Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
Caddisflies are popular on the fly-fishing scene, where anglers do their best to emulate the stream-scavenging creatures in their mature form. But like most aquatic insects, caddisflies actually spend the vast majority of their lives underwater in their larval stage, where they cling on for dear life against ceaseless stream currents. Mercifully for these minuscule creatures, they’re hatched into the world with something of a superpower for surviving the tough terrain: a versatile silk, dispensed from glands under their chin. Natural-born builders, the larvae deploy the sticky substance to fashion cases for themselves out of small pebbles that guard them against careening objects, and provide camouflage and protection against predators. This entry in the science-documentary series Deep Look takes a quick dive into the lives of these impressive improvisational engineers, including how their waterproof adhesive has inspired bioengineers hoping to create less-intrusive internal stitches for the human body. Read more about the video at KQED Science.
Video by KQED Science
Producer: Elliott Kennerson
Narrator and Writer: Amy Standen
Cinematographer: Josh Cassidy
video
Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
3 minutes
video
Metaphysics
Bertrand Russell wanted to kill off causation. Can contemporary philosophy rescue it?
8 minutes
video
History of science
Bat-people on the Moon – what a famed 1835 hoax reveals about misinformation today
8 minutes
video
Biotechnology
What it’s like to wear a prosthetic that ‘feels’
6 minutes
video
Chemistry
A square inch in a Petri dish becomes a grand stage for chemical transformations
4 minutes
video
Medicine
What is it like to be a paramedic, navigating human emergency?
17 minutes
video
Physics
The tangled tale of how physicists built a groundbreaking wormhole in a lab
17 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination
5 minutes
video
Social psychology
Social contagions can cause genuine illness, and TikTok may be a superspreader
10 minutes