Horizon
SERIE • 62 Staffeln •
Dokumentationen • Vereinigtes Königreich Großbritannien und Nordirland • 1964 - 2026
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Inhaltsbeschreibung
Horizon erzählt faszinierende Geschichten aus der Wissenschaft, entschlüsselt Rätsel und enthüllt Welten, die Sie noch nie zuvor gesehen haben.
Originaltitel
Horizon
Produktionsland
Vereinigtes Königreich Großbritannien und Nordirland
Originalsprache
Englisch
Regie
Sophie Todd, Emma Hatherley, Mike Connolly, John Fothergill, Dan Clifton
FSK
12
Untertitel
Englisch, Deutsch
Besetzung
Giles Yeo, Xand van Tulleken, Alice Roberts, Michael Mosley, David Attenborough, Hannah Fry, Steven Mackintosh, Richard Feynman, Paul Vaughan, Brian Cox, Professor Brian Cox
Sprache
Englisch, Deutsch
Episodenguide
1. 1964 (29 Episoden • 1964)
Entdecken Sie mit der BBC-Langzeitreihe „Horizon“ eine breite Auswahl an Themen aus Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und menschlicher Natur.
01
Episode 1
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Episode 2
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Episode 3
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Episode 4
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Episode 10
2. Staffel 2 (24 Episoden • 1965)
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Episode 1
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3. Staffel 3 (23 Episoden • 1966)
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4. Staffel 4 (24 Episoden • 1967)
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5. Staffel 5 (37 Episoden • 1968)
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6. Staffel 6 (37 Episoden • 1969)
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7. Staffel 7 (37 Episoden • 1970)
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8. Staffel 8 (35 Episoden • 1971)
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9. Staffel 9 (33 Episoden • 1972)
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Episode 1
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10. Staffel 10 (35 Episoden • 1973)
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11. Staffel 11 (33 Episoden • 1974)
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12. Staffel 12 (26 Episoden • 1975)
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13. Staffel 13 (30 Episoden • 1976)
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14. Staffel 14 (27 Episoden • 1977)
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15. Staffel 15 (24 Episoden • 1978)
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16. Staffel 16 (25 Episoden • 1979)
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17. Staffel 17 (30 Episoden • 1980)
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18. Staffel 18 (51 Episoden • 1981)
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19. Staffel 19 (47 Episoden • 1982)
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20. Staffel 20 (51 Episoden • 1983)
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21. Staffel 21 (26 Episoden • 1984)
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22. Staffel 22 (23 Episoden • 1985)
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23. Staffel 23 (23 Episoden • 1986)
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24. Staffel 24 (25 Episoden • 1987)
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25. Staffel 25 (25 Episoden • 1988)
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26. Staffel 26 (21 Episoden • 1989)
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27. Staffel 27 (26 Episoden • 1990)
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28. Staffel 28 (23 Episoden • 1991)
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29. Staffel 29 (22 Episoden • 1992)
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30. Staffel 30 (21 Episoden • 1993)
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31. Staffel 31 (21 Episoden • 1994)
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32. Staffel 32 (20 Episoden • 1995)
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33. Staffel 33 (20 Episoden • 1996)
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34. Staffel 34 (21 Episoden • 1997)
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35. Staffel 35 (20 Episoden • 1998)
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36. Staffel 36 (18 Episoden • 1999)
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37. Staffel 37 (20 Episoden • 2000)
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38. Staffel 38 (18 Episoden • 2001)
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39. Staffel 39 (18 Episoden • 2002)
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40. Staffel 40 (19 Episoden • 2003)
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Freak Waves – Riesenwellen aus dem Nichts
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41. Staffel 41 (19 Episoden • 2004)
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42. Staffel 42 (22 Episoden • 2005)
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43. Staffel 43 (19 Episoden • 2006)
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44. Staffel 44 (11 Episoden • 2007)
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45. Staffel 45 (18 Episoden • 2008)
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46. Staffel 46 (18 Episoden • 2009)
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47. Staffel 47 (16 Episoden • 2009)
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48. Staffel 48 (16 Episoden • 2010)
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49. Staffel 49 (18 Episoden • 2011)
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50. Staffel 50 (16 Episoden • 2012)
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51. Staffel 51 (19 Episoden • 2013)
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52. Staffel 52 (19 Episoden • 2014)
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53. Staffel 53 (16 Episoden • 2016)
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54. Staffel 54 (15 Episoden • 2017)
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55. Staffel 55 (14 Episoden • 2018)
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56. Staffel 56 (6 Episoden • 2019)
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57. Staffel 57 (12 Episoden • 2020)
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58. Staffel 58 (4 Episoden • 2021)
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59. Staffel 59 (4 Episoden • 2022)
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60. Staffel 60 (1 Episode • 2024)
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Episode 1
61. Staffel 61 (4 Episoden • 2025)
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Episode 4
62. Staffel 62 (1 Episode • 2026)
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1964. 1964 (10 Episoden • 1964)
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Prof. Arthur C. Clarke, Derek Price and Nigel Balchin discuss the past and future of science.
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1965. Staffel 1965 (24 Episoden • 1965)
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1966. Staffel 1966 (24 Episoden • 1966)
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Episode 3
A profile of Dr. Albert Copley, the famous hematologist, who is also known as an accomplished artist under the name of Alcopley.
For a country striving to raise its productivity, the supply of applied scientists is tremendously important. Professor S. A. Tobias, an engineer, and Lord Todd, ex-chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council, discuss the problems of educating them and their importance in society.
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1967. Staffel 1967 (24 Episoden • 1967)
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Episode 1
Horizon probes into whether aggressiveness is our birthright and can society live without violence?
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Episode 2
Medical advances have made it possible for 'life' to be maintained in an unconscious patient who has irrevocable brain damage and who might also be dependent on artificial aids to circulation and respiration. Is it now meaningless to define 'death' as the cessation of a heart beat? Why do so many people have difficulty In communicating, or in simply getting-on with other people? Psychologists have now begun to analyse aspects of social behaviour in a way which they believe will lead to more pleasant and more effective human relationships.
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Episode 3
In this episode, Horizon looks at a new school of mathematics and physics near Novosibirsk in Siberia, Russia. This school uses a competition held for Russian school children to qualify new students.
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Episode 4
Horizon profiles the life of the greatest physical scientist: Michael Faraday. Crucial events of his scientific career in science are reconstructed.
