Word: sheltering
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...Tower of London. It helps that Eden is visually stunning. Visitors descend into the former clay hole, now landscaped and studded with native vegetation, to arrive at the main attraction: two honeycombed domes, shaped like grapefruit halves, bubbling up from the base. These are the biomes, giant greenhouses that shelter the flora and mimic the climate of tropical rainforests and Mediterranean farms. Enter the humid and heated rainforest biome on a drizzly Cornish day, and you'll soon break a sweat worthy of Singapore...
...observe ordinary roach behavior, Halloy and his colleagues created an enclosure with two "shelters" inside - red-tinted plastic disks mounted so that roaches could scurry underneath to avoid bright light, which they do instinctively. When the insects were dumped into the enclosure, they scrambled around randomly for a while, but eventually all huddled under the same shelter. That they huddled is no surprise, since roaches like to gather in crowds. But since cockroaches don't have enough intelligence to allow for leadership skills or even communication, the fact that they collectively decide on one shelter looks, says Halloy, "like...
Veteran roach-watchers have a more mundane explanation. Cockroaches, they hypothesize, use just two pieces of information to decide where to go: how dark it is and how many of their friends are there. At first, the roaches will wander arbitrarily into one shelter or the other - but at some point, enough of them will end up under one shelter to reach a critical mass, which then becomes more attractive to the others...
...Again, all the roaches scurried around randomly for a while, but the robots eventually settled under the lighter, less shadowy disk - and the real cockroaches followed. Which means that the hypothesis - that a group of individual bugs, each with just two cognitive "rules," can make a collective decision about shelter - appears to be correct...
Brabeck was born in Villach, Austria, six months before the end of World War II. His mother Edeltraud Brabeck recalls rushing with her infant son to an air-raid shelter to avoid Allied bombs. In the tough economic times after the war's end, the surrounding Alps became Brabeck's playground. By age 10, he was climbing with ropes. As a teenager, he took off for hiking trips with his friend Hans Thomassen, with little more than a tarp and his mother's sandwiches. She recalls that "he was always an adventurer, just like his father"--a salesman...