In the last episode, Austroposeidon level trees in search of fresh foliage. A herd of Triceratops journey through a cave to find an underground clay lick. A male Carnotaurus sets the stage for an extravagant display. A female Qianzhousaurus uses an autumn storm to her advantage while hunting Corythoraptor. A family of Edmontosaurus evade a forest fire, while an Atrociraptor and Ankylosaur reap its rewards. Juvenile Therizinosaurus attempt to climb up to a bee nest. Hatzegopteryx hunts Zalmoxes, and patrols the dense undergrowth and seaspray-battered coastline.
In this mind-bending series, Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores the vast range of size in the universe, from tiny atoms to gigantic, interconnected galaxies. In the first episode, Jim will enter the world of objects that are too tiny to glimpse with the naked eye. Starting with the smallest insects, he moves on to encounter living cells with amazing superpowers and confronts some of humanity's deadliest enemies in the form of viruses. Going smaller still, he encounters wondrous new nanomaterials such as graphene, discovered by physicist Andre Geim. These are revolutionising engineering, medicine, computing, electronics and environmental science. Finally, Jim comes face to face with the fundamental building blocks of the world around us – atoms – and reveals why understanding the science of the 'small' is crucial to the future of humanity.
In 2011, a Social Security lawyer named Eric C. Conn and a judge named David Daugherty were investigated for committing massive fraud over many years. Conn figured out that he would get paid a hefty retainer for every Social Security disability payment he managed to get approved, so he and Daugherty (who need quick cash to pay for his daughter’s upcoming narcotics trial – which presumably meant bribing an awful lot of people) came to an arrangement. In the second episode, Investigators starts to collect evidence against Eric and Judge Daugherty. The whistle-blowers are pressured.
Eric C. Conn became a local celebrity and maybe even became heroic in the eyes of the people they were helping. He put up billboards all over the county and his parties were legendary. Conn took monthly vacations to exotic locations as a sex tourist and his 16 marriages were the talk of the town. In the third episode, a new U.S. attorney begins working the case. Things take a dark turn when several of Conn's former clients share their experiences. Wanted by the FBI, chased by the authorities, the story soon spirals into a twisty-turny thriller. That’s no coincidence either, given Conn mentions numerous times that he likens himself to James Bond. James Bond with a dash of Robin Hood.
Jennifer Griffith and Sarah Carver were working for the Disability Administration and noticed all this corruption firsthand. They wrote to the Social Security Administration, wrote to lawyers, wrote to the president of the United States. But nothing ever came of their complaints until the Wall Street Journal story broke. Then, with national attention brought to Conn, the Senate, the FBI and the SSA (who’d been enabling the fraud the whole time) finally stepped in. Series finale. Eric leads the government on a wild goose chase. The fallout from the fraud takes its toll on a struggling Kentucky community.
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.
A family of Edmontosaurus evade a forest fire, while an Atrociraptor and Ankylosaur reap its rewards. Juvenile Therizinosaurus attempt to climb up to a bee nest. Hatzegopteryx hunts Zalmoxes, and patrols the dense undergrowth and seaspray-battered coastline.