In just over 100 days, a new coronavirus has taken an unprepared world by storm, infiltrating every corner of the globe, sending entire nations into lockdown, killing thousands and infecting countless more. Across the world, governments are scrambling to react, hospitals are struggling to cope and an increasingly anxious public are starting to panic. The world's media is awash with data, information and misinformation. But what are the facts? What is COVID-19 and why is this strain of coronavirus so dangerous? What happens in our bodies when the virus attacks? How does this compare to previous pandemics? What do all the the numbers really mean, and how can data modelling help us look for an exit strategy? This programme investigates the scientific facts and figures behind the biggest public health crisis in living memory, and explores the latest research from the frontline of the medical and scientific fightback.
Dr Chris van Tulleken, Dr Hannah Fry and Michael Mosley examine the latest research and explore some of the big questions about Covid-19 and the pandemic it has created. Michael visits the UK government's high-security laboratory Porton Down, where vaccines are being tested. He also uncovers what the experience of the 2002 SARs epidemic reveals about this one. Both were caused by coronaviruses, but certain key changes to today's virus have allowed it to infect the world, where SARs was contained.
The archaeological world is fooled for nearly half a century when an ape-like skull that's claimed as solid evidence for Darwin's theory of human evolution is proven fake. Using new research, experts investigate and uncover the identity of the forger. Locked away in a store room at London Science Museum is a genuine 19th century miracle machine, a 180-year-old mechanical engine that solves complex mathematical equations, more than 100 years before the first electronic computer.
They're the cooling corpses of stars like our sun, but new research proves white dwarfs are one of the driving forces of our universe. And they can tell us literally about the nature of the cosmos itself. Have scientists finally discovered how these small stars could be such massive galactic players?
A featured documentary that explores the rise of a new Internet. Decentralized, encrypted, dangerous and beyond the law. The Deep Web, also called the Deep Net, Invisible Web, or Hidden Web is the part of the World Wide Web not indexed by search engines. The deep web was several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web. The majority of the information is hidden or locked inside databases and is growing exponentially at a rate that cannot be quantified. In 2008, to facilitate users of Tor hidden services in their access and search of a hidden .onion suffix, Aaron Swartz designed Tor2web, a proxy application able to provide access by means of common web browsers. Using this application, deep web links appear as a random string of letters followed by the .onion TLD.
Around 30% of the land's surface is desert, the most varied of our ecosystems despite the lack of rain. Unravel the secrets of desert survival and experience the ephemeral nature of this dynamic environment. Watch Saharan sandstorms nearly a mile high and desert rivers that run for a single day. In the Gobi Desert, rare Bactrian camels get moisture from the snow. In the Atacama, guanacos survive by licking dew off cactus spines. In the USA, the brief blooming of Death Valley triggers a plague of locusts 65km wide and 160km long. A unique aerial voyage over the Namibian desert reveals elephants on a long trek for food and desert lions searching for wandering oryx.
The world's media is awash with data, information and misinformation. But what are the facts? What is COVID-19 and why is this strain of coronavirus so dangerous? What happens in our bodies when the virus attacks? How does this compare to previous pandemics? What do all the the numbers really mean, and how can data modelling help us look for an exit strategy? This programme investigates the scientific facts and figures behind the biggest public health crisis in living memory, and explores the latest research from the frontline of the medical and scientific fightback.