After much trial and error, they landed on an unexpected solution: ultrasound. After seeing Tuazon’s videos, the two theorists, who specialize in knots and topology, were eager to join.īhamla and Tuazon set about finding an imaging technique that would allow them to peer inside the worm blob so they could gather more data. Tuazon, a co-first author of the study, collected videos of his experiments with the worms, including macro videos of the worms' collective dispersal mechanism and microscopic videos of one, two, three and several worms that capture their movements.īhamla and Tuazon approached mathematicians Jörn Dunkel of MIT and Vishal Patil of Stanford University about a collaboration. The study also highlights how cross-disciplinary collaboration can answer some of the most perplexing questions in disparate fields.įascinated by the science of ultrafast movement and collective behavior, Bhamla and Harry Tuazon have studied California blackworms for years, observing how they use collective movement to form blobs and then disperse. Their research, published in Science, could influence the design of fiberlike, shape-shifting robotics that self-assemble and move in ways that are fast and reversible. To investigate, Bhamla and a team of researchers at Georgia Tech linked up with mathematicians at MIT. Saad Bhamla wanted to understand precisely how the blackworms execute their tangling and untangling movements. But, most striking of all, while the worms tangle over a period of several minutes, they can untangle in mere milliseconds, escaping at the first sign of a threat from a predator. Tiny California blackworms intricately tangle themselves by the thousands to form ball-shaped blobs that allow them to execute a wide range of biological functions.
But there are organisms that are better at tying knots and far superior - and faster - at untangling them. For millennia, humans have used knots for all kinds of reasons - to tie rope, braid hair or weave fabrics.
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