New research reveals secrets about locust swarm movement
Study introduces a new theory that could improve locust control strategies
Texas A&M AgriLife Communications
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Journal
Science
Article Title
Virtual reality rewrites rules of the swarm
Monday, March 24, 2025
Tuesday, March 04, 2025
Clearing the air: Can nuclear energy solve South Asia's smog crisis?
An elevated view shows the Thatta Cement Co. plant in Thatta, Pakistan
by Anam Murad Khan
by Hammad Waleed
March 3, 2025
For several years now, the provinces of Pakistani and Indian Punjab have been engulfed in a thick, suffocating smog each winter. Air pollution has escalated to alarming levels, choking the lives of urban inhabitants and rural communities alike. With each passing season, the vibrant pulse of daily life grinds to a halt: classrooms fall silent as schools close their doors, public parks become desolate, breeding grounds for respiratory infections, and residents wear masks reminiscent of the haunting days of the Covid pandemic.
Domestically, an urgent and necessary drive for rapid power expansion has also led to the emergence of coal-fired power plants across the Punjab hinterlands, while unregulated traffic floods the roads. The relentless “concretisation” of urban and rural areas has consumed precious agricultural land, turning once-thriving landscapes into sprawling housing schemes. To worsen the situation, antiquated agricultural practices contribute significantly to air pollution as autumn gives way to the bitter chills of winter. The problem is glaringly obvious, everyone is acutely aware of it, and we are inhaling the toxic air with a mask tightly fitted over our faces. Nevertheless, amidst this backdrop of despair, the pressing question lingers: what viable solutions can emerge to address this relentless, escalating crisis?
Despite efforts from both countries to control sulphur, several gaps remain. They are participating actively in regional air pollution combat agreements, such as the UN ESCAP regional action programme and Male declaration on air pollution control. However, their heavy reliance on fossil fuels for energy generation has exacerbated this issue for both countries. The air quality of Pakistan and India in terms of average annual exposure to particulate matter are 43.0 µg/m³ and 48.4 µg/m³ respectively. These levels are alarmingly 8.6 and 9.7 times higher than the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. Air quality indices of the major cities of Lahore and New Delhi frequently cross the 300 micrograms of PM2.5 levels, far surpassing the acceptable and safe limit of 100 micrograms. Due to this, in 2021 alone Pakistan incurred the loss of 100,000 lives (87 per 100,000 people) while India suffered 950,000 (91 per 100,000 people) related deaths. Among other health hazards is heart disease, with 18 per cent in Pakistan and 23 per cent in India, which is also attributed to outdoor fine particle pollution.
Among the loopholes in air pollution mitigation efforts, the heavy reliance on thermal energy for energy production is a major concern for both India and Pakistan.
India, being the second largest coal producer globally, increased coal production to a massive 1 billion tons in 2024, and it plans to add 93 GW of coal-fired electricity capacity by 2032, as its largest coal producer nearly doubled its production in 2019. It contradicts the intended goal of Indo-US civil nuclear cooperation through which the former is enjoying access to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes but, India is now utilising it indirectly for building more nuclear weapons via its civilian, unsafeguarded nuclear programme. Moreover, it plans to expand coal mining operations in Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand and increase coal imports from Indonesia. Pakistan, meanwhile, relies on thermal energy as a key strategy to tackle its energy crisis. Thermal energy contributes 59.45 per cent of its energy mix. The country has faced significant energy challenges to acquire alternative energy sources to tackle severe shortages that have led to electricity blackouts and an ever-increasing debt. While Pakistan has pledged to increase its nuclear energy contribution to the national energy mix by 2030, the politicised international trade through practices of exceptionalism by major powers is hindering this goal and makes it a victim of exceptionalist polices. Consequently, it had to quadruple coal production shortly after announcing its moratorium in 2020 and ramped up its indigenous coal production from its 185 billion tons of coal reserves, located primarily in Balochistan and Sindh.
