The trade-off between quality and quantity is a fundamental economic dilemma. Now, a team of British, American, and Japanese researchers describes how it applies to biology, as well. They have discovered that this dilemma most likely shaped the evolutionary trajectory of ants, one of Earth’s most successful groups of organisms.

Their study reveals that, as ant societies grew in complexity and numbers, they didn’t just make their workers smaller—they also made them cheaper.

The cost of armor

In the insect world, the exoskeleton known as the cuticle serves as a protective barrier against predators, pathogens, and desiccation, while providing the structural framework for muscle attachment. But this protection comes at a price. Building a robust cuticle requires significant amounts of nitrogen and rare minerals like zinc and manganese. While skimping on armor for an individual insect may be a death sentence, the evolution of ants apparently found a way around it.

“There’s this question in biology of what happens to individuals as societies they are in get more complex?” said Evan Economo, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and co-author of the study. “For example, the individuals may themselves become simpler because tasks that a solitary organism would need to complete can be handled by a collective.”

Economo’s team hypothesized that the metabolic balance behind investing in cuticles in social insects like ants could favor the collective over the individual. The idea was that a colony of 10,000 workers could lose a few individuals to a predator without much consequence, so investing heavily in each worker’s defenses would seem like a waste of precious nutrients. To test this hypothesis, they examined whether ant lineages that maintain massive, specialized workforces reduce the investment in their individual workers’ exoskeletons.

Scanning superorganisms

To test this idea, the researchers needed to pull off a comparative study on the anatomy of ants at an unprecedented scale. “We worked with scans of ant specimens and species from all over the world to capture the global diversity of ants,” Economo says. The team used a massive database called Antscan, which contains three-dimensional X-ray microtomography imaging of ants from around the globe.

Microtomography works similarly to medical CT scans, but at a vastly higher resolution. Still, on its own, the technique could only generate lots of precise data—it still had to be interpreted. Parsing through 3D imagery of over 880 specimens, including workers, queens, and males belonging to over 500 different species, was another challenge. “The 3D scanning itself is a very advanced technology,” says Arthur Matte, a researcher at the University of Cambridge and lead author of the study. “But once you have the ants in three dimensions, it’s still very hard to segment manually every tissue you’re interested in.”

To solve this, Matte developed a computer vision algorithm for “unsupervised segmentation.” Because the cuticle is always the outermost tissue of an arthropod, the algorithm could automatically identify and measure the volume of the exoskeleton across all ants in the dataset.

The first thing scientists noticed when the results poured in was that cuticle investment varied wildly, ranging from 6 percent to 35 percent of an ant’s total body volume. So, the next thing they focused on was figuring out the reasons behind these variations.

The numbers game

The team started checking how factors like diet, temperature, humidity, and foraging style correlated with the size of the cuticle. To get a handle on this, segmented 3D scans were fed into evolutionary models. “One of the most insightful things we did was to individually remove such variables from the models to estimate their contributions to the final cuticle investment,” Matte explains. This way, scientists learned that temperature was responsible for just 12 percent of variation in cuticle size and diet—especially its nitrogen content—explained another 37 percent. But the factor that had the strongest impact on the model was the colony size.

Ants that invested less in their cuticle tended to have significantly larger colony sizes. More surprisingly, this reduction in cuticle investment and the resulting increase in colony size appeared to be associated with higher diversification rates. In biological terms, squishier ants could evolve to occupy new niches much faster than their heavily armored cousins. “Requiring less nitrogen could make these ants more versatile and able to conquer new environments,” Matte suggests. This efficiency may have allowed ants to transition from a diet of high-protein prey to more abundant but less nutritious liquid sugar sources, like honeydew or floral nectar.

“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of the collective,” Matte explains. “They’re shifting from self-investment toward a distributed workforce.”

Power of the collective

The researchers think the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of societal complexity. The transition from solitary life to complex societies echoes the transition from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones.

In a single-celled organism, a cell must be a “jack-of-all-trades,” performing every function necessary for survival. In a multicellular animal, however, individual cells often become simpler and more specialized, relying on the collective for protection and resources.

