The unearthing of a gruesome grave filled with thousands of skeletons at the beach of Kamakura in Japan could be about to unlock the true extent of the merciless violence and mystery surrounding the true origins of one of the most feared and revered warriors of all time: the Samurai.
In the Middle Ages, Kamakura was the capital of Japan. The 'Shogun', a kind of aristocratic military dictator, ruled here. This shogunate ended in 1333 with the Battle of Kamakura. A drastic event in Japanese history, because this resulted in not only political, but also social, philosophical and technical innovations. The remains of the samurai warriors who fell near Kamakura now provide scientists with detailed insights into the time of the Kamakura shogunate and the bloody conflict between the shogun and the emperor.
The chilling burial ground dates back to 1333. Kamakura was one of the most heavily fortified regions of Japan. When the Emperor became angered by the growing powers of the ruling Hojo family, he sought to retake control of the region, setting the stage for a war that would change the shape of the nation. Among over 4000 sets of remains, six have a unique story to tell: the husband and wife involved in a sword fight to the death; the warrior monk; a peasant boy soldier; and members of the ruling Hojo family, captured and decapitated, with their heads displayed as trophies of victory. These remains reveal the secrets of the Samurai, their ferocious fighting skills and their merciless killing techniques.

A young mother's mysterious death and her son's subsequent kidnapping blow open a decades-long mystery about the woman's true identity and the murderous federal fugitive at the center of it all.
It's late at night in Oklahoma City, in April of 1990. Two or three guys are in a truck driving along the road and they see some kind of debris. And then they see off to the side, there's a body. It appears to be a young woman, a blonde-haired woman and they call an ambulance. She's rushed to the hospital, and her husband, Clarence, eventually shows up. He says her name is Tonya Hughes, that she's a stripper in Tulsa, and that they have a young son named Michael. And he's much older and he's just kind of this weird guy. So, the doctors, as they continue to examine her, they see old bruises and old injuries. There's something wrong with this picture. Ultimately, she passes away. The girls Tonya danced with want to find her family. So they call this woman and they tell her that her daughter died. And she says, 'What are you talking about? My daughter died 20 years ago, she was only 18 months old.' They realize that who they just buried was not Tonya Hughes, so now they're asking, 'What happened?'.

As the world enters a phase of aggressive competition over untapped ocean floor resources, countries are scrambling to stake their claims. The vast economic potential on offer has made the seabed the ultimate frontier in a new Age of Exploration. China's research vessels in particular have been active in waters right across the globe. Through our exhaustive analysis of huge volumes of Chinese ship tracking data, from sand dredgers to survey vessels, we piece together a puzzle that reveals a new hidden power struggle over increasingly critical submarine resources.

The last episode explores Mescaline, the psychoactive molecule in San Pedro and peyote cacti, a sacred medicine that Native Americans have had to fight for the right to use. At the Indigenous practices there's always an elder, someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding. There's usually a group, a community is involved, There's always an intention, a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred, in order to achieve altered states of consciousness, which contribute to worship in various ways, or celebration or healing.
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all. In the old Greek histories of Eleusis, people who were initiated there got the drink, the kykeon, and then they had the illumination. The precise recipe is a mystery, but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries, a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment practiced by some of the world's greatest minds including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago? Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness considered threatening to the powers that be? Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
Psychedelics has a major part in how we can heal as a community, how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country. The current renaissance of psychedelics could not come at a better time as the world confronts a crisis in mental health. But psychedelics have much to offer. The psychedelic experience changes the mind in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works. All these altered states allow us to probe what is the greatest mystery in all of nature. The emergence from mere matter of something as miraculous as consciousness. But an even bigger question is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis of how we think about our place in nature. One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject, the spirit of all species, not just our own. And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.

The film explores the life and the mystery surrounding the death of American actress and cultural icon Marilyn Monroe through archival footage and previously unheard interviews with her inner circle. The filmmaker Anthony Summers spent three years collecting 650 tapes recorded with people who either knew Monroe in her lifetime or had knowledge concerning her death.

Scientists on the BICEP and Planck missions are attempting to solve a mystery about the earliest moments of our universe, by searching for patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). If successful, the missions will help to answer the biggest question anyone can ask: how did our universe begin?