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Episode 5
Horizon looks at some research recently carried out into the migraine headache and the means to provide treatment for it.
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Episode 6
Horizon probes in the danger of germs and infection in the operating theater and the methods currently used to prevent contamination.
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Episode 7
Joel, a healthy young American, is reduced to a restless neurotic state after being deprived of his dreams for three nights. Mr Bates, an eighty-four-year-old ex-milk man, has never dreamed in his life, or so he says until he is woken by scientists in the middle of a dream trip to New York.
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Episode 8
Will the next major war be fought with biological and chemical weapons? What are the available weapons? What is the horror they can cause? Is there any moral justification for their use?
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Episode 9
Horizon explores the part of the human brain devoted to memory.
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Episode 10
Horizon reports on the methods being used to irrigate the Negev Desert, making it fertile based on the methods of ancient civilizations.
1968. Staffel 1968 (24 Episoden • 1968)
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This episode covers interviews with surgeons and research workers discussing the need for animal experimentation in medical work.
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1969. Staffel 1969 (37 Episoden • 1969)
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1970. Staffel 1970 (37 Episoden • 1970)
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Episode 1
This episode of Horizon centers on the study of the moon rock samples brought back to the earth by the Apollo 11 flight to the moon.
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Episode 2
Horizon investigates the history of the life and work of Sir Henry Royce, co-founder of the firm Rolls Royce Royce.
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Episode 3
This is the first part of a two-part episode on diseases afflicting people today. Horizon looks at the issue of stress on the body.
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Episode 4
This is the second part of a two-part episode on diseases afflicting people today. Horizon looks at the causes of coronary heart disease and modern techniques of treatment and cure.
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Episode 5
Horizon exams the current scientific research into human sexual behavior.
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Episode 6
In this episode, Horizon reports on how much of the sea coast around Britain is becoming polluted.
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Episode 7
This episode deals with the problems of infertility and showing the investigations being carried out.
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Episode 8
Sir Bernard Spilsbury, a forensic pathologist, talks about the role of the scientific witness in the criminal courts.
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Episode 9
A look at some of the work carried out in Britain into the development of new materials for industry.
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Episode 10
This episode of Horizon looks at the question of the treatment of criminals in Britain.
1971. Staffel 1971 (32 Episoden • 1971)
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1972. Staffel 1972 (33 Episoden • 1972)
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1973. Staffel 1973 (33 Episoden • 1973)
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Episode 1
Horizon examines sources of infection that have, and could still, cause epidemics in Britain.
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Episode 2
This episode of Horizon features Immanuel Velikovsky and his theories about the solar system.
03
Episode 3
Horizon examines the doctrines and military strategies of the rival alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries.
04
Episode 4
Horizon looks into the problem of deafness in Britain.
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Episode 5
A jewel robbery, a hit-and-run, and the Case of the Skeleton in the Sand Dunes illustrate the work of forensic scientists and the police they assist. How do they discover the characteristics of an individual bullet as it enters a body? How are blood stains identified or microscopic flakes of paint? How do voiceprints and lie-detectors work? The crime labs of Britain and America have different priorities and different techniques. Each can learn from the other. They also have different success rates. Britain's is currently better. But how long can we hold out against a rapidly rising tide of drugs and violence? What can we learn from American experience?
06
Episode 6
How easy is it to get sterilized? Should there be abortion on demand? Do we need a free contraceptive service? Our average family size is 2.5. To avoid a social and population crisis it needs to be 2.1. Aberdeen, one of the few cities to have a fully comprehensive family planning service, has already successfully cut its birth rate. The Government plan to withdraw this kind of free service. But, in the light of Aberdeen's success, should the Government be made to reconsider?
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Episode 7
In this documentary by Horizon, we look at chemical warfare and the associated environmental problems that have given science a bad name.
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Episode 8
Horizon explores how to make the future livable and prevent the effects of urban sprawl.
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Episode 9
Horizon explains acupuncture theories and examines its validity in modern medicine.
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Episode 10
Horizon illustrates the Circadian Cycle of your body clock as it relates to physical and mental efficiency.
1974. Staffel 1974 (33 Episoden • 1974)
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In this report, Prof. John Maynard Smith looks back at some of the subjects Horizon has presented since 1964.
1975. Staffel 1975 (26 Episoden • 1975)
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Episode 1
This investigative report by Horizon covers an investigation into the deaths of people who inhaled asbestos dust at Acre Mill, Yorkshire, England.
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Episode 2
Horizon investigates the growing tendency in hospitals in Britain to induce childbirth by injecting the hormone oxytocin into expectant mothers.
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Episode 3
This episode of Horizon examines the problems of ship safety in the English Channel.
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Episode 4
Horizon investigates the symptoms of menopause and the various degrees in which it occurs.
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Episode 5
This episode of Horizon shows the peril to man of the ever increasing dog population in the western world.
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Episode 6
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Episode 7
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1976. Staffel 1976 (32 Episoden • 1976)
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Episode 1
Horizon investigates heart transplant research and techniques perfected and currently used by Dr. Norman Shumway in Britain.
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Episode 2
This episode of Horizon is about symbiosis - the close association between two or more species for their mutual benefit.
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Episode 3
Horizon reports on the country of Tanzania, a country that spends only one dollar per person on health services, and more than half of all children born there die before the age of five.
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Episode 4
This episode of Horizon explores what actually happens inside our bodies using new optical techniques.
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Episode 5
Horizon examines the projected expansion of the coal mining industry.
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Episode 6
In this episode of Horizon, we look at the need for confidence in the doctor to patient relationship.
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Episode 7
Horizon investigates the mysterious Bermuda Triangle.
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Episode 8
Horizon traces back the origins and development of the pre-Incan Chimu civilization of Peru.
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Episode 9
This documentary by Horizon takes a look at the shark, the supreme predator of the sea.
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Episode 10
Horizon reports on enzymes and the way they are being put on work in the industry and medicine fields.
1977. Staffel 1977 (25 Episoden • 1977)
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Episode 1
Horizon documents the life of crocodiles and alligators, and their breeding and exploitation.
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Episode 2
Horizon traces the history of the oral contraceptive pill through the last 60 years as told by its pioneers.
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Episode 3
Horizon looks at how recent excavations in Africa have changed the accepted ideas of man's origins and age.