“It’s a pattern that echoes the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units can be individually simpler than a solitary cell, yet collectively capable of far greater complexity,” says Matte. Still, the question of whether underinvesting in individuals to boost the collective makes sense for creatures other than ants remains open, and it most likely isn’t as much about nutritional economics as it is about sex.

Expendable servants

The study focused on ants that already have a reproductive division of labor, one where workers do not reproduce. This social structure is likely the key prerequisite for the cheap worker strategy. For the team, this is the reason we haven’t, at least so far, found similar evolutionary patterns in more complex social organisms like wolves, which live in packs—or humans with their amazingly complex societies. Wolves and people are both social, but maintain a high degree of individual self-interest regarding reproduction. Ant workers could be made expendable because they don’t pass their own genes—they are essentially extensions of the queen’s reproductive strategy.

Before looking for signs of ant-like approaches to quality versus quantity dilemmas in other species, the team wants to take an even closer look at ants. Economo, Matte, and their colleagues seek to expand their analysis to other ant tissues, such as the nervous system and muscles, to see if the cheapening of individuals extends beyond the exoskeleton. They are also looking at ant genomes to see what genetic innovations allowed for the shift from quality to quantity.  “We still need a lot of work to understand ants’ evolution,” Matte says.

Science Advances. 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

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Ok, it’s that time of year isn’t it? When people in the US celebrate something called “Thanksgiving” while everyone else celebrates… well, let’s not get into that.

And immediately afterwards of course it’s all about commerce. Money has to be spent. Wallets have to be emptied. And credit cards have to be maxed out.

How could Map Happenings possibly not do its part?

So without further ado, and in no particular order, please gorge on this rather delicious list of fourteen ‘mappy’ books that you, your friends or your family might slurp up.

These mapping gems range from amusing, to epic, to colourful, to insightful, to quaint, to just pure ‘must have’.

I didn’t bother with any affiliate links, so don’t worry, no enrichment of yours truly will take place if you happen to buy something.

Terrible Maps

Maps on Vinyl

This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong

Longitude

The Atlas of Unusual Borders

Our Dumb World by The Onion

At Atlas of Extinct Countries

A History of the World in 12 Maps

How to Lie with Maps

Transit Maps of the World

Utterly British Maps

Great City Maps

Brilliant Maps for Curious Minds

The Rand McNally Road Atlas!

Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology, and at minimal cost. The secret is evaporative cooling, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

Evaporative cooling is a well-known phenomenon; mammals use it to regulate body temperature. You can see it in your morning cup of hot coffee: the hotter atoms rise to the top of the magnetic trap and “jump out” as steam. It also plays a role (along with shock wave dynamics and various other factors) in the formation of “wine tears.” It’s a key step in creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

And evaporative cooling is also the main culprit behind the infamous “stall” that so frequently plagues aspiring BBQ pit masters eager to make a successful pork butt. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. That’s why a growing number of competitive pit masters wrap their meat in tinfoil after the first few hours (usually when the internal temperature hits 170° F).

Ice-printing methods usually rely on cryogenics or on cooled substrates. Per the authors, this is the first time evaporative cooling principles have been applied to 3D printing. The trick was to house the 3D printing inside a vacuum chamber using a jet nozzle as the printing head—something they discovered serendipitously when they were trying to get rid of air drag by spraying water in a vacuum chamber.  “The printer’s motion control guides the water jet layer-by-layer, building geometry on demand,” the authors wrote in a blog post for Nature, adding:

At very low pressure, water molecules at the liquid surface escape continuously as vapor. Each departing molecule carries the latent heat of vaporization, thus cooling the water jet. The very fine jet we use for printing has a very high surface-to-volume ratio, making heat extraction very efficient: the bulk liquid cools rapidly, dropping tens of Kelvin over a fraction of a second. When the jet reaches the substrate or a previously deposited ice layer, it freezes just after its impact.

And when the holidays are over, just turn off the vacuum pump and watch your tree melt back into its watery state, “no residue, no post-processing waste.”