READ: Pakistan, Azerbaijan agree to expand security, trade collaboration
Over the years, peaceful nuclear technology has increasingly been adopted as a preferable alternative for both developed and developing states, to reduce their carbon footprint and fulfil ever-increasing energy demand. It offers innovative solutions to combat the perilous air pollution, such as smog. Among the peaceful nuclear technologies are electron beam accelerators. One of their key functions is to remove pollutants such as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from the air by producing the attacker electrons that break down these harmful substances. Another key technology is cogeneration which uses nuclear power to produce heat and electricity concomitantly for industrial uses. This technology not only reduces greenhouse gas emissions but also enhances energy efficiency. Furthermore, radiation technology provides an eco-friendly solution to reduce pollutants. It converts harmful fossil fuels into valuable agricultural fertilisers. Together, these nuclear technologies not only tackle the urgent air pollution, but also contribute to sustainable energy generation practices. It makes them an essential tool to tackle air pollution such as smog.
The case study of Poland is pertinent to highlight the effectiveness of peaceful nuclear technologies in addressing the challenge of air pollution.
In Poland, air pollution claimed nearly 45,000 lives annually. Similar to India and Pakistan, the excessive usage of coal in 80 per cent of energy generation was the culprit. To tackle this, the country joined hands with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and employed peaceful nuclear technologies. Among the notable ones are the electron beam accelerators employed in Poland, and they reduced the emissions from the coal-powered plants significantly. The electron beam facility was installed at the Pomorzany power plant which cut sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by up to 95per cent and 70 per cent respectively, and released highly valuable agriculture fertilisers as a by-product.
Applying the success story of the nuclear decarbonisation of Poland to South Asia is suitable for tackling the South Asian smog crisis. In the wake of the dismal chances of an energy trade between India and Pakistan, the increase of nuclear energy in Pakistan’s energy mix is the key. India already has access to multiple players through 13-plus nuclear deals after the signing of the Indo-US nuclear agreement. However, Pakistan is not given equal treatment – except by China – in the nuclear club despite its need to increase the share of nuclear energy in its energy mix. The protracted conflicts, longstanding disputes and India’s aggressive regional and global designs with the aim of isolating Pakistan hinder the prospects of energy trade between both countries significantly. Their trade relations deteriorated further after India passed the Kashmir Reorganisation Act, straining bilateral relations and resulting in 200 per cent import duties on goods from Pakistan, while the latter suspended trade in retaliation for Indian actions in the Illegally Indian-Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJ&K). A World Bank report suggests that trade potential could have been up to 18 times higher than the pre-2019 levels, particularly for heavy machinery and heavy parts, considering their competitive prices.
Strengthening smog diplomacy is crucial. Pakistan and India cooperated successfully on joint operations such as combating locust attacks, and demonstrated that cooperation is possible despite bad blood between them. A similar collaborative spirit is required to address this common issue. As air pollution knows no borders, it is critical for both countries to cooperate on this. By leveraging innovative nuclear technologies to combat smog crisis, both countries can not only clean the air, but also pave the way for lasting peace and cooperation.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
Unless otherwise stated in the article above, this work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Saturday, March 01, 2025
Palestine at the Heart of Things
A Lament in Poetry and Prose
‘Francisco Goya, ‘Disasters of War’ ‘What good is a cup?’
Naivety can be rectified by experience. Yet stupid, and its attendant willful and belligerent ignorance, is a hazard to all near it. Trump careens down his death-besotted path as the Democrats simply step out of his way.
Democrats, smugly muttering, “I told you so,” will not suffice. Antiduopolists could retort, we warned you against rigging the apparatus of the Democratic Party in an attempt to enthrone Hillary, then, because stupid tends to double down on fuckwit, rigging the process for Biden.
The arming of genocidal Zionists didn’t help you either with citizens who take their conscience into consideration when deciding whether to vote or not.
MAGA will continue to act on behalf of the insatiable greed of oligarchs, and will continue feeding the bloodlust of spiteful soreheads. Yet Democrats will only regret the loss of a status quo that serves no one but their own donors.
