{"id":163174,"date":"2023-05-01T21:25:17","date_gmt":"2023-05-02T02:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/watch-thousands-of-worms-explosively-untangle-themselves-from-a-knotted-ball-in-milliseconds"},"modified":"2023-05-01T21:25:17","modified_gmt":"2023-05-02T02:25:17","slug":"watch-thousands-of-worms-explosively-untangle-themselves-from-a-knotted-ball-in-milliseconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/watch-thousands-of-worms-explosively-untangle-themselves-from-a-knotted-ball-in-milliseconds","title":{"rendered":"Watch thousands of worms \u2018explosively\u2019 untangle themselves from a knotted ball in milliseconds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/e-VXa_CrkyY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Worms can entangle themselves into a single, giant knot, only to quickly unravel themselves from the tightly wound mess within milliseconds. Now, math shows how they do it.<\/p>\n<p>Researchers studied California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) \u2014 thin worms that can grow to be 4 inches (10 centimeters) in length \u2014 in the lab, watching as the worms intertwined by the thousands. Even though it took the worms minutes to form into a ball-shaped blob akin to a snarled tangle of Christmas lights, they could untangle from the jumble in the blink of an eye when threatened, according to a study published April 28 in the journal Science (opens in new tab).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Worms can entangle themselves into a single, giant knot, only to quickly unravel themselves from the tightly wound mess within milliseconds. Now, math shows how they do it. Researchers studied California blackworms (Lumbriculus variegatus) \u2014 thin worms that can grow to be 4 inches (10 centimeters) in length \u2014 in the lab, watching as the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2229],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163174\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}