The applications aren’t limited to Christmas trees. The purity of the ice makes it ideal for biological applications such as scaffolding for tissue: any branching ice form can be cast in resin or polymer and when it melts, it will leave behind hollow channels. It can also be used to create custom fluid networks for microfluidics applications. And if you have plans to camp out on Mars with its cold temperatures and thin atmosphere, the method could enable 3D printed structures out of water ice, with no need for heavy and expensive cryogenic equipment.

arXiv, 2025. DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2512.14580 (About DOIs).

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Every so often, prominent figures in tech begin amplifying the same topic so energetically that it makes you wonder if they’re all on the same group chat (or if the hive mind from “Pluribus,” the Apple TV+ sci-fi show, is a real thing). One such moment occurred this past week, when it became hard to escape the deafening online chatter about data centers in space.

That was in large part thanks to Elon Musk, who began promoting the concept through a series of posts on X. It isn’t just Musk hyping the concept, though. Amazon executive chair and founder Jeff Bezos and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt have both been big believers for a while. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also jumped on the bandwagon.

Last month, Google, one of the biggest cloud providers, said it plans to launch prototype satellites by 2027 to see how its AI chips, called tensor processing units, perform in space. And this week, a space data center startup, Starcloud, said it had trained the first large language model in space aboard a demonstration satellite outfitted with an Nvidia graphics processing unit.

On one hand, this is an exhilarating vision, especially if you’re a sci-fi nerd. But there’s also a more pessimistic interpretation of the sudden enthusiasm of so many smart, powerful AI barons for sticking data centers in space—namely, they don’t think the U.S. can meet the compute needs of the AI industry on terra firma. That makes sense, as we’ll explain. First, though, we should acknowledge that some of the proponents of data centers in space—Musk in particular—have other agendas.

The data centers used for work on artificial intelligence can cost tens of billions to build. Tech giants are finding ways to avoid being on the hook for some of those costs.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued five large TV manufacturers yesterday, alleging that their smart TVs spy on viewers without consent. Paxton sued Samsung, the longtime TV market share leader, along with LG, Sony, Hisense, and TCL.

“These companies have been unlawfully collecting personal data through Automated Content Recognition (‘ACR’) technology,” Paxton’s office alleged in a press release that contains links to all five lawsuits. “ACR in its simplest terms is an uninvited, invisible digital invader. This software can capture screenshots of a user’s television display every 500 milliseconds, monitor viewing activity in real time, and transmit that information back to the company without the user’s knowledge or consent. The companies then sell that consumer information to target ads across platforms for a profit. This technology puts users’ privacy and sensitive information, such as passwords, bank information, and other personal information at risk.”

The lawsuits allege violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, seeking damages of up to $10,000 for each violation and up to $250,000 for each violation affecting people 65 years or older. Texas also wants restraining orders prohibiting the collection, sharing, and selling of ACR data while the lawsuits are pending.

Texas argues that providing personalized content and targeted advertising are not legitimate purposes for collecting ACR data about consumers. The companies’ “insatiable appetite for consumer data far exceeds what is reasonably necessary,” and the “invasive data harvesting is only needed to increase advertisement revenue, which does not satisfy a consumer-necessity standard,” the lawsuits say.

Paxton is far from the first person to raise privacy concerns about smart TVs. The Center for Digital Democracy advocacy group said in a report last year that in “the world of connected TV, viewer surveillance is now built directly into the television set, making manufacturers central players in data collection, monitoring, and digital marketing.” We recently published a guide on how to break free from smart TV ads and tracking.

“Companies using ACR claim that it is all opt-in data, with permission required to use it,” the Center for Digital Democracy report said. “But the ACR system is bundled into new TVs as part of the initial set-up, and its extensive role in monitoring and sharing viewer actions is not fully explained. As a consequence, most consumers would be unaware of the threats and risks involved in signing up for the service.”

“Mass surveillance system” in US living rooms

Pointing out that Hisense and TCL are based in China, Paxton’s press release said the firms’ “Chinese ties pose serious concerns about consumer data harvesting and are exacerbated by China’s National Security Law, which gives its government the capability to get its hands on US consumer data.”

“Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans’ devices inside their own homes,” Paxton said. “This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries.”