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Episode 4
Horizon investigates Sociobiology, which is a study of human social behaviour based on zoological research into animal behaviour.
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Episode 5
In this episode, Horizon explores how animal experiments are carried out in Britain.
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Episode 6
Horizon presents a story that depicts an astonishingly harsh way of life of the Netsilik Eskimos whose whole life is based on seal hunting.
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Episode 7
This story by Horizon traces the efforts of astronomers and scientists through history to prove the existence of life on Mars.
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Episode 8
Horizon looks at an ecological study of the Ythan estuary in Scotland.
09
Episode 9
In this episode, Horizon investigates research into solar energy in the USA, Japan, and the UK.
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Episode 10
Horizon explores the debate on human genetic engineering.
1978. Staffel 1978 (24 Episoden • 1978)
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Episode 1
Horizon investigates how biologists and engineers are pooling their ideas to understand how nature's machines work.
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Episode 2
In this episode, Horizon examines the need for an objective approach to land management in Britain.
03
Episode 3
Horizon explores community and residential services available to the elderly in South Hampton, England.
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Episode 4
Horizon presents a report on zero gravity and the effects of weightlessness in spacecraft on humans.
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Episode 5
Develops the theory that four and a half thousand million years ago the earth was formed thanks to the explosion of a huge star which provided the rocks, the minerals and the radioactivity from which life developed. These theories are based partly on analysis of a meteorite which dropped near a village in Mexico at the beginning of the seventies.
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Episode 6
Horizon reports on last three attempts to build a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks, near Plymouth.
07
Episode 7
Horizon presents a documentary on the development of the Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation device, or more commonly know as the Laser.
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Episode 8
Horizon investigates the reasons for poverty in Britain today, now with seven million on at the poverty line.
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Episode 9
About the applications and implications for the future, particularly the effects on the labour market, of microprocessors.
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Episode 10
In this episode, Horizon explores the after effects of a stroke when there is a sudden stoppage of blood to the human brain.
1979. Staffel 1979 (25 Episoden • 1979)
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1980. Staffel 1980 (26 Episoden • 1980)
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Episode 1
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Episode 2
Documentary examination on the process of ageing and some things that can be done about the problems of senility in old people.
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Episode 3
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1981. Staffel 1981 (27 Episoden • 1981)
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Episode 1
Horizon presents a portrait of the renowned economist John Maynard Keynes, Cambridge Don, and Bloomsbury intellectual.
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Episode 2
This episode of Horizon is about holistic medicine, health for the whole person, which uses unorthodox therapies.
03
Episode 3
Horizon explores the research of Egyptian doctors in trying to control bilharzia, a disease caused by parasitic worms.
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Episode 4
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Episode 5
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Episode 6
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Episode 7
Horizon reports on the changing role of the community midwife in Britain as more births take place in hospital.
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Episode 8
A group of scientists are trying to solve public utility problems in Mysore, India.
09
Episode 9
Horizon examines the design of Formula One racing cars with a particular reference to the aerodynamic 'skirt'.
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Episode 10
Horizon explores probabilities of whether we have any intelligent neighbors in space.
1982. Staffel 1982 (22 Episoden • 1982)
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1983. Staffel 1983 (24 Episoden • 1983)
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Episode 1
Horizon investigates if Britain should build a United States designed nuclear power station that uses a pressurized water reactor at its core.
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Episode 2
Horizon presents a report by Dr. Alison Jolly who discusses the country of Madagascar, just off of the west coast of Africa. Madagascar's ecology and conservation programs are in conflict with most third world economies.
03
Episode 3
Horizon brings you a report about the discovery of two new, and unimaginably short-lived, subatomic particles called "W" and "Z".
04
Episode 4
Horizon examines some of the effects that moderate amounts of alcohol can have on the body.
05
Episode 5
In the Horizon documentary, we look new ways of using computers in classroom and to what effect computers in our schools will have in future.
06
Episode 6
Horizon investigates the way girls and boys were taught science and related subjects at schools.
07
Episode 7
Horizon reports on the state of scientific research in Britain and the past blunders of the National Research Development Council.
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Episode 8
In this Horizon documentary, we look back at the event surrounding the near extermination of the North American bison (buffalo) in the 1880's.
09
Episode 9
The Horizon episode is about the Carsington Aqueduct Scheme in Derbyshire, England, and the massive excavation problems encountered during construction.
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Episode 10
Horizon presents a look at the current research into artificial computer intelligence.
1984. Staffel 1984 (22 Episoden • 1984)
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Episode 1
Sir Cyril Burt died in 1971, the most eminent psychologist of his age. Within two years the most bitter and disturbing scientific controversy since Piltdown Man saw Burt accused of lifelong faking and manipulation of phoney data. How and why was Burt allowed to get away with this?
02
Episode 2
Horizon looks at the research advances in physics and technology of microelectronics.
03
Episode 3
This episode of Horizon looks at the role of scientists in agriculture throughout the Third World countries.
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Episode 4
Horizon examines the various ways of committing computer fraud and at the efforts to prevent it and preserve our privacy.
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Episode 5
In this documentary, Horizon examines the work at an archaeological project in the Cusichaca Valley, Peru.
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Episode 6
Horizon presents this report on parasites, their life styles, and the diseases they cause in Third World countries.
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Episode 7
Horizon investigates the life for various civilizations along the river Waveney in east Angola.
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Episode 8
Horizon presents a report on current research and trends in facial reconstructive surgery.
09
Episode 9
In this documentary, Horizon reconstructs a therapy session where a man imprisoned for incest meets his family for first time in two and one half years.
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Episode 10
Horizon investigates the linguistic potential of non-human species.
1985. Staffel 1985 (16 Episoden • 1985)
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Episode 1
Documentary about colour perception based on the theories of Dr. Edwin Land, which oppose the long-held three-receptor theory of colour vision
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Episode 2
Horizon takes a look at consultant psychiatrists.
03
Episode 3
Horizon looks at the way modern archaeologists extract information from a site dig.
04
Episode 4
This Horizon episode is about a hospital in the African country of Kenya where the medical staff tells of a new approach to health care among the Pokot tribe.
05
Episode 5
In this episode, Horizon explores the characteristics of left-handed people.
06
Episode 6
Horizon examines new military technology which will come to dominate the battlefields of the future.
07
Episode 7
This episode of Horizon is about the controversial policy in African nation of Zimbabwe of encouraging villagers to allow wild animals back onto their land.
