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Aviation

   2020    Technology
Global CO2 emissions coming from aviation will go from about 2% to, by 2050, something closer to 20%. Technology is the only key to open up a brighter future that can be sustainable at the same time. The way we fly is about to change, driven by a new breed of aviators not afraid to think differently. From clean, green electric aircraft to autonomous sky taxis, could the days of the jet age be numbered?
Series: Engineering the Future

Pearl Harbor

   2020    History
When Japan’s military expansion in the Pacific reaches its fever pitch, Roosevelt is forced to act. By cutting off oil supplies, he hopes to force Japan to back down. But far from sedating their imperial expansions, he pushes them to take one of the greatest gambles in military history – taking their entire striking fleet 4000 miles across the Ocean to attack the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. It’s a huge gamble, and if it goes wrong, it will spell suicide for Japan.
Series: Greatest Events of WWII in Colour

Seasonal Worlds

   2022    Nature
Will explore the strategy, deception and feats of engineering plants use to thrive in the changing weather of different seasons. In the face of conditions ranging from ice and snow to raging fires, survival is often a question of perfect timing - particularly when contending with intense competition and surprising predators.
In this episode, David Attenborough travels to Finland to show one of the most extreme examples of seasonal plant life in the Arctic Circle. He also travels to California to see how climate change is affecting giant sequoias. These ancient trees like all other seasonal plants depend on the predictability of the seasons and our current changing climate threatens their survival.
Series: The Green Planet

The Pirate Republic

   2021    History
There had been other pirate settlements in different places but none of them had worked quite the same way that Nassau did. There was a fort there. People stayed, they built a community on the land. Larger and larger numbers of pirate-minded people were showing up there and starting to develop an economy around themselves. Men like Edward Thatch, later known as Blackbeard, his sidekick, Black Caesar, a former slave, and the pied pirate that led them all there, Captain Benjamin Hornigold.
In the second episode, tensions rise between Benjamin Hornigold and Henry Jennings; their rivalry takes a new direction when Hornigold declares Nassau a pirate republic.
Series: The Lost Pirate Kingdom

Chapter 2 Psilocybin

   2022    Medicine
Magic mushrooms, long considered sacred by the Indigenous Mazatec in Mexico, become the subject of scientific studies measuring the intense effects of its Psilocybin and its potential therapeutic use.
In the second episode, we are introduced to Ben, who’s battled with crippling Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) his entire life. When he had his firstborn, Ben’s life became full of panic attacks regarding his son’s safety, and he knew something had to change. Ben signed up for a psilocybin-assisted therapy clinical trial which was testing whether the psychedelic could help people with severe OCD. In the session under the influence of psilocybin, Ben felt decomposed and eventually grew into a tree. While living as a tree, he saw his human self, playing with his child. Though this sounds scary, from Ben’s perspective, it was beautiful. He was one with the universe, seeing himself in the ultimate third-person perspective. Finally, he saw how it could be different if he didn’t let his OCD control him. And several months out, all the symptoms disappeared.
Ben’s story is one of many told in this series, which gives hope that help is right around the corner for the millions who suffer —often in silence— with debilitating mental disorders. But Michael Pollan’s work is showcasing the success stories. Often, even in the most successful trials, psychedelic-assisted therapy only helps up to a third of people enter remission. More frequently, patients are helped —sometimes substantially— but they still suffer with their illnesses and some people aren’t helped at all.
Series: How to Change Your Mind

Eden

   2020    Science
Planets beyond our solar system are known to astronomers as exoplanets. They are at trillions of miles from Earth and yet, it might be possible to detect a faint signature of life in them. From the light of the stars they orbit that passes through the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it is possible to capture the chemical fingerprint of the elements in that atmosphere.
The fictional world Eden is orbiting not one star, but two. The light from its twin stars powers photosynthesis, pumping more oxygen into the atmosphere than in Earth, allowing life to thrive. Grazers are constantly alert to danger, because the canopy is home to predators perfectly evolved to live among the trees. In Episode 3, another topic are fungi and the role they could play on exoplanets. Ecologist Thomas Crowther talks about the role mycelial networks play in the Rothiemurchus forest in Scotland.
Series: Alien Worlds