The Paxton lawsuits, filed in district courts in several Texas counties, are identical in many respects. The complaints allege that TVs made by the five companies “aren’t just entertainment devices—they’re a mass surveillance system sitting in millions of American living rooms. What consumers were told would enhance their viewing experience actually tracks, analyzes, and sells intimate details about everything they watch.”

Using ACR, each company “secretly monitors what consumers watch across streaming apps, cable, and even connected devices like gaming consoles or Blu-ray players,” and harvests the data to build profiles of consumer behavior and sell the data for profit, the complaints say.

We contacted the five companies sued by Texas today. Sony, LG, and Hisense responded and said they would not comment on a pending legal matter.

Difficult opt-out processes detailed

The complaints allege that the companies fail to obtain meaningful consent from users. The following excerpt is from the Samsung lawsuit but is repeated almost verbatim in the others:

Consumers never agreed to Samsung Watchware. When families buy a television, they don’t expect it to spy on them. They don’t expect their viewing habits packaged and auctioned to advertisers. Yet Samsung deceptively guides consumers to activate ACR and buries any explanation of what that means in dense legal jargon that few will read or understand. The so-called “consent” Samsung obtains is meaningless. Disclosures are hidden, vague, and misleading. The company collects far more data than necessary to make the TV work. Consumers are stripped of real choice and kept in the dark about what’s happening in their own homes on Samsung Smart TVs.

Samsung and other companies force consumers to go through multistep menus to exercise their privacy choices, Texas said. “Consumers must circumnavigate a long, non-intuitive path to exercise their right to opt-out,” the Samsung lawsuit said. This involves selecting menu choices for Settings, Additional Settings, General Privacy, Terms & Privacy, Viewing Information Services, and, finally, “Disable,” the lawsuit said. There are “additional toggles for Interest-Based Ads, Ad Personalization, and Privacy Choices,” the lawsuit said.

The “privacy choices are not meaningful because opt-out rights are scattered across four or more separate menus which requires approximately 15+ clicks,” the lawsuit continued. “To fully opt-out of ACR and related ad tracking on Samsung Smart TVs, consumers must disable at least two settings: (1) Viewing Information Services, and (2) Interest-Based Ads. Each of which appear in different parts of the setting UI. Conversely, Samsung provides consumers with a one-click enrollment option to opt-in during the initial start-up process.”

When consumers first start up a Samsung smart TV, they “must click through a multipage onboarding flow before landing on a consent screen, titled Smart Hub Terms & Conditions,” the lawsuit said. “Upon finally reaching the consent screen, consumers are presented with four notices: Terms & Conditions: Dispute Resolution Agreement, Smart Hub U.S. Policy Notice, Viewing Information Services, and Interest-Based Advertisements Service U.S. Privacy Notice, with only one button prominently displayed: I Agree to all.”

Deceptive trade practices alleged

It would be unreasonable to expect consumers to understand that Samsung TVs come equipped with surveillance capabilities, the lawsuit said. “Most consumers do not know, nor have any reason to suspect, that Samsung Smart TVs are capturing in real-time the audio and visuals displayed on the screen and using the information to profile them for advertisers,” it said.

Paxton alleges that TV companies violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act with misrepresentations regarding the collection of personal information and failure to disclose the use of ACR technology. The lawsuit against Hisense additionally alleges a failure to disclose that it may provide the Chinese government with consumers’ personal data.

Hisense “fails to disclose to Texas Consumers that under Chinese law, Hisense is required to transfer its collections of Texas consumers’ personal data to the People’s Republic of China when requested by the PRC,” the lawsuit said.

The TCL lawsuit doesn’t include that specific charge. But both the Hisense and TCL complaints say the Chinese Communist Party may use ACR data from the companies’ smart TVs “to influence or compromise public figures in Texas, including judges, elected officials, and law enforcement, and for corporate espionage by surveilling those employed in critical infrastructure, as part of the CCP’s long-term plan to destabilize and undermine American democracy.”

The TVs “are effectively Chinese-sponsored surveillance devices, recording the viewing habits of Texans at every turn without their knowledge or consent,” the lawsuits said.

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