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A sense of awe - Murmurations spark curiosity and wonder, as well as a deep appreciation for something so massive in scale and so detailed in its design. One of its greatest human benefits is the feeling of awe.

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A mystery for many years - In the 1930s, many thought the birds used some kind of telepathy to communicate their flight intentions. Famed ornithologist Edmund Selous wrote, “They must think collectively, all at the same time.”

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Scientific thought progressed - In the 1950s, scientists studying collective animal behavior across other species did away with that telepathy theory and instead suggested that these animals just have an extremely fast response rate.

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That theory stuck - In a 2015 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it’s called the "rapid transmission of local behavioral response to neighbors," and it enables the flock of birds (and schools of fish, swarms of insects) that incredible synchronicity.

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There is no leader - While much of human behavior can be linked to top-down organization, murmurations are actually organized by the individual’s little behavior rules that, when combined, scale up to the large group.

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Observe the local to grasp the global - In order to understand the murmuration behavior, scientists had to start from the individual on the local scale to grasp the total outcome on the global scale.

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They can’t be aware of every other bird - In 2013, mechanical and aerospace engineer Naomi Leonard worked with Italian physicists and determined that it's impossible for one bird in a flock of 1,200 birds to keep track of the other 1,199, the real question is "Who is keeping track of whom?"

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Math enters - They used hundreds of photos and plotted the position and speed of birds as they flocked in order to build a mathematical model that could identify the optimal number of flock-mates each bird must track.

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The magic number? - Seven! Each bird apparently only keeps tabs on its seven closest neighbors, ignoring everyone else.

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The groups of seven are intermingled - All the little groups of seven touch on other individuals and groups of seven, linking them all in this greater mass, sending information about twists and turns through the group very quickly.

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Three things tying the individual birds - There’s surprisingly no large-scale coordination, but instead the individual birds are merely focused on three aspects of their flight and the flight of those around them. They are as follows...

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1. An attraction zone - This is the area in which the bird is expected to move toward the next bird.

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2. A repulsion zone - This is essentially another bird’s lane, which you don’t want to fly into or else you both go down.

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3. Angular alignment - This requires every bird to follow his neighbor’s direction.

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The three factors determine the murmuration shape - Depending on how those three factors are altered, you can get all kinds of shapes, from loose to dense, long to round, and so forth.

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A scare tactic? - Many scientists believe the murmuration’s purpose is to confuse and intimidate predators through the combination of their size, noise, and motion.

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Other reasons - There may also be communication in murmurations regarding where food sources are, and other researchers believe they could also just be a way for the birds to keep warm.

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Synchronized swooping - What’s most stunning is how these birds move in synchronization, changed by a few flaps of a bird’s wing.

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They move almost as one - Because they can take in and process information much faster than humans (called a higher temporal resolution, in science-speak), they can become something much larger together.

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Humans have learned from starlings -

In 1986, a computer scientist by the name of Craig Reynolds built computer models of birds flocking and fish schooling, calling it "Boids."

These programs actually provided the basis for more lifelike animation in movies, most notably first seen in the animated swarm of bats in Tim Burton’s 1992 ‘Batman Returns.’

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Applications to real life - Understanding the behavioral movements of large groups of starlings opens up a world of possibility, particularly in humans’ ability to program swarms of robots.

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Responsive robots - Though they sound a little intimidating, these robots can take the shape of telescopes. Las Cumbres Observatory, for example, has 22 robotic telescopes on seven sites around the world that can coordinate with each other to function as one big telescope. 

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Birds in flight help us look into the sky -

With several telescopes working as one, we can continually watch space phenomena unfold, increasing our learning capacity and speed.

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Swarm robotics - According to the Wyss Institute at Harvard, swarm robotics can revolutionize our approach for search and rescue missions, environmental remediation, and medical solutions.

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Military applications - Being able to program responsive robots can also be used for micro-drones.

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We could do away with traffic - Imagine a swarm of self-driving cars who are all programmed to respond to one another—there would be no accidents and you could greatly reduce traffic jams.

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Looking ahead - Cell-sized robots are well on their way, and if programmed correctly could fight things like cancer.

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Good to look outside of our own species - Humans are used to looking to complicated top-down decision-making processes to understand and shape a whole, but these murmurations challenge those processes with a simple bottom-up alternative.

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The bird to watch, even for non-birdwatchers -

It’s incredible what you can gain from watching the wondrous flocking of this simple bird.

See also: The most exotic birds on Earth

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