Francisco Goya, Proud Monsters
As noted above, stupid cannot be rectified. The only redemption possible is: a movement toward novelty. Two party despotism took us to this dismal spot. Time to chart a new course appropriating a compass constructed of the sublime material of one’s own heart, mind and soul.
At present, the needle of the heart’s compass points towards Palestine.
Impersonal Catastrophes…that feel so damn personal: Tragedy in Palestine, that could well be one’s own: Speaking as the son of a mother who escaped Nazi, Germany on Kindertransport, then delivered into the homes of strangers in the UK, as her father, had been arrested by the Gestapo and was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp: I ask — I implore you:
Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?
The news of the cosmos arrives as blood, bone, and other urgent dreams of flesh, soil and breath — thus: Do dispatches from history cause you to recall wild thunderstorms shaking mid-August afternoons? Then silence returns. And what of the ghostly lamentation of empires, risen like sunflowers, teeming in the summer air, then withering and falling within an interlocking eternity of arrivals and departures? Comes a vision risen on the horizon of the World’s Mind: a towering, crimson nimbus laden with the blood of Palestinian children.
Francisco Goya, Enterrar y callar Bury them and keep quiet
At Passover Seder, my family, among our traditional reading of tribal mythos, chanted liturgy and song; we joined voices in the declaration, “L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim” i.e., “Next year in Jerusalem”.
Thus, turning eastward in the direction of my mythical home: a catastrophe shakes my heart; a decimation of the soul.
Witness/Rebuke — the sneering pride of those in possession of minds made of bullets, of those seething in their death cult wherein rifles, missiles and bombs seemed to be held as liturgical accoutrements.
Mortified/Enraged — compelled to insist the killers and their dissembling apologists answer the following:
How did it come to be that you are driven to attempt to murder all beauty by stabbing at the heart of the world with a knife you have placed on the violated altar of our God — who you have transfigured into a god of death?
I ask you again: Israel, do you not realize that you have broken your house?
You cannot walk through your house without wading through blood.
Angry ghosts shuffle upon your rooftops. The ceilings of your homes stare down at you in rebuke.
We, the living, bestowed, albeit in reluctance, to be the eyes of Heaven and Hell, continue to witness the unfolding abomination.
We could not forgive ourselves — we would loath the very air agitated by our own words — if we were to turn away.
Francisco Goya, Tristes presentimientos de lo que ha de acontecer (Sad forebodings of what must come to pass)
Once again we must remind ourselves to consult the heart’s compass: Palestine must be at the present heart of all things…
In places —veiled, everywhere — from sight:
the past refuses to depart,
the dead do not rest,
the unspoken sings in endless stanzas of verse,
musical notes rise as mountains,
and spirits grief and renewal envelop all things in concentric rings.
At this moment, this place is Palestine,
Besieged Palestine, located in the indomitable heart,
Here, now, we are induced to dismantle despair’s ad hoc architecture and begin building living monuments to the grace bequeathed in every breath — the quality known to us humble human beings as compassion.
Blood of the blameless will continue to pool the streets. Bombs will bounce Levant rubble. Lies, thick as Old Testament locust, swarm the air.
Israel, I have stared into your face until I disappeared. I have inhabited the shadow of your mendacity. To this day, I stumble through the landscape of my heart amid ruins left by your campaign of genocide-justifying lies.
I drown everyday in the rising of your blood-tide, unloosed by means of your god-ordained guns and hate-garrisoned pride.
Your children, from birth, fed on lie-rancid milk, have grown rifles for hands; their hearts are now predator drones; their breath meets the world as bombs.
Francisco de Goya, Well-Known Folly
In childhood, I was instructed to plant trees to provide cooling shade for a desert homeland, according to the lore of my people, now regained due to the death agonies inflicted on six million of our tribe.
Trees, you told me, that would serve as living tributes in memory of my murdered kinsfolk in the death mills of Europe. But you watered those trees with the blood of the innocent.
The desert air speaks: The history that made you has become a harvest of shame. The scent of those flowering trees cannot conceal the reek of tens of thousands of corpses.
No matter how innumerable in number — the fragrance of a billion flowering trees will never conceal the reek of genocide.
