Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

Journey through the long-vanished corners of prehistoric North America, beginning when man first entered the vast, unspoiled continent some 14,000 years ago, in this appealing BBC documentary. Witness ancient beasts, mammoths, mastodons, giant bears, and sabre-toothed cats, and see the legacies each has passed to their modern successors. Computer animation and digital effects bring to life mammoths, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, glyptodonts, and a plethora of smaller animals in a lush Ice Age mosaic.

Forget the Big Bang. The real moment of creation was the Cosmic Dawn - the moment of first light. It's the moment the first stars were born, the moment that lit up the Universe, and made the first structure and the first ingredients of life. This is the scientific version of the story of Genesis. The Big Bang gets all the credit for creating our universe. But in fact, the universe it gave was dark and boring. There were no stars, no galaxies, just a vast, black fog of gas - the cosmic dark ages". But, after a hundred million years of nothing, came a dramatic moment of transformation - the Cosmic Dawn. Astronomers are now trying to witness this cosmic dawn. For the first time they have the tools to explore the very first stars of the universe and to tell the scientific story of our creation.

The drug policies have remained unchanged over the last 40 years so should they be reformed in the light of new research? Recent research has analysed the link between the harmful effects of drugs relative to their current classification by law with some startling conclusions. Perhaps most startling of all is that alcohol, solvents and tobacco (all unclassified drugs) are rated more dangerous than ecstasy, 4-MTA and LSD (all class A drugs).

Super quick computers and advanced mathematical formulas have taken over trading on the financial markets from human beings -algorithms- which seem to have a life of their own. The only ones who understand the system in any way are its architects, the algorithm developers. Haim Bodek is one such algo-developer. After finding some strange wrongdoings he set out on a personal crusade against this elusive system". The machinery behind our financial markets, consisting of mathematical models, data centers and miles and miles of fiber optic cables, is disguised by technological complexity and secrecy. The builders of this financial system are a new breed of Wall Street employees -quants- mathematicians and physicists who are responsible for a technological revolution. Haim Bodek is a quant; he specialized in artificial intelligence and worked for Goldman Sachs. He knows the system from the inside, he helped build it. Haim Bodek was invited to tell his story at the "Battle of the Quants" - a recurring event where quants discuss high-frequency trading, amongst other things. Bodek wrote an algorithm for trading machines that would generate guaranteed income - a money machine that weathered the financial meltdown of 2008. But then from one day to the next the algorithm stopped working.

This absolutely beautiful documentary on our World, its mystical beauty and miracles including slow motion footage of nature, animals, seasons, new life and daily beauties I've never seen nor imagined existed. The photography is sensational. The animal behaviour shown is incredible, beautiful and humorous. Even if you never have been a fan of nature documentaries, this blew you away

The Basilosaurus, the first of the large whale species, is not a harmless plankton eater but a fearsome high speed hunter. And most frightening of all is the Megalodon, a gargantuan ancestor of the great white that makes its modern day relative look like a tuna.