Bitcoin is the world's leading virtual currency, but unlike real money, it is not backed by a government or properly regulated. Bitcoin is exchanged and held digitally by users - which is attractive to criminals selling drugs, pornography and arms. But now Bitcoin is moving into the mainstream and being openly marketed as an investment opportunity. The film investigates what Bitcoin is and what it means, going inside a Bitcoin mine in Iceland - where currency is made - and spending time with the Bitcoin millionaires of Silicon Valley. The programme also hears from others who have been scammed out of their life savings and investors who think the cryptocurrency is an enormous scam and that the writing is on the wall. Around the world, authorities are sounding the alarm that Bitcoin is too risky - is it too late, or too crazy, to try to become a Bitcoin millionaire?
In Los Angeles, a remarkable experiment is underway; the police are trying to predict crime, before it even happens. At the heart of the city of London, one trader believes that he has found the secret of making billions with math. In South Africa, astronomers are attempting to catalogue the entire cosmos. These very different worlds are united by one thing - an extraordinary explosion in data. Meet the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data.
The story of one misguided art collector's attempts to save a Banksy painting from destruction and the auction block. Featuring some of the world's top street artists, this film poses the question 'What would you do if you owned a million dollar painting that the artist doesn't want sold?'
An informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path. The Story Of Science tells the forces that came together to create scientific knowledge; the practical business of making instruments and machines; the great forces of history – revolutions, voyages of discovery and artistic movements – and the dogged determination of scientists and experimenters. This is the story of how scientific ideas shaped the modern world and how science made history. Michael Mosley begins the first episode with the story of one of the great upheavals in human history - how we came to understand that our planet was not at the centre of everything in the cosmos, but just one of billions of bodies in a vast and expanding universe. He reveals the critical role of medieval astrologers in changing our view of the heavens, and the surprising connections to the upheavals of the Renaissance, the growth of coffee shops and Californian oil and railway barons. Michael shows how important the practical skills of craftsmen have been to this story and finds out how Galileo made his telescope to peer at the heavens and by doing so helped change our view of the universe forever.
Comet ISON can well be the brightest and most spectacular comet for a generation. It appeared above the eastern horizon from December 2013 as a glorious streak across the sky. ISON has been travelling towards the sun for ten thousand years and will make only one orbit through its corona before disappearing off into the outer solar system. But as well as providing a great spectacle, ISON's tail of vaporised gas and water, hundreds of millions of kilometres long, will give insights into some of the greatest mysteries of science; it will help explain the origins of the solar system, whether earth's water was delivered on comets and even whether we are alone in the universe.
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...
The programme also hears from others who have been scammed out of their life savings and investors who think the cryptocurrency is an enormous scam and that the writing is on the wall. Around the world, authorities are sounding the alarm that Bitcoin is too risky - is it too late, or too crazy, to try to become a Bitcoin millionaire?