Go to the dead, those you left in Europe and you have killed in Palestine, and let their ghosts do to you what they will.
Francisco Goya, No hay quien los socorra There is no one to help them
Often, when the crimes of Israel are enumerated, Zionist apologists bandy the assertion, “the history of the Middle East is too complex for such over-simplified critiques.”
The assertion amounts to a noxious and death-besotted display of casuistry. What is complex about starving and slaughtering men, women, and children with agendas of ethnic cleansing?
My maternal DNA relates the history of my Ashkenazi Jewish origins. In brief, out of the Levant, we came, delivered as slaves into southern Italy then, when freed, into the north of Italy then settling into the German Rhineland.
Not a single Palestinian acted in the manner of the various oppressors whose crimes against my ancestors’ humanity drove us ever northeastward across Europe. Not a single Palestinian harmed my ancestors during the anti-Jewish rampages of 1096 across the Rhine river region of Germany, nor shattered glass on Kristallnacht, nor held positions in the Frankfurt-based IG Farben corporation where Zyklon B had been manufactured to be used as an agent of mass extermination against Jews in death camps across the face of Europe.
Yet the Palestinians lost their homeland and are forced to live on their knees in a perpetual state of submission and contrition for the crimes of Germany. Why doesn’t the Zionist state stand in the Rhineland? In this light, Germany’s unwavering support of Israel seems convenient and self-serving, at best.
German and other European leaders’ blinkered reaction ensures the ethnic cleansing inherent to Zionism continues without consequence. Can you imagine any other nation, other than the United States, actions being defended, much less enabled, as they committed crimes against humanity to the degree of the Zionist state?
Goya, Francisco, There is no remedy
My mother, who, as I noted above, escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, in the final years of her life came to question her Zionist affiliations. I’m certain viewing the overkill, to say the least, a constant in the response of Zionists towards Palestinian acts of resistance, she would express a deep sense of shame, as do I, for the lack of humanity displayed by our troubled tribe in the present day Levant.
My Ashkenazi DNA, carrying my ancestor’s memory of oppression, cries out, from my blood and bones, to stand for and with the people of Palestine.
I possess dual US/German citizenship, because the Nazis stripped my mother’s family of their citizenship — which I have since reclaimed. My ancestral homeland, on the maternal side, at least, is Germany.
The Zionist “right of return” is based on a number of noxious fallacies e.g., 1) the White Man’s Burden-type, racist mindset of European colonialist settlers — who believed that they possessed the “manifest destiny” to dispossess “less civilized” inhabitants of their native lands, in order to, as the Zionist propaganda trope goes, “to make the desert bloom”; 2) The ancient, tribal myths of the Old Testament/Torah.
If you listened to the rebuke of the dead, you would be compelled to do the same. If only such a thing could come to be.
Francisco Goya, They escape among the flames’
As for myself, I have heard an earful. I must affix my attention upon the composition of these words of poetry — or else I might go sobbing into the streets, reeling in lamentation.
On Genocide and Indomitable Feathers
In periodic dreams, all manner of things had wings: Tortoises. Ukuleles. Rocks. Rhinoceros on rooftops. Coffins — migrating flocks of them cast long shadows under the afternoon sun.
Then a crushing tyranny — The Keepers Of The Separation Wall And Perpetual Shackle — stormed the land and seized power. Wings were clipped and confiscated. The earth withered into wasteland.
Phalanxes of police descended on university campuses; once, sanctums where the young were instructed in the art of flight.
Abandoned dreams were converted into slave ships then launched to cross dark, storm-tossed skyways.
The ships docked at islands of imperium in the sky. Therein, forsaken dreams served at the caprice of a brutal regime sustained by the life-force of usurped lives.
The overseers were squads of monsters known as: The Sum of All Fears.
Yet, across the earth, in hidden places, in dreams within dreams within dreams, in sanctuaries of the heart, refuges unreachable to the usurpers, banished imagination brooded, molted feathers, then took flight across internal skies.
