Ants [noun]

The most cooperative organisms like ants, bees, termites—or, if you want to compare mammals to mammals, the beautiful naked mole rats—aren’t renowned for their brilliance.

Yet while the cows’ bacteria merely inhabit the animals’ stomach, the bacteria in the ants live inside their gut cells as endosymbionts.

In exchange, the carpenter ants provide a protective cellular environment for the Blochmannia and transmit them to their offspring, ensuring the bacteria’s survival.

So the ants evolved to leave the ancestral germline as a “decoy” to attract the bacteria, Rajakumar said.

Bullet ant stings, he finds, are roughly 10 times more painful.

Individuals in this category might include an ant colony or a spiderweb — distributed systems that are “partially scaffolded” by their environment but still maintain some structure on their own.

To run a really complex quantum computation, millions of physical qubits may be necessary — more plentiful than the ants that discovered a slice of last night’s pizza on the kitchen counter.

Each individual ant is relatively weak, but together, they create a vibrant superorganism.

As in an ant colony with workers and soldiers, the surface code requires that different qubits have different jobs.

Her feet crush creeping things: there is a busy ant or blazoned beetle, with its back broken, writhing in the dust, unseen.