Some of my clearest memories growing up are the drives between Monterrey and Chihuahua, watching the desert open into fields on either side of the highway. Almost every trip, somewhere along that road, the sky would fill with birds. I'd press my forehead to the window and watch them bank left, then right, pouring into one shape and then another, thousands of them turning at the same instant like something had given them all the same order.

I didn't know it then, but I know it now. Those were starlings, and what they were doing has a name, a murmuration, one of the clearest examples in nature of what biologists call behavioral synchronization. For years, the assumption was that each bird simply copies its nearest neighbors, a chain reaction that should lose strength as it spreads. But when researchers finally tracked individual birds through a real turn, they found the opposite. The direction change moved through the flock undamped, arriving at the far edge almost as strong as when it started, the same physics used to describe superfluid helium.