08
Episode 8
This documentary by Horizon attempts to explain the advances in physics in the search for the ultimate equation that explains the meaning of life, the universe, and everything else in existence.
09
Episode 9
Horizon brings you a report by Robert Symes who offers ten golden guidelines on how to be a successful inventor.
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Episode 10
This is a Horizon follow-up report on the careers of seven British teenagers studying Science 'O' levels back in 1978.
1986. Staffel 1986 (23 Episoden • 1986)
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Horizon explores the myth about the discovery of the antibiotic penicillin.
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1987. Staffel 1987 (23 Episoden • 1987)
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Episode 1
Report on research into biological body clocks, which can effect emotional and physical health and well-being.
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Episode 2
Report on how forensic scientists ae identifying individual victims amongst the people murdered by Argentina's military juntas, by examination and genetic testing of their remains.
03
Episode 3
In this interview by Horizon, zoologist Richard Dawkins investigates an attack on evolution by scientific creationists, based on the book of the same name by the famous zoologist.
04
Episode 4
Astronauts and space shuttle designers talk about the risks of space flight, in the light of the space shuttle disaster of January 1986.
05
Episode 5
Two part documentary on psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and his work with emotionally disturbed children.
06
Episode 6
Two part documentary on psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and his work with emotionally disturbed children.
07
Episode 7
Report on exploration into releasing energy sources which came from outer space during the formation of the earth, 4,500 million years ago, and have lain dormant under the earth's crust. In Sweden a five mile deep drill hole was made to unleash this energy.
08
Episode 8
Documentary on the Osprey in north east America, where its natural habitat was being damaged by the use of DDT, but after some conservation work the Osprey is returning to the area.
09
Episode 9
Report on the development of the AIDS virus, and current research into vaccines to combat the disease.
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Episode 10
Documentary on the increasing pressure put on the British police resulting in stress and psychological disorders, and also on the work of Dr. Douglas Duckworth, a psychologist at Leeds University who has worked with the police on these problems.
1988. Staffel 1988 (25 Episoden • 1988)
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Episode 1
This episode of Horizon looks at a new approach that holds hope for the treatment of Parkinson's Disease.
02
Episode 2
Horizon documents the first sighting of a star in supernova at its initial stages. The study of the spacial event provides fascinating insight into the life of our own universe.
03
Episode 3
In the report by Horizon, they looks at manic depression and how is now known that it has a strong genetic component.
04
Episode 4
This episode of the Horizon explores the Panama Canal, now a billion dollar commercial sea crossroad between continents. The future of the canal is in danger because of damage to rain forests.
05
Episode 5
Horizon investigates how those who are born into a working class family are at greater risk of dying early than if born a child of the professional classes.
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Episode 6
This documentary report by Horizon examines the devastating effects of the Greenhouse Effect (earth's temperature rising) and how man is causing it.
07
Episode 7
This is a Horizon report on Britain's air traffic control capabilities and the use of outdated and unreliable equipment.
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Episode 8
Explores the limits of digital computers and artificial intelligence. Includes the views of John Searle, a philosopher at the University of California who refutes the claims for 'thinking' machines.
09
Episode 9
Horizon looks at the experimental treatment of four cancer patients in the USA who have volunteered to try the LAK/Interleuken 2 treatment.
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Episode 10
This is part one of a two-part series by Horizon reporting on a military exercise code named Purple Warrior which is designed to test lessons learned during the Falklands war.
1989. Staffel 1989 (20 Episoden • 1989)
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Episode 1
Horizon looks again at the Human Genome Project which aims to decipher or sequence all genes.
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Episode 2
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Horizon covers the story of the Nottingham psychiatrists who study the human race to see who is mostly likely to develop schizophrenia.
1990. Staffel 1990 (20 Episoden • 1990)
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Horizon looks at the potential implications of genetically engineering plants.
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1991. Staffel 1991 (23 Episoden • 1991)
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Episode 1
Documentary considering the nature of sudden death, the effects of coronary heart disease and the part they play.
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Episode 2
This Horizon episode tells the story of the top secret experiments carried out to test the effects of mustard gas.
03
Episode 3
Horizon investigates the case against passive smoking and reveals new evidence of its danger.
04
Episode 4
Horizon reports on the new arms verification industry emerging due to the new arms control treaties.
05
Episode 5
Horizon follows astronomer's efforts to rescue the Hubble space telescope and restore its original planned performance.
06
Episode 6
Looks at the work of Earthwatch, and some of the many people who spend their holidays contributing to learning about the planet by helping on prehistoric digs, recording fish noises, tracking rodents, measuring grass an leaves and counting insects in places all over the world, often suffering much discomfort and boredom.
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Episode 7
This Horizon documentary presents the US auto industry's response to clean-up the air in Los Angeles, California by the year 2007.
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Episode 8
This episode of Horizon examines 20 years of research which has led to a new theory on how the earth's crust was made.
09
Episode 9
Looks at the phenomenon of the outbreaks of a lethal kidney disease amongst groups of people scattered around an area of the Balkans, covering Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, over the past 30 years.It considers the attempts and theories of scientists from all these countries over the years to find the cause of the disease.
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Episode 10
This Horizon interview presents Dr. Ulysses Seal who believes the "frozen zoo" concept is the best way to save vanishing species for the future generations.
1992. Staffel 1992 (19 Episoden • 1992)
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Episode 1
Horizon presents a new study that has highlighted the case of breast cancer.
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Episode 2
Horizon examines the advantages and disadvantages of biological pest control.
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Episode 3
About the original discovery in 1985 of a third form of solid carbon, named Buckminsterfullerene after the architect who invented geodesic domes. The two scientists who discovered the material glimpsed it for brief seconds only in their lasers but neither they nor other scientists subsequently could make the substance last long enough in the laser to prove their theory. Then in 1990, a couple of physicists with an arc-welder in a bell-jar found they could make as much Buckminsterfullerene as they liked, and industrial applications opened up, with talk of new polymers, molecular ball-bearings, lubricants and super- conductors. Meanwhile, the original discoverers were turning back to the fundamental questions surrounding the discovery, such as how and why does it form; does it exist in space or is it the solution to one of the great mysteries of the universe.
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Episode 4
Horizon explores the ecological track record of the North American Indians.
