggly gyrations and dances.
Individual bees don’t operate under the laws of psychophysics, but whole colonies do. Credit: Getty Images.
Researchers applied the psychophysical laws to colonies of European honey bees (Apis mellifera) who were going out and gathering information, in order to decide where they should build their nest. Researchers observed them carefully, then took that data and applied the laws to it. The bees sometimes had to pick between high quality and low quality nesting sites, for instance. At other times, they had to select between two high quality sites.
Reina and colleagues concluded that while no individual bee operated in terms of psychophysic's laws, the colony as a whole did. "This study is exciting because it suggests that honey bee colonies adhere to the same laws as the brain when making collective decisions," Reina told Medical News Today.
He added, "With this view in mind, parallels between bees in a colony and neurons in a brain can be traced, helping us to understand and identify the general mechanisms underlying psychophysic's laws.” These findings could help us understand the brain better and may even give us a glimpse at the biological underpinnings of psychological phenomena.
For more on the science behind honey bees, click here.
Meet ANITA. ANITA stands for "Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna." It seeks out cosmic rays from space as while hanging from a balloon suspended over Antarctica. In the last two years, though, it has twice detected cosmic rays coming from a direction no one expected: inside the earth. According to the Standard Model (SM) of physics, this shouldn't be possible.
ANITA, foreground, and its balloon, background(NASA)
And guess what? ANITA’s not alone
In September, a paper was submitted for peer review by astrophysicists at Penn State led by Derek Fox. "I was like, 'Well this model doesn't make much sense,'" Fox tells Live Science, "but the [ANITA] result is very intriguing, so I started checking up on it. I started talking to my office neighbor [and paper co-author] Steinn Sigurdsson about whether maybe we could gin up some more plausible explanations than the papers that have been published to date." Lacking any, they looked for other similar events and found three. They'd been detected by a surface-based Antarctic neutrino detector called, sensibly enough, IceCube. And when the data from ANITA and IceCube when combined, the Penn State scientists started getting excited. They calculate that whatever kind of particle is flying up and away from Earth has a less than 1-in-3.5 million chance of being any of the particles predicted by the Standard Model. Obviously, this has physicists scratching their heads trying to figure out what on earth is going on.
IceCube
How cosmic rays are supposed to behave
First of all, of course, cosmic rays are supposed to come from out there somewhere, not here. The earth is bombarded with them all the time. The suspicion is that the newly detected particles are cosmic rays slamming into the earth on one side and somehow making it out the other.
Cosmic rays, though, are high-energy particles with relatively wide cross-sections that lead to their demise by causing them to crash into matter inside the Earth. They're "mainly (89%) protons — nuclei of hydrogen, the lightest and most common element in the universe — but they also include nuclei of helium (10%) and heavier nuclei (1%), all the way up to uranium particles," according to CERN. Low-energy neutrinos, on the other hand, can pass through the earth's rocky mass, but they're not involved with cosmic rays.
Both ANITA and IceCube track neutrinos indirectly by detecting their remains, if you will. They detect the particles neutrinos produce when they decay post-collision. Since neutrinos can't get through the earth, though, something else is producing these particles. But what?
Artist rendition of cosmic rays
(koya979/Shutterstock)
They could be a new kind of particle…
One candidate put forward as responsible for the event is the elusive "sterile neutrino," first hinted at by evidence captured in the mid 1990s at the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector (LSND) at Los Alamos. The data was interpreted as suggesting a weird kind of high-speed neutrino that simply passes through matter without any interaction. No one else was able to reproduce the result, and the idea fell out of favor. Until this last spring, that is, when MiniBooNE at Chicago's FermiLab captured new signs that it might exist. The sterile neutrino would break the Standard Model if confirmed, which is one of the things that make MiniBoonE's data exciting. "That would be huge," says Duke physicist Kate Scholberg, who wasn't involved with the research, "…that would require new particles ... and an all-new analytical framework."
Others have suggested that it could be a product of dark matter. Cool as either of these ideas would be, perhaps the strongest reason for the detected upward cosmic rays is even more thrilling.
…or they could be long-sought supersymetrical particles
According to the Standard Model, every particle has a symmetrical partner, but the particles we know about don't match up. To resolve this apparent imbalance, a class of thus-far-hidden "supersymmetrical" particles has been proposed. It was hoped that the Large Hadron Collider could detect these mysterious — and so far just theoretical — particles, but no. Since 2012, when the last known particle predicted the Standard Model, the Higgs-Boson, was detected, nothing new's been found.
Until, maybe, now.
What the Penn paper proposes
The Penn State paper suggests these South Pole upward cosmic rays could be our first sign of supersymmetricals, specifically the partner of the Standard Model's tau leptons. With a a couple of "S"es added to signify supersymmetry, they'd be stau sleptons.
Others agree that they could be the first actual evidence of supersymmetry. Los Alamos physicist Bill Louis tells LiveScience, "I think it's very compelling," though he adds that the pinpointing of a stau slepton is "a bit of a stretch."
Fox admits he certainly can't be sure, but that, "From my perspective, I go trawling around trying to discover new things about the universe, I come upon some really bizarre phenomenon, and then with my colleagues, we do a little literature search to see if anybody has ever thought that this might happen. And then if we find papers in the literature, including one from 14 years ago that predict something just like this phenomenon, then that gets really high weight from me." And, guess what, he did find a prediction from 2003 of stau sleptons showing up just like this.
