Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

For centuries, the precise workings of gravity have confounded the greatest scientific minds - from Newton to Faraday and Einstein - and the idea of controlling gravity has been seen as little more than a fanciful dream. Yet in the mid 1990s, UK defence manufacturer BAE Systems began a ground-breaking project code-named Greenglow. Nasa was simultaneously running its own Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Project". It was concerned with potential space applications of new physics, including concepts like 'faster-than-light travel' and 'warp drives'. Looking into the past and projecting into the future, Horizon explores science's long-standing obsession with the idea of gravity control. It looks at recent breakthroughs in the search for loopholes in conventional physics and examines how the groundwork carried out by Project Greenglow has helped change our understanding of the universe. Gravity control may sound like science fiction, but the research that began with Project Greenglow is very much ongoing, and the dream of flying cars and journeys to the stars no longer seems quite so distant.

As he tries his hand at baking, brewing and braising, acclaimed food writer Michael Pollan explores how cooking transforms food and shapes our world. In the first espisode, with help from Aboriginal hunters and a barbecue pit master, Pollan shows how fire shaped human gastronomy, and weighs our duty to the animals we eat.

Join investigators as they untangle the cause of Alzheimer’s and race to develop a cure. Alzheimer’s disease strikes at the core of what makes us human: our capacity to think, to love, and to remember. The disease ravages the minds of over 40 million victims worldwide, and it is one of the greatest medical mysteries of our time. Join investigators as they gather clues and attempt to reconstruct the molecular chain of events that ultimately leads to dementia". Follow key researchers in the field who have helped to develop the leading theories of the disease. Along the way, meet individuals from all walks of life who will reveal what it’s like to struggle with Alzheimer’s. Among them, members of a unique Colombian family who have learned that their genetic predisposition all but guarantees early onset Alzheimer’s. Yet there may be hope. Join these courageous patients participating in clinical trials, and then go behind the scenes of the major drug trials to see how researchers target and test therapies that may slow and even prevent Alzheimer’s

The hunt for aliens is on! After a distinguished career in cosmology Professor Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, has taken up the search for extra-terrestrials. Looking for aliens is no longer science fiction - it is a question that's engaging some of the greatest minds in science." As our knowledge of the universe has increased, we're getting closer to answers. Many scientists now think we live in galaxy with a billion Earth-like planets, many of which may be teeming with life. But what kind of life? Has anything evolved into beings we could communicate with? This film gets inside the minds of the scientists considering one of the most exciting and profound questions we can ask - are we alone in the universe? Professor Rees thinks we may have our idea of what an alien is like all wrong. If he's right, it's not organic extra-terrestrials we should look for, it's machines.

Angela Rippon and Dr Chris van Tulleken travel the world in search of the latest science that could help us all stay young and healthy for longer. They investigate the best ways to help both our bodies and brains age better. Up first is the body, and Angela travels to Germany to join a groundbreaking study which reveals the exercise that holds off ageing the most. Chris visits America to find out about the unexpected diet that can add years to our lives. And in Ecuador we meet a seventeen-year-old who looks like a child to discover how scientists hope he may hold the key to preventing the diseases of ageing.

A war story unlike any ever seen. A story of what happens when one ordinary man, Time magazine war correspondent Michael Ware, transplanted into the Middle East by the reverberations of 9/11, butts into history. Ware handpicked and given a shattering video tape by the most feared, most hated terrorists on the planet to announce his arrival of the world stage sets out on an epic journey into the deepest recesses of the conflict as he seeks answers. Answers that he thinks will lead him to the Truth. The invasion of Iraq has ended, and the Americans are celebrating victory. The year is 2003. Alone and in secret one man, Abu Musab al Zarqawi is planning the real war. Step- by-step he lays out his plan in a letter to Osama bin Laden: the suicide truck bombings; the bloody horrors of the civil war; the televised beheadings. He carries out his grand design to transform the invasion into one of the most brutal conflicts our time and a catastrophe for the planet...and he does it all on camera. He gives the tape to Michael Ware. The tape sets our correspondent off on an epic voyage as he seeks answers. As he seeks what he thinks will be the Truth.