05
Episode 5
In this episode, Horizon look at attempts to persuade major respected organizations to do controlled trials on a synthetic malaria vaccine.
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Episode 6
Horizon follows five teams of scientists on the island of Mauna Kea in Hawaii as they wait for a solar eclipse.
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Episode 7
Horizon investigates how in 1939, the Nazis led the race for the atomic bomb. Did scientific errors rob Hitler of a victory over the allies?
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Episode 8
This episode of Horizon looks at Britain's science spending and how it is falling behind it's competitors.
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Episode 9
Horizon presents the life and work of mathematician Dr. Alan Turing.
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Episode 10
This episode of Horizon is about how nuclear fusion has been heralded as the power of the future with the promise of clean affordable energy.
1993. Staffel 1993 (21 Episoden • 1993)
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This Horizon episode is about the new and terrible threat from tuberculosis which kills more people than any other infection.
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This is the second part of a two-part Horizon series presenting a portrait of Richard Feynman, the American Nobel Prize winning physicist.
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1994. Staffel 1994 (21 Episoden • 1994)
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Episode 1
Horizon brings you the international campaign to frame the laws of war by limiting the design and use of weapons aimed at "soft targets".
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Episode 2
This Horizon documentary explores theories about the reasons for the extinction of mammoths including those which survived on the Island of Wrangel.
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Episode 3
This is a Horizon episode that attempts to answer the question, "What is a mind?" and how does your brain create it? Gerald Edelman thinks he has the answer.
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Episode 4
Horizon brings you the story about a 13 year old girl who had lived most of her life tied up in the back room of her parent's house since the time she was born.
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Episode 5
In this report by Horizon, we look at a type of cancer which cured itself. The cancer cells were killing themselves and finding out why may revolutionize future cancer treatment.
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Episode 6
Horizon reports on a team investigating the mysterious disappearance of an airliner in 1992 that was flying over the Panamanian jungle.
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Episode 7
In this documentary, Horizon tries to answer the question if "Star Wars" technology could be used to destroy meteors big enough to threaten life on earth.
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Episode 8
This Horizon episode follows the rescue and repair mission carried out by the shuttle astronauts on the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Episode 9
Horizon explores scientific discoveries made in extraordinary ways.
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Episode 10
Horizon examines the continuing, bitter controversy over the claim that nuclear fusion has been produced in a test tube.
1995. Staffel 1995 (20 Episoden • 1995)
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Horizon brings you the recent discovery of the real Venus as space probes, like the Magellan, shattered previous existing concerning its geology.
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This Horizon episode is about the Earth as an icon.
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1996. Staffel 1996 (16 Episoden • 1996)
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Episode 1
Investigates the case of the "Boxgrove Man". Follows archaeologist Mark Roberts who tries to piece together the history of the first Englishman, from a shin bone nearly 500,000 years old, discovered in Boxgrove in Sussex.
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Episode 2
Tells the story of mathematician Andrew Wiles who has made it his life's work to solve the puzzle of Fermat's last theorem that has baffled minds for three centuries.
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Episode 3
Examines the latest research aimed at conquering cancer. Includes research into vaccines for prostate cancer and skin cancer.
04
Episode 4
Follows a group of biologists Conservation International who take a pragmatic approach to what species can be saved.They travel to the Bolivian rainforest to assess missing species.
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Episode 5
Follows two teams of researchers, in Britain and USA as they use radically different genetic techniques in the race to find an effective treatment against cystic fibrosis.
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Episode 6
Recounts the history of scientific attempts from Marconi onwards to understand the atmospheric layer, known as the ionosphere. Discusses interest shown by the US Military in the region which has led to the establishment of HAARP (High Altitude Auroral Research Project) which will beam energy directly into the ionosphere.
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Episode 7
Are changes in modern living increasing levels of oestrogen and threatening males of different species, from alligators to humans?
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Episode 8
In this Horizon documentary, we look at the notion that each cell in our body is programmed to die. Understanding this concept has major implications for research into disease.
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Episode 9
Follows astronomers from Manchester, Switzerland and California as they search for planets with liquid water on them, the prerequisite for life
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Episode 10
In this episode of Horizon, which is a follow-up to the 1991 documentary, we follow a group of soviet scientists on a suicide mission as they search for the missing nuclear fuel inside the remains of the nuclear reactor 4.
1997. Staffel 1997 (15 Episoden • 1997)
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Episode 1
Horizon reports on the resurgence in research on psychedelic drugs in the 1990's.
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Episode 2
In this documentary, Horizon investigates obesity in Britain, following a woman, Heather Osborne, who weighs 322 pounds. We watch her progress through a stomach stapling operation and explore reports on a so-called fat free fat and two new drugs which have been marketed as the ultimate cure for obesity.
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Episode 3
Horizon follows the investigations into the origins of a 16th century shipwreck discovered off of the coast of the Channel Islands.
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Episode 4
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In this episode, Horizon reports on the last lab samples of smallpox destined to be destroyed. But do we still have much to learn from this virus?
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Episode 6
In this episode, Horizon investigates an amazing new sign language developed solely by deaf children and explores if we copy language from what surrounds us.
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1998. Staffel 1998 (18 Episoden • 1998)
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Horizon presents this documentary on how special effects have evolved during the last century of films.
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1999. Staffel 1999 (13 Episoden • 1999)
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2000. Staffel 2000 (20 Episoden • 2000)
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Episode 1
In this moving film Horizon follows the Loughran family in their fight to save the life of their daughter Sheila who suffers from cystic fibrosis. They lost their youngest daughter Ann to the disease in 1974 at the age of 15, and now as the health of their third daughter Sheila deteriorates, they must face the prospect of losing a second child. The current shortage of donor organs means that Sheila's only hope of survival is a rare and controversial operation that requires her two surviving siblings to undergo an arduous and potentially fatal operation.
An X-ray of Shelia's lungs Cystic fibrosis (CF) is the most common genetic disease in this country and it is incurable. The lungs of people with cystic fibrosis become covered with a sticky mucus making them extremely susceptible to bacterial infection. Over time these infections badly scar the lungs, until eventually they stop functioning. The defective CF gene is harmless when only a single copy of the gene is inherited. However, both the Loughran parents carry the gene, giving any child they may have a 25% chance of being born with cystic fibrosis. In fact two of their four children were born with the condition.
