'Bottom-heavy squirmers' adopt characteristic group behaviours

From starling aberrations to self-turbulent fluids, 'active systems' encompass a wide family of phenomena in which individual objects propel themselves forward, allowing them to display intriguing collective behaviors. On microscopic scales, they are found in groups of living organisms which move around by squirming, and are aligned with Earth's gravitational fields due to their bottom-heavy mass distributions. Through research published in EPJ E, Felix Rühle and Holger Stark at the Technical University of Berlin find that depending on their properties, these objects collectively spend most of their time in one of two states, between which some intriguing behaviors can emerge.

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