I came across a couple of neat videos of emergent behavior that I thought might be interesting to discuss together. The first comes from a study of marathons and the dynamics of how the race starts. Typically marathons have large fields such that everyone cannot start running at once; the runners at the front begin, and the "start" moves backwards through the field in a sort of wave. If you've never run a marathon, you might be familiar with similar phenomena from other contexts, such as traffic on a freeway. I've … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Watching the Special Features