did every day as a commuter. Her neck slowly began to itch before she was halfway home. Shrugging it off as mosquito, she stayed calm – as the itching slowly spread across her shoulders and to her arms she began to worry. So close to home, Amy continued until she parked in her driveway. Only then did she look down and notice she was covered in pox. Realizing that this was more than just a bad reaction to a mosquito, she grabbed the box and ran to the basement – whatever she contracted had to have been from inside the box; if she could figure out what it was, she probably had the right antibiotics to combat it.

Covering the case with her jacket- she barely made it intoThis image shows the robot ants (Alices) pursuing a light trail around the constructed maze. Credit: PLOS Comput Biol 9(3): e1002903. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002903.

Scientists have successfully replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.

The researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food sources.

The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate themselves in both symmetrical and asymmetrical pathways. In nature, ants do this by leaving chemical pheromone trails. This was reproduced by