Shortly thereafter, great birds of impossible beauty winged westward towards vast reservoirs of the collective soul and in their beaks bore back water to quench the thirst of those stranded in parched lands and restore the memory of flight.
Flights of the indomitable heart such as these are winging, at this moment, to the spaces of the heart where young and old, our wings restored, will continue wage a campaign of conscience to put an end to genocide.
Another thing I know, birds of the restorative heart will not make their nests in the absent heart of either of the present political system’s war parties.
Francisco Goya, Contra el bien general Against the common good
Thursday, February 27, 2025
Scientists rewrite the rules of swarming locusts
University of Konstanz
image:
Locust outbreak in East Africa
Copyright:view moreCredit: Copyright: Einat Couzin-Fuchs, Inga Petelski, Yannick Günzel, Felix B. Oberhauser
Desert locusts, a notorious Biblical pest, form some of the largest insect groups in nature and are estimated to threaten the livelihood of one in ten people due to their impact on food security. Swarms begin when flightless juveniles aggregate and start marching in unison. Understanding how these plague insects coordinate their motion is crucial for developing evidence-based control, such as forecasting swarm movements. In addition, revealing the nature of inter-individual interactions is key to understanding how collective motion emerges among social animal species more broadly.
- A video can be found here: https://youtu.be/oBJnY4HKmeY
For decades, a principle borrowed from theoretical physics – treating individuals as "self-propelled particles" – has been used to model collective motion in animals. Similar to particles in physical systems like magnets, this hypothesis assumes that animals actively align with one another. However, unlike in magnets, these "particles" are constantly in motion. Such models have shown that even when individuals align only with their local neighbors, large-scale coherent movement can emerge, with vast numbers of individuals moving in the same direction.
The longstanding hypothesis also states that the density between the animals is a decisive factor for the change from non-coherent motion – where individuals move in random directions – to coherent large scale collective motion. When enough animals come together in a space, they are predicted to spontaneously transition from disordered to ordered swarm motion. This prediction was later seemingly corroborated by laboratory experiments with large locust groups, thereby strengthening the claims of these classical models.
Testing long-held hypotheses
Through a combination of fieldwork during East Africa’s locust outbreak of 2020, laboratory studies, virtual reality experiments, and a reevaluation of past data, researchers from the Cluster of Excellence "Collective Behaviour" at the University of Konstanz have concluded that the behavioural mechanisms governing collective motion in locust swarms cannot be explained by these classical models. Their findings challenge the traditional view by which collective motion is thought to emerge in animal groups.
"Inferring the mechanism of interaction in mobile animal groups is notoriously difficult", says Professor Iain Couzin, the study’s senior author, noting that "individuals both influence, and are influenced, by the behaviour of others in a complex interplay." To overcome this challenge, the Konstanz team leveraged immersive 3D virtual reality, enabling them to study how freely moving locusts interact with a computer-generated "holographic" virtual swarm. "This approach allowed us to rigorously test hypotheses about what drives their behaviour in ways that would be impossible in natural swarms", adds first author Dr Sercan Sayin.
The precise control of visual information afforded by virtual reality meant that the researchers could establish how sensory input is translated into movement decisions by locusts. Contrary to previous assumptions, the team observed that the "optomotor response" – an innate reflex in which locusts (and many other species) follow motion cues – is not responsible for coordinating collective motion. Indeed, they found no evidence that locusts explicitly align with the direction of motion of others at all.
In one virtual reality experiment, for example, focal locusts were placed in between two virtual swarms, one to their left and one to their right, both moving in the same direction. Classical models predict that under such circumstances, locusts should "go with the flow". However, the Konstanz team saw that locusts would turn to face one swarm, or the other, and move towards it.
Furthermore, the researchers found that group order is not simply a product of increasing density, as was previously thought. Alignment occurred in response to coherent visual cues, almost entirely independent of density. "It’s really about the quality of information, not the quantity", says Sercan Sayin. A reanalysis of a large number of previous laboratory experiments, which had argued for density-dependent transition to coherent motion, confirmed the Konstanz team’s findings, challenging previous assumptions about the behavioural mechanisms underlying swarming in locusts.
