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Podcast: The Future of Everything
Episode: Nick Ouellette: What flocks of birds can tell us about engineering
Description: A civil engineer explains how new insights gleaned from the flight of birds may one day be applied to fields as far-ranging as autonomous cars and crowd control.
Anyone who has ever observed a large flock of starlings in flight – darting and swirling as if the entire flock were one big beautiful being – cannot help but marvel and wonder at how all those birds keep from crashing into one another.
Nick Ouellette is studying the in-flight behavior of birds to draw lessons he can apply to engineering. He says that birds are not alone in their tightly coordinated patterns of move...