Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s three-part documentary about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He shows how, in our quest to understand the tiny atom, we unravelled the mystery of how the universe was created a story with dramatic twists and turns, taking in world changing discoveries like radioactivity, the atom bomb and the Big Bang, as the greatest brains of the 20th century competed to answer the biggest questions of all.
This documentary explores the highly controversial subject of the design of America’s capital. Was the city built to reflect the majesty of America’s new found freedom? Or the hidden agenda of secret societies? With every major cornerstone laid by Freemasons, was the city built in a Masonic pattern? Embark upon this incredible journey as Riddles in Stone interviews experts on both sides of the heated debate. Watch as Freemason apologists defend some of the most direct and hard-hitting questions concerning the influence of Masonry in America, and its symbolism in Washington, D.C.
Otzi the Iceman is the modern nickname of a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC, found in 1991 in a glacier of the Otztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy. The nickname comes from the valley of discovery. He rivals the Egyptian "Ginger” as the oldest known human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view on the habits of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans. Otzi was found by two German tourists, Helmut and Erika Simon, on September 19, 1991. The body was at first thought to be a modern corpse, like several others which had been recently found in the region. It was roughly recovered by the Austrian authorities and taken to Innsbruck, where its true age was finally discovered. Subsequent surveys showed that the body had been located a few meters inside Italian territory. It is now on display at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
The first ever footage of a person being cryonically frozen is to be broadcast in a Channel Five documentary that will follow a woman who is terminally ill with cancer before and after her death. "We’re really very proud of what we have achieved with this program – the human and emotional journey we captured with one contributor in particular, filming prior to her death and the subsequent process of her preservation, in conjunction with the amazing scientific and ethical questions raised by this subject, makes for one of our most challenging and fascinating productions to date.
Trek to the high-altitude summit of Denali Park's Mount McKinley, kayak through the hidden secrets of the Everglades, and face the wild extremes of life in Death Valley. With stunning cinematography, National Parks Collection travels off-road to reveal the real Yosemite and Yellowstone. It's an awe-inspiring collection you'll want to journey to again and again.
Go beyond the Oscar-winning drama "A Beautiful Mind” and learn more about the life of troubled mathematician and Nobel Prize-winner John Nash and his struggle with mental illness . A Brilliant Madness is the story of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by a descent into madness. At the age of 30, John Nash, a stunningly original and famously eccentric MIT mathematician, suddenly began claiming that aliens were communicating with him and that he was a special messenger.
Our sun is a fireball in the sky, a bubbling, boiling, kinetic sphere ofwhite hot plasma, exploding and erupting. Its size is almost unimaginable: one million Earths would fit within its boundaries. In this violence is born almost all the energy that makes existence on Earth possible. Yet its full mysteries are only now beginning to be understood. From sun spots to solar eclipses, solar flares to solar storms, the birth of the sun to its potential death, discover the science and history behind this celestial object that makes life on Earth possible.
An odyssey over three years in the making, Winged Migration certainly isan amazing experience to behold. Its most impressive and moving achievement is its ability to draw the viewer into an almost foreign world, traveling along with a myriad of bird species as they undertake their semiannual migrations over vast distances. Just as MicroCosmos placed the viewer into an ant-sized world where blades of grass loomed like skyscrapers, Winged Migration offers the world through birds’ eyes.
White lions are not a separate subspecies and they have never been common in the wild. Regarded as divine by locals, white lions first came to public attention in the 1970s in Chris McBride’s book The White Lions of Timbavati. The greatest population of white lions is in zoos where they are deliberately bred for color. The population of the white lion is unknown but the most recent count was in 2004 and 30 were alive. White lions are not albino lions. Instead, the white color is caused by a recessive gene known as chinchilla or color inhibitor. They vary from blonde through to near white, however some can also be red.
Planned Obsolescence is the deliberate shortening of product life spans to guarantee consumer demand. The Light Bulb Conspiracy combines investigative research and rare archive footage to trace the untold story of Planned Obsolescence, from its beginnings in the 1920s with a secret cartel, set up expressly to limit the life span of light bulbs, to present-day stories involving cutting edge electronics (such as the iPod) and the growing spirit of resistance amongst ordinary consumers.
