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Scientists still have much to learn about how life materialised on earth, but the concept of emergence – complex systems developing from smaller, simpler parts – goes a long way towards demystifying it. To help better understand emergence, researchers at Harvard are programming small, simple ‘kilobots’ to simulate emergent patterns found in nature. Beyond revealing more about how order and intelligence can emerge from chaos, it’s possible that the kilobots could reveal shortcomings and inefficiencies in our own biology that we might someday be able to reprogramme.
Producer: Josh Cassidy
Website: Deep Look
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Animals and humans
Why be dragons? How massive, reptilian beasts entered our collective imagination
58 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
Flirtation, negotiation and vodka – or how to couple up in 1950s rural Poland
5 minutes
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Technology and the self
In the town once named Asbestos, locals ponder the voids industry left in its wake
16 minutes
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Biology
How the world’s richest reds are derived from an innocuous Mexican insect
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Cities
A lush, whirlwind tribute to the diversity of life in a northern English county
3 minutes
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Physics
The abyss at the edge of human understanding – a voyage into a black hole
4 minutes
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Film and visual culture
‘Bags here are rarely innocent’ – how filmmakers work around censorship in Iran
8 minutes
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Language and linguistics
Closed captions suck. Here’s one artist’s inventive project to make them better
8 minutes
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Thinkers and theories
A rare female scholar of the Roman Empire, Hypatia lived and died as a secular voice
5 minutes