Horizon joins the family at a time when Sheila's health has deteriorated to such an extent that she requires oxygen 24 hours a day and has only months to live. Although on the waiting list for a donor lung, with 50% of patients dying while waiting to receive a transplant, Sheila's chances are not good.
The family has become aware of a controversial new operation, pioneered in the UK by Professor Sir Magdi Yacoub at Harefield Hospital. The technique, known as Living Donor Lung Transplantation, would involve removing Sheila's diseased lungs and, in an extraordinary three-way operation, replacing them with a lobe from one of the lungs of each her two siblings.
There have been six of these groundbreaking operations carried out in this country. However, only three patients have lived longer than a month. There is a clear moral dilemma - with such a low success rate, is it ethical to put the lives of two healthy people at risk? Even if the operation is initially successful it may only give Sheila five more years to live, by which time her new lungs are likely to fail again.
Damian Loughran Sheila's brother and sister, Damian and Josephine, feel compelled to do anything they can to save their dying sister. They undergo stringent tests before being certain that they are compatible donors and fit for surgery. They will have to face the risk of haemorrhaging and infection, both of which could potentially be fatal. After the operation both donors will be left with a 20-25% permanent loss of lung function. Despite these dangers, Damian and Josephine remain determined to proceed.
As all three of their children are wheeled in for the 12-hour operation, Mary and Harry Loughran's emotion is apparent. A day later, Sheila is breathing with her new lungs, but it is not long before complications arise. She is unable to absorb food and develops an abscess on her lung. Sheila is kept under sedation and so is unaware of these complications. Sadly, three weeks after the operation, Sheila loses her fight for life.
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Episode 2
On a barren desert in South America lies one of the greatest archaeological puzzles in the world. Etched in the surface of the desert pampa sand are hundreds of straight lines, geometric shapes and pictures of animals and birds - and their patterns are only clearly visible from the air. They were built by a people called the Nasca - but why and how they created these wonders of the world has defied explanation.
On the pampa, south of the Nasca Lines, archaeologists have now uncovered the lost city of the line-builders, Cahuachi. It was built nearly two thousand years ago and was mysteriously abandoned 500 years later. New discoveries at Cahuachi are at last beginning to give us insight into the Nasca people and to unravel the mystery of the Nasca Lines.
Distorted heads The Lines were first spotted when commercial airlines began flying across the Peruvian desert in the 1920's. Passengers reported seeing 'primitive landing strips' on the ground below. No one knew who had built them or indeed why. Since their discovery, the Nasca Lines have inspired fantastic explanations.
SpiderPerhaps most famously, the Austrian writer Erich von Danikken claimed that they were evidence that the earth had been visited by extra-terrestrials. The lines, he said, were runways for their spacecraft. Scientific study began in the 1940s with the arrival of a German mathematician and astronomer called Maria Reiche. She lived at Nazca until her death in 1998 and was known as the Lady of the Lines. Reiche believed that the lines were a sophisticated astronomical calendar. However, in 1965, astronomer Gerald Hawkins came to Nazca and used computers to check Reiche's theory. Hawkins could find no correlation between the lines and the stars.
Giuseppe Orefici Italian archaeologist Giuseppe Orefici has been excavating the immense Cahuachi site for the last 17 years. Every year he brings a team of specialists to South America for three, intensive months of excavation. Horizon joined Orefici and his team in the hot, windy months of 1998 and this is a fascinating record of their extraordinary finds.
Woven clothCahuachi is emerging as a treasure trove of the Nasca culture. As Orefici and his team excavate, discoveries of paintings on preserved pottery, and the ancient technique of weaving that the Nasca people developed, have given an insight into how the lines may have been made, and what they might have been used for, more than 1500 years ago.
MummyMost exciting is the discovery of human remains. Stunningly preserved in the dry soil of the Peruvian desert are the mummified bodies of the Nasca themselves. Orefici's colleagues Brian Harrison and Andrea Drusini carry out modern autopsies on these remarkable finds, and reveal the strange world and rituals of the Nasca people.
CahuachiOriginally believed to have been a military stronghold, Cahuachi is now reckoned to be a place of ritual and ceremony, and Orefici's stunning new evidence confirms this idea. Cahuachi is now revealed to have been abandoned after a series of natural disasters destroyed the city. But before they left it, the Nasca people covered the city in the arid pampa sand where, until recently, it has remained a barely visible mound in the desert.
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Episode 3
There is something so special about diamonds, and they are so valuable, that people have always been prepared to go to the most extraordinary lengths to find them. But how would we feel about the uniqueness of diamonds if it was possible to make one in a laboratory, just like the real thing, down to the nearest atom? In the last few years there has been a scientific race to do exactly this: to manufacture the perfect gem diamond.
Today the dream is close to becoming reality. Science has finally found a way to replicate in a few days something that nature has taken millions of years to produce - diamonds. These man-made diamonds are so close to the real thing, that they have the same atomic structure as natural diamonds. Even the most sophisticated machines are finding it hard to tell the difference. More importantly, these diamonds can be made and sold at a profit.
Synthetic diamond press: This is the story of the race to produce man-made gem diamonds, from the first faltering steps 50 years ago, to today's 'New Alchemists' in Russia who are using the latest science and technology to produce perfect synthetic diamonds in an array of colours and sizes. And it is the story of how this leap in diamond-making technology has forced De Beers to develop ever-more sophisticated detection equipment, trying to spot the synthetics, while the physical distinction between real and man-made diamonds becomes more and more blurred.
Today there are alarm bells ringing at De Beers in Johannesburg. De Beers controls the world diamond trade. By buying up most of the world's uncut diamonds, the company can regulate supply to select dealers, increasing it in good years and reducing it in bad, to keep prices high. Every year 3 billion pounds worth of rough diamonds are distributed around the world for cutting and polishing.
The diamond market survives on public confidence. Already De Beers spends a fortune trying to detect synthetic gems, and teach wholesalers and graders what the molecular differences are. But imagine if these synthetics had exactly the same properties as real diamonds, each atom in place, every manufacturing flaw removed, leaving something indistinguishable from the real thing. They would be undetectable. What would a real diamond be then? To many, the difference would be purely psychological. And so what would happen to public confidence in the natural diamond market?
Man made diamonds: According to the new alchemists, this is all just about to happen.
