Plants compute!

New research shows that the leaves of plants adjust their "breathing" based on making problem-solving calculations.

It's the same form of maths that is widely thought to regulate how ants forage. The signals that each ant sends out to other ants, by laying down chemical trails for example, enable the ant community as a whole to find the most abundant food sources.

This might not sound much like what a computer does, but it is. In distributed computation, signals exchanged between components of the system define the process for solving a problem. Researchers are now exploring the possibility of using distributed computing with swarms of simple robots to carry out tasks, such as searching a landscape, more efficiently than a single, more sophisticated robot could manage.