A new cognitive framework for collectives
In order to explain their results, it was necessary for the Konstanz team to rethink the approach of modeling collectives from the bottom up. "Locusts are not behaving like simple particles that align with one another", says Iain Couzin. "We realized that we need to model them as cognitive agents – processing their surroundings and making decisions about where to move next."
The research team developed a simple cognitive model, informed by the neurobiology of the neural circuits used by animals for spatial navigation, termed a "ring attractor" neural network. In this model, individuals have a simple neural representation of the bearing towards, but not the body orientation or direction of motion, of neighbours. Movement decisions emerge through a dynamic process in which neural representations compete or converge based on relative positioning, ultimately reaching a consensus that determines the direction of motion. "Our model is based on known neurobiological principles", explains Dr. Sayin, "and we found it can account for all of our key experimental findings".
The study, published in Science, represents nothing less than a paradigm shift in swarm research. By providing fundamental new insights into how locust behaviour results in devastating swarms, the Konstanz research may provide critical knowledge for improved locust control strategies, such as for effective modeling of swarm movement.
Moreover, the consequences of these findings will likely extend beyond locusts to broader applications in understanding the coordination of motion in other species, as well as robotics, artificial intelligence and the study of collective intelligence. Swarm robotics and autonomous vehicle coordination, for example, may benefit from algorithms inspired by locusts’ highly effective cognitive strategies for collective motion.
Key facts:
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Note to editors:
A video can be found here:
https://youtu.be/oBJnY4HKmeY
You can download photos here:
https://www.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/pi/fileserver/2025_extra/scientists_rewrite_1.jpeg
https://www.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/pi/fileserver/2025_extra/scientists_rewrite_2.jpeg
https://www.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/pi/fileserver/2025_extra/scientists_rewrite_3.jpg
Caption: Locust outbreak in East Africa
Copyright: Einat Couzin-Fuchs, Inga Petelski, Yannick Günzel, Felix B. Oberhauser
4. https://www.uni-konstanz.de/fileadmin/pi/fileserver/2025_extra/scientists_rewrite_4.jpg
Caption: Laboratory study with locust in the Imaging Hangar, University of Konstanz
Copyright: Christian Ziegler, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB)
Journal
Science
DOI
Studying locusts in virtual reality challenges models of collective behavior
Summary author: Walter Beckwith
A study of locusts navigating in a novel virtual reality (VR) environment challenges traditional models of collective swarming behavior, researchers report. The findings show that the insects don’t just follow their neighbors like self-propelled particles but instead rely on internal cognitive decision-making processes to navigate as a collective. Collective motion, a phenomenon found widely in nature, has traditionally been described using "self-propelled particle" theoretical models from physics. These “classical” models of collective behavior, like the highly influential Vicsek model, explain how basic local interactions, where individuals align and synchronize their movements with those of nearby members, can give rise to large-scale, coordinated motion within groups. Desert locust (Schistocerca gregaria) swarms, which can cover vast areas and contain billions of individuals, serve as a prominent example of collective motion in nature. Using a combination of field experiments and an innovative virtual reality (VR) system in which locust nymphs moved freely, interacting with virtual locusts, while immersed in a 3D virtual environment, Sercan Sayin and collogues show that classical models of collective behavior fail to explain the motion exhibited by swarming locusts. Sayin et al. found that locusts do not follow the fixed interaction rules assumed by traditional models, such as explicitly aligning with their moving neighbors when the density of the swarm increases. Instead, locusts behaved as if they were drawn toward other locusts – a behavior that aligns with a minimal cognitive model of spatiotemporal decision-making where an individual makes directional choices based on their own internal consensus. “Sayin et al. conclude that it is time to move beyond the conception of locusts and other organisms as moving particles behaving according to fixed spatiotemporal rules and to consider organisms as probabilistic decision-makers responding dynamically to their sensory environment,” write Camille Buhl and Stephen Simpson in a related Perspective.
Journal
Science
Article Title
The behavioral mechanisms governing collective motion in swarming locusts
Article Publication Date
28-Feb-2025