Last Watched

Science

Sort by

The Great European Disaster Movie

   2015    Science
Annalisa Piras and former editor of The Economist Bill Emmott, which explores the crisis facing Europe. Through case studies of citizens in different countries, the film explores a range of factors that have led to the present crisis, economic and identity challenges across Europe. High-level experts analyse how and why things are going so wrong. The film includes fictional scenes, set in a post-EU future, which feature archaeologist Charles Granda (played by Angus Deayton) travelling on a flight through a menacing storm, explaining to a child passenger what the EU was. Sombre, thought-provoking and witty, the film frames Europe through the eyes of those who have most at stake - the Europeans themselves.

The Great Levelling

   2010    Technology
Twenty years on from the invention of the world wide web, this major new series takes stock of its profound impact – how, for better and for worse, the digital revolution is reshaping our lives. Dr Aleks Krotoski explores the meaning of a phenomenon that is transforming everything, from how we learn to how we shop, vote and make friends. With a quarter of the planet connected so far, this series examines what is in store for the remaining 75 per cent of the world's population as they come online." In the first part series, Aleks charts the extraordinary rise of blogs, Wikipedia and YouTube, and traces an ongoing clash between the freedom the technology offers us, and our innate human desire to control and profit. Dr Aleks Krotoski looks at how it is reshaping almost every aspect of our lives. Joined by some of the web's biggest names - including the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, and the web's inventor - she explores how far the web has lived up to its early promise.
Series: The Virtual Revolution

The Great Math Mystery

   2015    Science
Go with us on a mathematical mystery tour, a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy, and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power?" Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers, follow math from Pythagoras to Einstein and beyond, all leading to the ultimate riddle: Is math an invention or a discovery? Humankind's clever trick, or the language of the universe? Whether we think we're good with numbers or not, we all use math in our daily lives. The Great Math Mystery sheds fascinating light on how math works in our brains and ponders the ultimate mystery of why it works so well when decoding the universe.

The Great Survivors

   2011    Science
The final episode explores dinosaurs' extraordinary ability to survive. Featured dinosaurs include the bizarre magyarosaurus, which lived in the shadow of the biggest flying animal - hatzegopteryx - and showed an amazing adaptation to island life; and the weird nothronychus, a carnivore that gave up meat eating. This astonishing capacity to evolve into ever more diverse and bizarre forms meant that dinosaurs not only spread throughout the world, but also dominated life upon it for more than 160 million years. It was only an unprecedented extraterrestrial event that finally saw the end of planet dinosaur.
Series: Planet Dinosaur

The Hacker Wars

   2014    Technology
Ripped from international headlines, The Hacker Wars takes you to the front lines of the high-stakes battle over the fate of the Internet, freedom and privacy". Get ready to be shuttled between story lines at lightning speed mirroring the disjointed lives of the protagonists and life on the Internet. The Hacker Wars- a film about the targeting of (h)ac(k)tivists and journalists by the US government. Hacktivists are either terrorists or freedom fighters depending on ones perspective on who should control information. Meet weev, infamous hacker; Barrett Brown, journalist and propagandist for the hacktivist collective, Anonymous; and Jeremy Hammond, aka Anarchaos, number one on the FBI's cyber-criminal list. The fourth character is Sabu, the uber-hacker turned FBI informant who ran the FBI's cyber unit for 9 months and is responsible for many arrests. He is the shadowy protagonist in a high-stakes game of espionage and betrayal in the age of the Internet. Barrett Brown, American journalist, is facing 105 years in prison for publicizing information revealed through Jeremy Hammond's epic hacks. Hammond himself has just begun a 10-year prison term. Andrew Auernheimer, known by his hacker handle weev embarrasses large corporations. He was sentenced to 41 months for hacking AT&T, but his conviction was just overturned. He vows to continue doing what landed him in prison in the first place. These hacktivists are the rock stars of the Internetmodern-day folk heroes. Glenn Greenwald (Snowdon Leaks), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and others explain why these anti-heroes exposing the security surveillance state are essential to a functioning democracy.

The Hawking Paradox

   2005    Science
Stephen Hawking is the most famous scientist on the planet. But behind the public face lies an argument that has been raging for almost 30 years. Has he been wrong for the last 30 years? Hawking shot to fame in the world of physics when he provided a mathematical proof for the Big Bang theory. This theory showed that the entire universe exploded from a singularity, an infinitely small point with infinite density and infinite gravity. Hawking was able to come to his proof using mathematical techniques that had been developed by Roger Penrose. These techniques were however developed to deal not with the beginning of the Universe but with black holes". Science had long predicted that if a sufficiently large star collapsed at the end of its life, all the matter left in the star would be crushed into an infinitely small point with infinite gravity and infinite density – a singularity. Hawking realised that the Universe was, in effect, a black hole in reverse. Instead of matter being crushed into a singularity, the Universe began when a singularity expanded to form everything we see around us today, from stars to planets to people. Hawking realised that to come to a complete understanding of the Universe he would have to unravel the mysteries of the black hole and its paradoxes
Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci

2024  History
Life

Life

2009  Nature
Worst Ex Ever

Worst Ex Ever

2024  Culture
Cursed Films

Cursed Films

2020  Art
Chimp Empire

Chimp Empire

2023  Nature
How to Grow a Planet

How to Grow a Planet

2012  Science
Planet Earth

Planet Earth

2007  Nature