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Episode 4
Hidden deep beneath the Earth's surface lie one of the most destructive and yet least-understood natural phenomena in the world - supervolcanoes. Only a handful exist in the world but when one erupts it will be unlike any volcano we have ever witnessed. The explosion will be heard around the world. The sky will darken, black rain will fall, and the Earth will be plunged into the equivalent of a nuclear winter.
Normal volcanoes are formed by a column of magma - molten rock - rising from deep within the Earth, erupting on the surface, and hardening in layers down the sides. This forms the familiar cone shaped mountain we associate with volcanoes. Supervolcanoes, however, begin life when magma rises from the mantle to create a boiling reservoir in the Earth's crust. This chamber increases to an enormous size, building up colossal pressure until it finally erupts.
The last supervolcano to erupt was Toba 74,000 years ago in Sumatra. Ten thousand times bigger than Mt St Helens, it created a global catastrophe dramatically affecting life on Earth. Scientists know that another one is due - they just don't know when... or where.
Yellowstone National Park: It is little known that lying underneath one of America's areas of outstanding natural beauty - Yellowstone Park - is one of the largest supervolcanoes in the world. Scientists have revealed that it has been on a regular eruption cycle of 600,000 years. The last eruption was 640,000 years ago... so the next is overdue.
And the sleeping giant is breathing: volcanologists have been tracking the movement of magma under the park and have calculated that in parts of Yellowstone the ground has risen over seventy centimetres this century. Is this just the harmless movement of lava, flowing from one part of the reservoir to another? Or does it presage something much more sinister, a pressurised build-up of molten lava?
Scientists have very few answers, but they do know that the impact of a Yellowstone eruption is terrifying to comprehend. Huge areas of the USA would be destroyed, the US economy would probably collapse, and thousands might die.
And it would devastate the planet. Climatologists now know that Toba blasted so much ash and sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere that it blocked out the sun, causing the Earth's temperature to plummet. Some geneticists now believe that this had a catastrophic effect on human life, possibly reducing the population on Earth to just a few thousand people. Mankind was pushed to the edge of extinction... and it could happen again.
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Episode 5
When and how did space and time begin? The birth of the Universe is one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. It has perplexed the best scientific minds for centuries. Decades before space travel was possible, astronomers dreamed of putting a telescope into orbit to try and answer these fundamental questions. It wasn't until the 1970s, when space flight had become a reality, that NASA resolved to build just such a space telescope. They named it Hubble.
This was one of the most ambitious missions ever conceived. The technical challenges were enormous and it took 12 years to design and build. Travelling at seventeen thousand miles an hour, the Hubble Telescope would take pictures of the furthest reaches of space, transmitting them 400 miles back to Earth.
In April 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was launched. But just weeks later, disaster struck - the $2 billion telescope had a fatal flaw in its main mirror. This was not just a disaster for NASA; it was a national scandal. Hubble had to be saved; scientists and engineers began to search desperately for a solution to the problem.
Plans for an adventurous repair mission began to take shape but it was two years before work could be carried out. It took astronauts five gruelling space-walks to carefully replace the instruments and patch up the telescope. But nobody knew if Hubble would be able to deliver on any of its original promises.
Finally, the miracle happened. An unexpected avalanche of data from Hubble confirmed that the telescope was fixed. At last it began to solve the most fundamental puzzles of the Universe.
Hubble has given us breathtaking images of the birth of stars; it has found black holes swallowing matter at the centre of galaxies; and last year the Hubble Telescope resolved the most fundamental question in astronomy - the age of the Universe. At last, half a century of scientific endeavour was rewarded.
Horizon marks the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope by tracing the extraordinary tale of triumph, disaster and eventual success of this unique window into the Universe.
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Episode 6
What happens when a completely healthy person wants their leg amputated?
Gregg is 55 and does not feel physically whole. This is despite the fact that he is physically healthy and able-bodied. Gregg believes he is incomplete with two legs and it has been his life-long struggle to get doctors to agree that removing one of his legs is the right thing for him. He isn't delusional. He knows what he is asking for and knows it is strange. But he cannot help his feelings. Gregg suffers from a rare but genuine psychological disorder - a form of body dysmorphia. And Gregg is not alone.
Although Body Dysmorphia is rare, a worldwide network of sufferers is growing and demanding treatment. It affects both men and women and each person has a precise sense of which limb or limbs they want removed.
Cases were cited a hundred years ago but still very little is known about the disorder. No one knows what causes it and very few psychiatrists have even encountered patients with the disorder. All that the patients seem to have in common is a strong memory of the first amputee they saw. They also report that the feelings started in childhood. However, the profession is now being forced to respond and devise methods of treatment. If not treated, it has been reported that suffers can go to extreme lengths to remove the unwanted limbs themselves. Some have even committed suicide.
The difficulty with the condition is that the conventional methods for treating psychological problems, drugs and therapy, do not seem to be effective. The only treatment that does seem to be effective is surgery - actually removing the limb. The idea of using surgery is highly controversial and has divided the medical community. Some physicians consider it much too drastic a measure, possibly conflicting with their Hippocratic oath, not to cause harm. Others believe that it is the only way to free the patient of their obsession, 'curing' them of their psychological problem.
At the present time, there is only one surgeon in Britain who has been prepared to perform such operations and who has publicly defended his decision. He has operated on two patients, both of who claim to be delighted with their new body-image and now free to get on with the rest of their lives.
There are many other patients who seek similar treatment. Horizon 'Complete Obsession' follows a year in the lives of people who are body dysmorphic and are determined to have their limbs surgically removed. It follows the process they go through to try and achieve their goal.
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Episode 7
Some people see GM food as a ground-breaking scientific idea that could help to end world hunger and reduce global pollution. Others see it purely as 'Frankenstein foods' on 21st century menus, bringing health and environmental disasters. But what are the real scientific facts behind the newspaper headlines?
Scientists can manipulate the genetic code of life to produce plants with new characteristics never seen in nature. They can isolate any one gene from any organism like an animal or bacterium, and insert it into a completely unrelated species like a plant. The possibilities are almost endless - Scientists can insert a gene from a bacterium into a grape to make it resistant to viruses. Or they can engineer maize that resists drought or potatoes that resist pests, so farmers can use less pesticides on their crops.
For thousands of years we have been tampering with the genes of plants by traditional breeding. But there's a key difference here - with traditional plant breeding genes cross within the same species. But GM allows plant breeders to break the species barrier. And for critics this is fundamentally unnatural.
