Ants nev­er cease to amaze us. Over the years here, we’ve watched them cre­ate a liv­ing life raft in 100 sec­onds flat, build sur­pris­ing­ly com­plex ant colonies, and demon­strate an uncan­ny kind of cen­tral­ized intel­li­gence. Now let’s add to the list the ways in which they can col­lec­tive­ly act like a flu­id or a sol­id, depend­ing on the demands of a sit­u­a­tion.

These obser­va­tions were made by sci­en­tists at the Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, who record­ed the video above and pre­sent­ed it at a 2013 meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Phys­i­cal Soci­ety. Watch­ing the video, you can see ants wield­ing pow­ers that we’ve only oth­er­wise seen demon­strat­ed in sec­ond tier super­heroes (no offense to the Won­der Twins intend­ed). And yet, accord­ing to The New York Times, these remark­able pow­ers may have some prac­ti­cal impli­ca­tions, lead­ing sci­en­tists to devel­op self-assem­bling robots and self-heal­ing mate­ri­als. By watch­ing ants build and repair bridges for them­selves, we can imag­ine cre­at­ing bridges that auto­mat­i­cal­ly repair their own cracks here in the mate­r­i­al world.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

Watch The Amaz­ing 1912 Ani­ma­tion of Stop-Motion Pio­neer Ladis­las Stare­vich, Star­ring Dead Bugs

Can Ants Count? Do They Have Built-In Pedome­ters? Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

Albert Ein­stein is the patron saint of slack­ers redeemed. We’ve all heard some ver­sion of his late-bloomer sto­ry: “You know, Albert Ein­stein did ter­ri­bly in high school” (says every high school guid­ance coun­selor at some point). Most of us nor­mals like to see him this way—it bucks us up—even if he was any­thing but your aver­age low achiev­er. The above 2006 pro­file of Ein­stein by PBS’s “Amer­i­can Mas­ters” doc­u­men­tary series, Albert Ein­stein: How I See the World, takes the oppo­site tack, sur­round­ing him with the aura of a hero in a Her­mann Hesse nov­el. The film begins with William Hurt’s nar­ra­tion of Einstein’s solo trek through the Alps at twen­ty-two, dur­ing which he “longed to grasp the hid­den design, the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples of nature.” Over the intrigue con­jured by Michael Galasso’s haunt­ing, min­i­mal­ist score and a mon­tage of black-and-white nature films, nar­ra­tor Hurt intones:

Every once in a while there comes a man who is able to see the uni­verse in a total­ly new way, whose vision upsets the very foun­da­tions of the world as we know it. Through­out his life, Albert Ein­stein would look for this har­mo­ny, not only in his sci­ence, but in the world of men. The world want­ed to know Albert Ein­stein, yet he remained a mys­tery to those who only saw his pub­lic face and per­haps to him­self as well. “What does a fish know of the water in which he swims?” he asked him­self.

After this sen­ten­tious begin­ning, with its strange­ly out­dat­ed pro­noun use, Hurt tells us that those who knew Ein­stein best saw a lit­tle of him, and the film goes on to doc­u­ment those impres­sions in inter­views: col­league Abra­ham Pais com­ments on Einstein’s love of Jew­ish humor (and that his laugh­ter sound­ed like “the bark of a con­tent­ed seal”). Han­na Loewy, a fam­i­ly friend, describes his abil­i­ty to look at “many, many dimen­sions, whether they be proven or not,” and to see the whole. Inter­cut between these state­ments is archival footage of Ein­stein him­self and com­men­tary from Hurt, some of it ques­tion­able (for exam­ple, the idea that Ein­stein was a “sci­en­tist who believed in God” is ten­den­tious, at best, but a sub­ject best left for the end­less bick­er­ing of YouTube com­menters).

It’s a bit of an Olympian treat­ment, fit­ting to the sub­ject in some respects. But in anoth­er sense, the doc­u­men­tary per­forms the func­tion of a hagiog­ra­phy, a genre well-suit­ed for encomi­um and rev­er­ence, but not for “get­ting to know” its sub­ject per­son­al­ly. The film places a great deal of empha­sis, right­ly per­haps, on Einstein’s pub­lic per­sona: his vocal pacifism—in which he joined with Mahat­ma Gandhi—and state­ments against Ger­man mil­i­tarism, even as the ris­ing fas­cist order dis­missed his work and denounced the man.

But while Albert Ein­stein: How I See the World pro­vides a com­pelling por­trait and offers a wealth of his­tor­i­cal con­text for under­stand­ing Einstein’s world, it leaves out the voic­es of those who per­haps knew him best: his chil­dren, wife Elsa, or his first wife, Mil­e­va. (Their divorce gets a brief men­tion at 15:20, along with his sub­se­quent mar­riage to first cousin Elsa.) Einstein’s trou­bled per­son­al life, revealed through pri­vate cor­re­spon­dence like an angry post-divorce let­ter to Mil­e­va and an appalling list of demands writ­ten to her dur­ing the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of their mar­riage, has received more scruti­ny of late. These per­son­al details have per­haps prompt­ed PBS to reeval­u­ate Mil­e­va’s influ­ence; rather than “lit­tle more than a foot­note” in his biog­ra­phy, Mil­e­va may have played a role in his suc­cess for which she nev­er received cred­it, giv­ing Hurt’s gen­dered nar­ra­tion some­thing of a bit­ter per­son­al twist.

None of this is to say that a doc­u­men­tary treat­ment of any pub­lic fig­ure needs to dredge the fam­i­ly secrets and dis­play the dirty laun­dry, but as far as learn­ing how Ein­stein, or any­one else of his stature, saw the world, the per­son­al seems to me as rel­e­vant as the pro­fes­sion­al. PBS’s doc­u­men­tary is very well-made, how­ev­er, and worth watch­ing for its pro­duc­tion val­ues, inter­views with Einstein’s friends and col­leagues, and archival news­reel footage, even if it some­times fails to tru­ly illu­mi­nate its sub­ject. But as Hurt’s nar­ra­tion dis­claims at the out­set, maybe Ein­stein was a mys­tery, even to him­self.

The film will be added to the Doc­u­men­tary sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

You can find free cours­es on Ein­stein’s work in the Physics sec­tion of our col­lec­tion of 550 Free Online Cours­es.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.