Science. In Search of Myths and Heroes. Watch the four myths that inspired Michael Wood to embark on his journey: The Queen of Sheba, the earthly paradise of Shangri-La, King Arthur and Jason and the Argonauts. Myths are more than mere stories and they serve a much more profound purpose in ancient and modern cultures.
Myths are sacred tales that explain the world and man's experience. They instruct, inspire, console, and warn. They embody the wisdom of a culture and serve to pass that wisdom to the next generation. The Queen of Sheba. The story of the Queen of Sheba appears in religious texts sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Described in the Bible as simply a Queen of the East, modern scholars believe she came from the Kingdom of Axum in Ethiopia, the Kingdom of Saba in Yemen, or both. Shangri-La. King Arthur.
Jason and The Golden Fleece. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - ) What Happened Before the Beginning? Every cosmologist and astronomer agrees: our Universe is 13.7 billion years old. Using cutting-edge technology, scientists are now able to take a snapshot of the Universe a mere heartbeat after its birth. Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself - if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.
The big bang theory holds that the entire universe was once packed tightly into an unimaginably dense and tiny space, known as a "singularity. " But what brought about that big bang? Successfully answering the question of what existed before the big bang would require bridging the gap between the so-far mutually incompatible worlds of relativism and quantum mechanics.
SECURITY ENGINEER - SilverSky. Monsters We Met. The first humans left their African homeland 100,000 years ago and began an epic journey that was to end with mankind dominating the globe. On their voyages they encountered monster-like creatures and perilous lands that would test their powers of survival to the very limit. In this series we journey with them into an unknown world where no man had set foot before. Each film is a dramatic reconstruction of personal stories of our ancestors’ struggle for survival in a primeval wilderness dominated by formidable predators. A world where man was both hunter and hunted. While the world was still in the grip of the last ice age, humans first crossed Siberia and entered the New World. They encountered creatures familiar to them from their travels, such as the woolly mammoth and the steppe bison, but also a whole host of new marvels. Humans travelled out of Africa and reached South-east Asia perhaps as early as 90,000 years ago.
Watch the full documentary now (playlist - 2 hours, 35 minutes) Birth of the Earth. Our Earth was spinning very fast when it was spit out of the Sun as a molten glob four and one half billion years ago in the initial explosion. Venus was spinning in an opposite direction when it was spit out and is still doing the same. The Earth settled down in a very fortunate orbit for the existence of life. At 93 million miles distance from the Sun it receives just about the right amount of radiant energy. Its spinning has gradually slowed down over these billion of years and is now settled into a comfortable 24 hour rotation at the present time. It will be millions of years in the future before it slows to a complete halt as our less massive moon has already. In the days of the dinosaurs when the Earth was spinning faster, the days/night cycles were shorter. Going back a couple of billion years further, at one time the Earth was spinning so fast that it may have had a ring around it, similar to Saturn.
Watch the full documentary now. The Monkey-Eating Eagle of the Orinoco. The Human Family Tree. Secrets of The Mind. In Secrets of the Mind we gain insights through various tragedies that have affected others, thanks to the logic and insights of Professor Ramachandran regarding what he calls the most complex organized matter in the universe.
The documentary begins with "phantom limb syndrome" - pain and sensation in missing body areas. Ramachandran's reasoning, confirmed through a CAT-scan, is that the brain has a map of various body areas, and that eg. the right arm and right face areas of the brain are adjacent. Thus, missing body areas can lead to interference by those associated brain areas trying to cope with stimulus deprivation - eg. "cross-wiring. " However, we are still left with the problem of treating pain in a body-part that no longer exists. Dr. Visual activities take up almost half the human brain. Dr. Watch the full documentary now - Violent Universe. Take a breathtaking journey into the future, five billion years from now, to see the ultimate fate of the Solar System.
This gem from HubbleCast showcases stunning Hubble imagery of the death throes of Sun-like stars. The wreckage of these dying stars form the building blocks of new generations of stars. The Galactic Center harbors the closest supermassive black hole known, and the one that is also the largest in terms of its angular diameter on the sky, making it the best choice for a detailed study of black holes. Today, energy is very much on our minds, as we search for ways to power our civilization and serve the needs of our citizens. But what is energy? Where does it come from? And where do we stand within the great power streams that shape time and space?
EsoCast showcases a new Hubble image of a giant cloud of hydrogen gas illuminated by a bright young star. In the plane of our galaxy, GRS 1915 is a star with a black hole bound together by gravity. What Is Reality? Secrets of the Parthenon. A highly sophisticated restoration team is painstakingly reassembling the Parthenon of Athens—a classic Greek building that has suffered from wars, earthquakes, and disastrous previous restoration attempts.
The Parthenon's builders created dauntingly precise yet subtle curves throughout the structure, giving the building its legendary grace. Etched in the marble itself, the restoration team discovers traces made by the ingenious tools the stonemasons used to carve the blocks with such speed and precision. Experts examine the extent to which the Parthenon's symmetry and visual harmony is dependent on a system of mathematical proportions. Two hundred miles from Athens, faint lines left behind on another Greek temple reveal the technique the early engineers used to sculpt the Parthenon's perfect curves. (Excerpt from pbs.org) Watch the full documentary now. What The Ancients Did For Us: The Indians. India is one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world.
