Movement is a central aspect of almost every animal’s survival, whether it relates to local exploration or global migration. Even more sophisticated behaviors, such as the collective interactions for which many types of ants are famous, are built upon the motion of the individual. As such, understanding this individual behavior is integral to piecing together the life and ecology of an animal. By recording how individual ants explore a laboratory environment, researchers have come up with a model for how these ants navigate based on stochastic physics. As one of the most rigorous descriptions of ant exploration behavior to date, this model allows researchers to explore how these ants might behave in new environments, and highlights how physics-based tools and models can be used to quantify and understand living systems.

Large language models power today's AI applications, but generating responses quickly and efficiently remains a significant challenge. In a new study, researchers from Japan developed UniSpec, a training-free framework that speeds up LLM inference without retraining or altering model outputs. The team also introduced Multi-SpecBench, the first multilingual benchmark of its kind, demonstrating up to 2.6× faster inference across multiple LLM architectures, GPU platforms, and seven languages while producing outputs identical to standard autoregressive decoding. 

The analytical results reveal a clear transition between a regime governed by the snow slab that detaches and another governed by the weak layer, or its interface, along which the fracture propagates. In the presence of a stiffer weak layer or interface, the crack may 'feel' a local stiffness greater than the global one, and therefore appear to propagate at a globally supersonic speed while remaining locally subsonic. This finding at least partially reconciles the different interpretations reported in the avalanche literature and is based on a characteristic energy length previously introduced to explain the two propagation regimes that had already emerged from numerical studies.