Raw video: Kingston Police Department in North Carolina share footage of thousands of insects bunched together to create raft on top of post-Hurricane Florence floodwaters to protect queen. Aside from the stings and ruined picnics, fire ants are famous for their ability to swarm together and self –assemble bridges, ladders, and even floating rafts. Researchers have now figured out the statistical rules that govern how fire ants form these structures, and the new study could help scientists build swarming, tiny shape-shifting robots. A team from the University of Colorado at Boulder wanted to learn how the self–made rafts, bridges, and ladders– which can take hundreds to thousands of fire ants to form– can change shape in a matter of seconds and maintain a rubber-like flexibility. "Fire ants are a great subject of study because they display collective intelligence and they're also macroscopic, which makes them relatively easy to observe and study," lead study author Franck Vernerey told Fox News.

Conventional pharmaceuticals aren't always the best way to treat an ailment. Drugs are often imprecise, unpredictable, or come along with tricky side effects. Medicine is always trying to move on to more targeted treatments. And soon, robots will be one of those options: small and mobile, they could theoretically deliver pharmaceuticals right where they're needed, tear through tumors, or rebuild broken bits of your body. Of course, these kinds of treatments are decades away--which might not be a problem, depending on how you feel about maggots.