Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Army ants have tiny brains and are nearly blind, yet they routinely perform extraordinary feats of engineering, building bridges with their bodies to span gaps that they need to cross. In this video from the Swarm Lab of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recorded in the field in a tropical forest in Panama, researchers pulled apart one of these bridges to study how army ants recover from such a rupture. One conclusion is that, although individual ants are incapable of understanding the movement of their colony as a whole, they have evolved a behavioural code that tells them to stop in their tracks if another ant is walking on top of them, a strategy that allows them to rebuild quickly. There are, however, some more complex army ant-bridge manoeuvres that researchers are still attempting to explain, such as when ants will construct a shortcut bridge rather than taking a longer route. Capturing this phenomenon close-up, this short video observes the surprising capabilities of collective intelligence to solve complex logistical problems.
Video by Helen McCreery, Simon Garnier, Radhika Nagpal, Mike Rubenstein, Melinda Malley, NJIT, Harvard University
Editor: Adam D’Arpino
video
Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Biology
Beetles take flight at 6,000 frames per second in this perspective-shifting short
9 minutes
video
War and peace
A war meteorologist’s riveting account of how the Allies averted a D-Day disaster
6 minutes
video
Physics
What does it look like to hunt for dark matter? Scenes from one frontier in the search
7 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes