Oceans are the largest ecosystem on earth, covering two thirds of our world’s surface and providing half the oxygen in our atmosphere. They are home to as much as 80 per cent of all life on earth, and nearly three billion people rely on them for their primary source of food.
But our planet’s oceans would be little more than stagnant wastelands, and life on planet earth would cease to exist, were it not for one simple factor: a global network of powerful ocean currents. Every drop of seawater on earth rides these currents, taking 1,000 years to complete a single circuit. Without the constant mixing of currents, tides and waves, our oceans would stop supporting life - and a healthy ocean is vital to a healthy planet.

Between the 1920s and the 1960s the world's great powers sent vast military-style expeditions to conquer the peaks of the Himalayas, with Everest at their head. This was a great game played - camera in hand - by Imperial Britain, Nazi Germany and superpower America. As a result, Himalayan mountaineering's most iconic, epic and tragic moments didn't just go down in history, but were caught on film - from the deaths of Mallory and Irvine on Everest in 1924, to Everest's final conquest in 1953 by Hillary and Tensing. Using footage never before seen on British television, this is the story how of how film-makers turned the great peaks into great propaganda.

This episode focuses on the Jurassic period, a time when the first giant killers stalked the Earth and lurked in the seas; a time when the slightest advantage meant the difference between life and death. In North America the iconic allosaurus, an ambush hunter with a lethal bite, dominated. Not even the heavily-armoured stegosaurus was safe from this killer, and incredible evidence reveals a glimpse of a vicious battle between these two giants. Life in Jurassic oceans was no easier; in 2008, a fossil was dug out of a frozen island high in the Arctic. It was a colossal marine reptile, twice as big as most ocean predators, at 15 metres long and weighing about 45 tonnes. This was Predator X. Its skull alone was nearly twice the size of a tyrannosaurus rex's, and its bite force unmatched by anything in the Jurassic seas. The balance of power between predator and prey is a fine one, as prey continually evolves different ways to avoid predators. But for the most successful and enduring predators, the battle to survive has always been tipped in their favour

It is the greatest technological challenge ever undertaken by humankind. The quest to produce the ultimate energy solution, Fusion, a reliable source of clean power. What if we could create here on earth, our very own version of a star, a machine that makes power from nuclear fuel? But so immense are the challenges, the goal of a power-producing fusion reactor has so far remained elusive and out of reach... until now.

Could the chemicals found in marijuana prevent and even heal several deadly cancers? Could the tumour regulating properties of cannabinoids someday replace the debilitating drugs, chemotherapy, and radiation that harms as often as it heals? Discover the truth about this ancient medicine as world renowned scientists in the field of cannabinoid research explain and illustrate their truly mind-blowing discoveries. A powerful and eye-opening film about the future of cannabis and perhaps even the future of medicine.

Writing itself is 5,000 years old, and for most of that time words were written by hand using a variety of tools. The Romans were able to run an empire thanks to documents written on papyrus. Scroll books could be made quite cheaply and, as a result, ancient Rome had a thriving written culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, papyrus became more difficult to obtain. Europeans were forced to turn to a much more expensive surface on which to write: Parchment. Medieval handwritten books could cost as much as a house, they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship.
No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater.
That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.