It is home to the world's first planned cities, where every house had its own bathroom and toilet five thousand years ago. The Ancient Indians have not only given us yoga, meditation and complementary medicines, but they have furthered our knowledge of science, maths - and invented Chaturanga, which became the game of chess. According to Albert Einstein, they "taught us how to count", as they invented the numbers 1-9 and 'zero', without which there would be no computers or digital age. Unfairly we call this system of counting Arabic numbers - a misplaced credit. Two thousand years ago the Indians pioneered plastic surgery, reconstructing the noses and ears on the faces of people who had been disfigured through punishment or warfare.
They performed eye operations such as cataract removal and invented inoculation to protect their population from Smallpox, saving thousands of lives. Watch the full documentary now. Break the Science Barrier. Quants: The Alchemists of Wall Street. The Day The Earth Nearly Died. 250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the lifeforms on the planet would be wiped out, in the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever known.
What natural disaster could kill on such a massive scale? It is only in recent years that evidence has begun to emerge from rocks in Antarctica, Siberia and Greenland. The demise of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago (at the so-called K/T boundary), was as nothing compared to the Permian mass extinction. The K/T event killed off 60% of life on Earth; the Permian event 95%. Geological data to explain the destruction have been hard to find, simply because the rocks are so old and therefore subject to all kinds of erosion processes. In the early 1990s, the hunt for evidence headed for a region of Siberia known as the Traps. Watch the full documentary now. HOME.
Do You Know What Time It Is? Particle physicist Professor Brian Cox asks, 'What time is it? ' It's a simple question and it sounds like it has a simple answer. But do we really know what it is that we're asking? Brian visits the ancient Mayan pyramids in Mexico where the Maya built temples to time. He finds out that a day is never 24 hours and meets Earth's very own Director of Time. He journeys to the beginning of time, and goes beyond within the realms of string theory, and explores the very limit of time. He discovers that we not only travel through time at the speed of light, but the experience we feel as the passing of time could be an illusion. This documentary is available for preview only - . Known Universe: The Fastest. What is the Higgs Boson?
Scientists behind Sixty Symbols (Ed Copeland, Roger Bowley and Tony Padilla from the University of Nottingham) are doing their best to answer what actually is the Higgs Boson. Named after Peter Higgs, an Edinburgh University physicist, the Higgs boson is crucial to understanding the origin of mass. The Higgs boson is a hypothetical elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. It belongs to a class of particles known as bosons, characterized by an integer value of their spin quantum number. The Higgs field is a quantum field with a non-zero value that fills all of space, and explains why fundamental particles such as quarks and electrons have mass. The Higgs boson is an excitation of the Higgs field above its ground state.
Experiments to determine whether the Higgs boson exists are currently being performed using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. Watch the full documentary now. Learning to Think Critically. From the author: Despite great strides in our understanding, the average person still does not understand science in the facts or in the practice, and instead fills the void with pseudoscience. This reflects a worldview that values an emphasis on commonly accepted, traditional lore, and a general disinterest in the role of science and reason in our lives.
Science is perceived by the media, government, and popular conciousness as something that happens to other people. This is unacceptable. We need to find a way to reach out with reason to the unreasonable, with knowledge to the ignorant, or else we will be unprepared when the moment of crisis finally arrives. There has never been a more important time to value and respect science, technology and reason. Those who value science can not retreat into their academic towers. I have a message and a challenge to all viewers. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - 2 hours, 18 minutes) Reality and the Extended Mind. Extinctions. More than 90 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. As new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500 million years, 50 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a geological blink of the eye.
Though these mass extinctions are deadly events, they open up the planet for new life-forms to emerge. The most studied mass extinction, between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods about 65 million years ago, killed off the dinosaurs and made room for mammals to rapidly diversify and evolve. The causes of these mass extinction events are unsolved mysteries, though volcanic eruptions and the impacts of large asteroids or comets are prime suspects in many of the cases.
Starved of sunlight, plants and plant-eating creatures would quickly die. The Chemistry of Almost Everything. Chemistry is involved in everything and is everywhere. This series explains how some of the processes work. Professor Steven Ley from Cambridge University discusses the development of a molecule in his research lab. He describes a compound so strong that just a tablespoon full would cover an area the size of two football pitches. We find out about the oil from Neem trees in India and the medical benefits it has. A slum district in Delhi that recycles equipment so it can be re-used for teaching chemistry. How carbon plays a central role in the chemistry of creation. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - 2 hours) Seven Wonders of the Microbe World. This little documentary is talking about Microbes and why some are good, some are bad and what they have done for mankind. Microbes have given us some devastating diseases, everything from the Black Death to cholera, syphilis, typhoid and the occasional yeast infection.
But our microbial friends have also done us some good. The video investigates: The origins of beer and brewing in Ancient Egypt, and the role microbes play in the process. Microbial origins of the Black Death. How do microbes destroy the food that we eat and how has humankind sought out different ways of preserving foodstuffs? How critical microbes are to life on Earth with their role in nitrogen fixation - providing the essential elements that we need to survive. Experts reveal how the natural processes of microbes are used to fight disease. The ways in which humans are learning to exploit microbes to produce medicines, fuel and food.
Watch the full documentary now. What Darwin Never Knew. Hyperspace. Can You Hack It? – Hackers Wanted. Cosmic Voyage. Einstein’s Unfinished Symphony. Cosmic Journeys. Richard Feynman: The Character of Physical Law. Strange Days on Planet Earth.