When a crowd of passengers on a burning ship jumps overboard, when schoolboys go calmly through a fire drill, when four clubmen stage a drinking spree, when a mob of strikers overturns police cars, ...

Collective behavior is the spontaneous, temporary, and unstructured behavior of a group in response to the same situation. In the animal kingdom, collective behavior can be observed in flocking birds, ...

An international team of researchers is the first to successfully apply machine learning toward understanding collective animal behavior from raw data such as video without tracking each individual.

Stop me if you've heard this one. A Cornell graduate physics student takes his girlfriend to her first heavy metal concert. Instead of diving straight into the mosh pit, as he typically would, he ...

Thousands of starlings move together to form a cloud-like murmuration. New work from UC Davis and Hokkaido University shows how this kind of collective behavior can be understood based on interactions ...

New research sheds light on how 'animal personalities' -- inter-individual differences in animal behavior -- can drive the collective behavior and functioning of animal groups such as schools of fish, ...

The behavior of crowds at heavy metal concerts is surely a topic close to the hearts of many readers of the Physics arXiv Blog. In these crowds, fans often form circles called mosh pits and then run ...

Robotics company Boston Dynamics has a new four-legged addition to its family: a 160-pound quadruped named Spot—and dude is impressive. In a short video posted yesterday, the Google-owned company ...

Active matter comprises systems in which individual components convert stored or ambient energy into mechanical work, leading to self-driven phenomena and spontaneous organisation. This area of ...

It’s not uncommon to see a flock of birds, startled by some perceived threat, take to the air in a highly coordinated flight. Similar behavior can be observed in schooling fishes where each fish, ...