Fly across iridescent tropical reefs, brush through a cloud of a million jellyfish, visit an alien world where the closer you look, the more you see, where the tiniest creatures support the greatest predators... We think of reefs as exotic, distant places with little or no connection to our everyday world. Yet every reef is a living city beneath the sea with a parallel existence to ours, distant yet undeniably connected. Reefs are hotspots of biodiversity as vital to life on earth as the rain-forests. They have been shaping our shorelines, literally forming islands and mountains, for millions of years. The fossil record shows that given time they have recovered from all of earth's major extinction events. Even reefs pulverised by atomic blasts at Bikini Atoll have regenerated. Yet within our lifetime reefs have come to face their greatest threat...

Sir David Attenborough takes a breath-taking journey through the vast and diverse continent of Africa as it's never been seen before. From the richness of the Cape of Good Hope to blizzards in the high Atlas Mountains, from the brooding jungles of the Congo to the steaming swamps and misty savannahs, Africa explores the whole continent. An astonishing array of previously unknown places are revealed along with bizarre new creatures and extraordinary behaviours. Using the latest in filming technology including remote HD cameras, BBC One takes an animal's eye view of the action. The journey begins in the Kalahari, Africa's ancient southwest corner, where two extraordinary deserts sit side by side and even the most familiar of its creatures have developed ingenious survival techniques. Black rhinos reveal a lighter side to their character as they gather around a secret waterhole. Springbok celebrate the arrival of rains with a display of 'pronking'. Bull desert giraffes endure ferocious battles for territory in a dry river bed.

Japan's landscapes range from snowy mountains to subtropical warmth. They are full of wildlife - and animals' and people's lives often cross as they adapt to these extremes. The central island of Honshu is home to over 100 million people, and its biggest city, Tokyo, is one of the largest urban metropolises on earth. But it has a wild heart - most of Honshu is mountainous. This wilderness is home to an astonishing range of wildlife - black bears, monkeys, exquisite fireflies and even cow demons. But all across this island, from the mountains to the edge of the sea, people and nature are drawn together in the most unexpected ways.

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.