Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the electrifying story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force - electricity. Until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements.Without electricity, we would be lost. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution. Episode one tells the story of the very first 'natural philosophers' who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity. They studied its curious link to life, built strange and powerful instruments to create it and even tamed lightning itself. It was these men who truly laid the foundations of the modern world. Electricity was without doubt a fantastical wonder. This is the story about what happened when the first real concerted effort was made to understand electricity; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will - the battery.

Since 2010, Artificial Intelligence is revolutionized by deep learning, neural networks that discern complex patterns in huge quantities of data and react in real time. A.I. is a primal force, like fire. The same fire that warms us can incinerate our homes; A.I. could enslave mankind -- or, join us in a grand alliance to reach the stars.

Travelling forward in time to 30,000 years ago, it's the middle of an ice age. The landscape is dominated by mighty mammoths, living side-by-side with woolly rhinos, giant deer and two separate species of human. The programme follows the fate of a herd of mammoths in their annual struggle against the harsh ice-age conditions. Every summer they spend on the grassy plains of what will one day become the bottom of the North Sea, but every winter they are forced to head for the less exposed valleys further south. It is a journey fraught with danger: mammoths can get trapped in frozen bogs, and the herd must run the gauntlet of hunters like cave lions and the deadly Neanderthals.

Back one million years ago, South America was a continent of exotic oversized creatures found nowhere else on Earth - huge terror birds, giant ground sloths and spiky-tailed relatives of the armadillo as big as cars. The deadliest animal of them all was smilodon, the largest of the sabre-tooth cats, with canines like carving knives. The programme follows the fortunes of an individual male, Half Tooth. Ousted from his clan by a pair of rival males, his life suddenly becomes a struggle to survive in this alien world.

After several rogue traders stories made the headlines these last years, revealing the human factor behind the global economy, neuroscientists have started to scrutinize traders' brain and stress management. What stimulates and motivates them? How can their brain cope with such a high level of stress and competition? This film investigates further into Neuroeconomics, showing how traders are being governed by unconscious psychological and biological processes which can trigger borderline behaviours and have disastrous financial consequences on the financial markets.

Moving on to Ethiopia 3.2 million years ago, we witness the beginnings of mankind via a group of australopithecus - a type of ape which, like us, walks upright on two legs. But unlike us, these early members of the human family weren't predators, they were prey. Things get worse for the group as they are hunted by a sabre-tooth cat called dinofelis and fall victim to other dangers such as malaria, rival australopithecus and a rampaging 14-tonne deinotherium.