Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses. The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories. Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos. It may be that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected from the edge of the universe. Or that we exist in an infinity of parallel worlds. Your reality may never look quite the same again.

It is time to see if personalised dieting will work in normal life. The volunteers have been given one of three diets to follow - based on their genes, their hormones and their psychology. But now they are back at home, trying to stick to their personalised diets with all the stresses and temptations of real life. Dr Chris van Tulleken and Professor Tanya Byron discover how our genetic makeup can make temptation difficult to resist, how understanding the brain reveals what makes us comfort eat and what science can tell us about why we make disastrous food choices.

The story of how the secret of life has been examined through the prism of the most complex organism known - the human body. It begins with attempts to save the lives of gladiators in Ancient Rome, unfolds with the macabre work and near-perfect drawings of Leonardo in the Renaissance, through the idea of the 'life force' of electricity, to the microscopic world of the cell. It reveals how a moral crisis unleashed by work on the nuclear bomb helped trigger a great breakthrough in biology - understanding the structure and workings of DNA.

This series takes viewers on a journey to the frontiers of science, where researchers are tackling some of the biggest questions about life and the cosmos. The universe is hiding something. In fact, it is hiding a lot. Everything we experience on Earth, the stars and galaxies we see in the cosmos—all the 'normal' matter and energy that we understand—make up only 5% of the known universe. The other 95% is made up of two mysterious components: 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' We can’t see them, but we know they’re there. And what’s more —these two shadowy ingredients are locked in an epic battle to control the very fate of the universe.
Now, scientists are trying to shed light on the so-called 'dark sector' as the latest generation of detectors rev up, and powerful telescopes peer deeper into space than ever before to observe how it behaves. Will the discoveries help reveal how galaxies formed? In the series finale, Nova Wonders journeys to the stars and back to investigate what we know —and don’t know. Find out how scientists are discovering new secrets about the history of the universe, and why they’re predicting a shocking future.

In this episode, Michael demonstrates how our society is built on our search to find the answer to what makes up everything in the material world. This is a story that moves from the secret labs of the alchemists and their search for gold by the stone of the philosophers to the creation of the world's first synthetic dye - Purple - and onto the invention of the transistor. This quest may seem abstract and highly theoretical. Yet it has delivered the greatest impact on humanity. By trying to answer this question, scientists have created theories from elements to atoms, and the strange concepts of quantum physics that underpin our modern, technological world.

Time i s a concept which is so familiar, and yet recent discoveries have revealed it to be far stranger than we could have possibly imagined. In the final programme in the series, Brian explores the enigma of time - a phenomenon we take for granted but which is one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. He recalls highlights from his TV series that touch upon this conundrum.