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For centuries we've peered at them, delighted and terrified at seeing our best and worst traits in miniature. Brett Westwood investigates why we see ourselves in the Ant.

For centuries we've peered at them, delighted and terrified at seeing our best and worst traits in miniature. Brett Westwood investigates why we see ourselves in the Ant. With contributions from the Ant Lab of Nigel Franks, giant ants as seen by Judith Buchanan, slave-making ants as interpreted by John Clarke and Tom Waits, and the robot swarm of Sabine Hauert. Plus St Paul's Cathedral and a whole ant colony between 2 microscope slides. Plus the fearsome threat of H G Wells' The Empire of the Ants, and the films Antz, and THEM!

First broadcast in a longer form : 28th June 2016
Original Producer (2016): Melvin Rickarby
Archive Producer (2023) : Andrew Dawes

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Sun 17 Dec 2023 06:35

Dr Andrew Polaszek

Dr Andrew Polaszek
Andrew is a Researcher in Entomology at the Natural History Museum, London. His fascination with insects started in childhood, turning over the stones in his South London garden to reveal β€œthe Serengeti in miniature”.
He is committed to public outreach, science education, and the facilitation of descriptive taxonomy using modern techniques. A current priority is the use of high-quality images to inform society at all levels about the importance of parasitoids and other wasps, as well as bees and ants, as ecosystem service providers.

Professor Judith Buchanan

Professor Judith Buchanan
Judith Buchanan is Professor of Film and Literature and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York and Director of Silents Now. She has expertise in the transmission of stories across generations and across media, in Shakespeare performance histories and in silent cinema.

Through the creative work of , she brings back little-known films from the silent era as a source of pleasurable engagement for contemporary audiences in the UK and elsewhere, thereby helping to ensure the preservation and ongoing life of a valuable but threatened part of our heritage.

She is the author of, among other things, Shakespeare on Film and Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse and the editor of The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship. She speaks regularly to public as well as to academic audiences and her voice-overs can be found on the BFI’s newly released β€˜Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film'.Β 

Twitter:

Dr John Clark

Dr John Clark
Born and raised in Canada, John Clark completed degrees at the universities of Western Ontario and Toronto before receiving a DPhil at the University of Oxford. He subsequently held fellowships at Oxford and at the University of Kent, where he was a Wellcome Lecturer in the history of medicine and life sciences.

He is currently a lecturer in the School of History and director of the Institute for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews. His teaching and research focus on the history of science, medicine, and environment; and his publications include . In 2014, he was a visiting senior fellow at The Ohio State University.

Professor Nigel Franks

Professor Nigel Franks
Nigel Franks is Professor of Animal Behaviour and Ecology at the University of Bristol. The focus of his research at the university's is on the simple rules of interaction among worker ants that generate complexity and sophistication at the level of the colony.Β Recent studies by the team have begun to demonstrate the algorithmic basis of the self organisation of ant colonies.Β 

Ant colonies embody all of the most important aspects of biological organisation. In simple terms they are more than the sum of their parts and they are robust flexible systems that are capable of self repair. The fundamental advantage of ant colonies as experimental biological materials is that they can be quickly taken apart and rapidly and easily put together again. This is the reason why we study ant colonies rather than natural neural networks which exhibit similar capabilities but can be experimentally intractable.
Picture: EXI Photography

Dr Sabine Hauert

Dr Sabine Hauert
Dr Sabine Hauert is a swarm engineer at the and is interested in designing large collective systems that self-organise. Swarm strategies are either inspired from natural collectives such as ant colonies and bird flocks or are automatically designed in simulation using machine learning and crowdsourcing.

It has been used to design swarming nanoparticles for cancer treatment and for deploying large aerial swarms for communication relay.Β She is also working towards using automatic swarm design to understand natural self-organised systems such as those found in the brain or the immune system.

Broadcasts

  • Tue 28 Jun 2016 11:00
  • Mon 4 Jul 2016 21:00
  • Sun 17 Dec 2023 06:35

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