Contact: Sevda Eris, seris@kqed.org, 415.553.2835
Deep Look, KQED’s YouTube series exploring big scientific mysteries by revealing the unseen at the edge of our visible world, is back with new releases this week on the PBS Digital Studios channel. To illuminate rarely seen wonders, all of Deep Look’s videos are shot in ultra-HD using macro cinematography and microscope video. Deep Look will roll out two new videos per month through March 2016, taking viewers from the forest floor to the depths of the ocean.
The latest video, Where Are the Ants Carrying All Those Leaves?, takes you deep inside the nests of leafcutter ants, some of the world’s oldest farmers, which use leaves to grow white tufts of nutritious fungus to feed their offspring. Their success as farmers has made leafcutter ants into fungus tycoons, and Deep Look’s video shows their hidden world up-close, complete with underground cities and huge half-inch soldiers to patrol them.
Other topics in the new collection include the following:
- “Resurrection plants,” which can spring back to life with the rain after decades of lying dormant without a drop of water
- Kilobots, tiny self-organizing robots inspired by the behavior of swarming insects and flocking birds
- 500-year-old coral samples being studied by climate scientists
- Ampullae of Lorenzini, the electroreceptors in sharks and rays
- Chameleon skin and a look at color-changing technology.
Deep Look is produced by KQED’s award-winning science team and is presented in collaboration with PBS Digital Studios. Deep Look launched its first video collection of 12 videos in October 2014 exploring wide-ranging topics from the pygmy seahorse’s amazing act of camouflage to the hummingbird’s slow-motion aerial acrobatics in a wind tunnel. Deep Look’s YouTube channel now has more than 10,000 subscribers and more than 1 million views. The entire short-video collection with accompanying articles can be accessed at KQED.org/deeplook.