New York's Central Park Tower is the second tallest building in the US, and as engineers and builders race to complete this 1,550-foot-tall mega build, they use cutting-edge science and engineering to battle high altitudes and brutal weather. From the world's longest tunnels to the world's most advanced skyscraper, the series Building Giants reveals the extraordinary innovations that help record-breaking superstructures to be built, and uncovers the inner secrets of how they work.
Gaby Roslin and Amir Khan present a program in which they apply the latest science to some of the worst sleepers. They include an extreme snorer, a man who suffers from night terrors, a woman who has restless leg syndrome, and a man with chronic insomnia for 20 years. The film also shows a sleep deprivation experiment to test for risky behaviour, pain resistance and emotional control. When the subjects reach the final hours of the challenge, the experiment begins to take its toll as the participants' emotions go into overdrive, with one threatening to quit altogether.
Almost everything we know today about the beautiful giant ringed planet comes from Cassini, the NASA mission that launched in 1997 and arrived at Saturn in 2004. Since then, the space probe has been beaming home miraculous images and scientific data, revealing countless wonders about the planet, its rings and 62 moons - including some that could harbor life. When the mission approached its final days, it attempted one last set of daring maneuvers - diving between the innermost ring and the top of Saturn's atmosphere. Aiming to skim less than 2000 miles above the cloud tops, no spacecraft has ever gone so close to Saturn, and hopes were high for incredible observations that could solve major mysteries about the planet's core. But such a daring maneuver comes with many risks and is no slam dunk. In fact, slamming into rocks in the rings is a real possibility. Join NASA engineers for the tense and triumphant moments as they find out if their bold re-programming has worked, and discover the wonders that Cassini has revealed over the years.
How what began as a passion for the tantalising possibilities of jetpacks became an obsession. Shot over ten years, this documentary chronicles Australian David Mayman's seemingly impossible quest to fulfil his childhood dream to build and fly the world’s first jetpack. His ambition, which nearly cost him his life and family, culminates in an attempt to make the world's first jetpack flight around the Statue of Liberty.
Join us on a journey into the mysterious depths of the human psyche as we investigate the strange and surprising terrain of the Mind Field. Chimps and Humans can be traced biologically back to a common ancestor. The Cognitive Tradeoff Hypothesis theorizes about the two different paths of development - particularly cognitive development - that occurred in these two species after the split. Chimps stayed in the trees and developed some extraordinary cognitive capabilities which are shown by the research work of Japanese scientists, while humans came down into the savanna and developed social capabilities and language. The hypothesis is that humans 'traded' some aspects of cognitive capabilities by re-purposing areas of the brain that had evolved in the context of other uses. Those capabilities are kept in chimps and are far surpassing that of normal humans. This is shown by the research work of scientists at the Primate Research Center connected with Kyoto University.
Moral psychology isn't always an easy thing to study. Experiments that actually puts people in what feels like a real scenario may get realistic results, but researchers must always balance the benefits of what we could learn with the safety and well-being of the people they study. Often what we learn from moral psychology experiments doesn't make humans look good. We are imperfect creatures. But the more we learn about why and how we make the moral choices that we do, the better we'll be able to tackle difficult questions in the future.
From the world's longest tunnels to the world's most advanced skyscraper, the series Building Giants reveals the extraordinary innovations that help record-breaking superstructures to be built, and uncovers the inner secrets of how they work.