An Armenian priest circles the Edicule, which marks the place where tradition holds Jesus was buried. The structure is located straight under the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
On a ledge over a church door in Jerusalem stands a simple cedarwood ladder. It's been there for perhaps three centuries. Since nobody remembers who put it there, nobody knows who is authorized to remove it. If anyone would try, there'd be immediate trouble with whomever would feel slighted — and there are plenty of candidates. This is the Immovable Ladder, and it is a fitting symbol for the deeply-entrenched divisions within Christianity, and within that church building itself.
The most sacred place on Earth
Those religious divides matter here more than anywhere else because this is the most significant church in the world. For Christians of any denomination this is the most sacred place on Earth. This is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and according to tradition, it contains both Golgotha (or Calvary in Latin; both mean "skull"), the place where Jesus died on the cross. Just a few feet further is the tomb (a.k.a. sepulcher) where his body was laid to rest and where according to the faithful he was resurrected three days later.
Yet despite its supreme religious importance, there is no single authority managing this holiest of church buildings. The care over the sprawling, multi-level complex is divided between various denominations.
The church's history goes back to the fourth century, when Roman emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, sent his mother Helena to Jerusalem to locate places and things associated with the life and death of Jesus. This is the spot where she found the True Cross, a sign that this must have been Golgotha. The place of Jesus' burial was identified nearby. Constantine razed the pagan temple built here by his predecessor Hadrian, and a church on this spot, the first commissioned by a Roman emperor, was consecrated in the year 335.
In continuous use for 1700 years
The church has survived earthquakes, fires, invasions, and demolition by decree. It has been in continuous use for nearly 1700 years, even if the building standing there today is mostly a renovation and reconstruction dating to Crusader times. Over the centuries, various Christian traditions latched on to the church. Ownership became a constant source of dispute.
In 1852, the Ottoman Sultan decreed that the church was to be managed by the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Apostolic churches and apportioned parts of the building to each denomination. Over time, smaller parts of the building came under the authority of three smaller Orthodox denominations: the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian churches.
- Most of the building is under control of the Greek Orthodox church (in blue on the map). They manage the Katholikon (which is slightly ironic), the North Transept, the Seven Arches of the Virgin, a small Orthodox monastery, and various chapels, among other bits.
- The Latins (a.k.a. Roman Catholics, in purple) manage the Franciscan Monastery on the north side (which includes the Chapel of the Apparition and the Chapel of Mary Magdalene), the Grotto of the Invention of the Cross, a small area north of the Parvis, and a tiny space between the Katholikon and the Rotunda.
- The Armenians (in yellow) manage the Chapel of St. Helena, the Chapel of St. James, and the Armenian Gallery next to the Rotunda.
- The Copts (in red) have the care of various chapels near the Rotunda, including a small annex to the Edicule (i.e., the Holy Sepulcher) itself.
- The Ethiopian monastery is spread out on the roof, and the Ethiopians also manage an area called Deir al-Sultan, the Chapel of the Four Living Creatures, and the Chapel of St. Michael (all in orange).
- The Syriac church has the smallest part (in green): the Chapel of St. Nicodemus. But at least it's very close to the Sepulcher.
The Ottoman edict is the basis for the status quo, which is scrupulously maintained. A complex set of rules determines how the church is managed — such as who is allowed where and when, who cleans and repairs which parts of the building, and which areas are held in common (by the Greeks, Latins, and Armenians but not by the other three).
- The Rotunda is common territory, as is a chapel to the north.
- The Parvis (i.e. the courtyard at the entrance) is also common, as is an adjacent part of the church that contains the Stone of Unction (where according to tradition, Jesus' body was prepared for burial).
But some of the rules are disputed, and conflicts occasionally erupt. Two examples:
- The Copts have a long-standing claim over part of the roof, which is occupied by Ethiopian monks. To maintain their claim, Coptic monks take turns to sit on a chair on the roof. But on a particularly hot day in 2002, when a Coptic monk moved the chair a few inches into the shade, the Ethiopians interpreted that move as a violation of the status quo. The ensuing fight sent 11 monks to the hospital.
- And in 2008, Greek and Armenian monks got into a violent argument over the procedure of a religious procession. The brawl was caught on camera and pasted all over the news.
Can't we all just get along?
In recent years, however, the churches seem to be getting along a little bit better, although partly out of necessity. Significant parts of the building are in extreme need of repair. In 2017, the three main denominations (Catholic, Greek, and Armenian) agreed to fix the Edicule, which was in danger of collapsing. And in 2019, the three churches signed an agreement to renovate parts of the church's infrastructure (floor, foundations, and sewage pipes) and even to share ownership of any archaeological artifacts that might turn up during the work. However, the agreement excludes the three other denominations, which under the status quo have no say in the management of shared spaces.
Which brings us back to the Immovable Ladder. Despite its nickname, it has proven to be very movable indeed. It was stolen twice in the 20th century. Both times, it was soon recovered by the police and returned to its original position. In 2009, it was moved again, this time with the agreement of all relevant denominations, in order to accommodate scaffolding for renovations.
Upon completion of the works, it was again put back. And there it will remain until, as Pope Paul VI suggested in 1964, the divisions between the various Christian denominations are resolved. Or until Christ returns — whichever happens first.
Meanwhile, the keys to the church building itself will remain where they have been for centuries: in the possession of the Joudeh and Nuseibeh families, who by virtue of their Muslim faith are accepted by all Christian denominations as neutral guardians of the entrance to the church.
Strange Maps #1081
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