The fear is that the proteins produced by these foreign genes might be dangerous. Either because the protein itself is poisonous or because it might alter the chemistry of the plant so that the plant becomes toxic. Detailed tests are performed on the plants to discover if they are substantially biologically and chemically the same as before modification and if they have become toxic or allergenic.
Critics believe that no amount of testing can ensure that GM crops are completely safe. They believe that there is too much we don't understand about the complex genetic make-up of living organisms. And that even though there is little evidence so far, there may be a risk that genetic modification could cause effects so unexpected that they will be missed by all the tests biotech scientists carry out.
In contrast genetic engineers claim their work is safer and more predictable because they are moving just one or two specific genes, and they can more easily test the effects.
But those who campaign against GM have another fear: that the genes from the engineered plant will spread throughout the plant world, creating new strains of superweed and superbug we cannot control.
Horizon explores the key elements of scientific facts to try to answer the ultimate question: do the dangers of GM foods outweigh their benefits?
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Episode 8
If extra-terrestrials do exist they must have a home. Horizon tells the story of the race to find out where in the Universe this might be. The answer, for scientists across the world, lies in the hunt for planets around distant stars.
Stars which are trillions of miles away from our own solar system.
But the history of the planet hunters is littered with failure. Centuries of searching had thrown up nothing. It was time for the new style planet hunters to step in. However, it is only in the last ten years that these scientists have had the technology to succeed. Even now looking for these distant planets is far from straightforward.
The planets themselves are so faint that they cannot be seen, even by the most powerful telescopes ever built. Instead the astronomers must devise ingenious ways to search for clues to their presence. They examine stars just like our own Sun, across the galaxy, for any give-away characteristics that might indicate that they too have planets circling around them.
A Swiss team finally struck gold in 1995 - convinced they'd detected a star that must have its own planet. Their discovery was the first of its kind but not the last. Other teams started to get lucky and suddenly it seemed like there were stars with planets everywhere. But the scientific community soon became restless. All they had done so far was detect the presence of alien planets - without seeing one, it was impossible to work out what the planet was like.
If these planets really did exist it was time the scientists caught a glimpse of one of them. Only then would they be able to learn about the planet - its surface and its atmosphere. And only then would they know whether it could sustain life as we know it.
Horizon follows the trials and tribulations of the planet hunters and shares in the triumph of the Scottish team who, just a few months ago, became the first to achieve the ultimate goal - to capture the image of an alien planet. It is orbiting another star, 55 light years away from Earth.
The question is - how similar is this planet to our own and could it be home to alien life? Horizon uncovers the answers.
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Episode 9
A handful of children around the world cannot tolerate the sun. Any exposure leads rapidly to skin cancer. They must either play indoors during daylight or be protected from head to toe in UV-proof suits. These children suffer from a strange and rare genetically-inherited disease, xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP, which means that within seconds of the sun's rays touching their skin, they are in danger of developing skin cancer.
Sun Children with XP are missing the crucial gene that repairs damage to DNA and so exposure to any carcinogen - UV light, or even cigarette smoke - is lethal. Unless, they are thoroughly protected they will die from cancer at an early age. There is no cure.
But these tragic children may may lead the way to new and better cancer treatment. Through studying XP sufferers, scientists have reached a whole new understanding of the genetic basis of cancer. They can now predict why one in three people will succumb to cancer. Scientists have discovered how the body survives damage and repairs itself and as a result of this, developed a radical new approach to treating cancer.
Horizon explores the story of one family, where 5 out of 7 siblings suffer from XP, and how they provide the final proof that genes and DNA repair are linked to cancer. It follows an intricate 40-year scientific detective story from the discovery of DNA, through the chance findings of the cells of the XP families that led to the unexpected insight that DNA is capable of repairing itself and that the failure of this repair system underlies most cancers.
After years of research, this insight is finally beginning to revolutionise medicine. Now a new concept in cancer drug therapy is just beginning medical trials based on the knowledge gained from children suffering from XP.
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Episode 10
Scattered across the world’s oceans are a handful of rare geological time-bombs. Once unleashed they create an extraordinary phenomenon, a gigantic tidal wave, far bigger than any normal tsunami, able to cross oceans and ravage countries on the other side of the world. Only recently have scientists realised the next episode is likely to begin at the Canary Islands, off North Africa, where a wall of water will one day be created which will race across the entire Atlantic ocean at the speed of a jet airliner to devastate the east coast of the United States. America will have been struck by a mega-tsunami.
Back in 1953 two geologists travelled to a remote bay in Alaska looking for oil. They gradually realised that in the past the bay had been struck by huge waves, and wondered what could have possibly caused them. Five years later, they got their answer. In 1958 there was a landslide, in which a towering cliff collapsed into the bay, creating a wave half a kilometre high, higher than any skyscraper on Earth. The true destructive potential of landslide-generated tsunami, which scientists named "Mega-tsunami", suddenly began to be appreciated. If a modest-sized landslide in Alaska could create a wave of this size, what havoc could a really huge landslide cause?
Scientists now realise that the greatest danger comes from large volcanic islands, which are particularly prone to these massive landslides. Geologists began to look for evidence of past landslides on the sea bed, and what they saw astonished them. The sea floor around Hawaii, for instance, was covered with the remains of millions of years’ worth of ancient landslides, colossal in size.
But huge landslides and the mega-tsunami that they cause are extremely rare - the last one happened 4,000 years ago on the island of Réunion. The growing concern is that the ideal conditions for just such a landslide - and consequent mega-tsunami - now exist on the island of La Palma in the Canaries. In 1949 the southern volcano on the island erupted. During the eruption an enormous crack appeared across one side of the volcano, as the western half slipped a few metres towards the Atlantic before stopping in its tracks. Although the volcano presents no danger while it is quiescent, scientists believe the western flank will give way completely during some future eruption on the summit of the volcano. In other words, any time in the next few thousand years a huge section of southern La Palma, weighing 500 thousand million tonnes, will fall into the Atlantic ocean.
What will happen when the volcano on La Palma collapses? Scientists predict that it will generate a wave that will be almost inconceivably destructive, far bigger than anything ever witnessed in modern times. It will surge across the entire Atlantic in a matter of hours, engulfing the whole US east coast, sweeping away everything in its path up to 20km inland. Boston would be hit first, followed by New York, then all the way down the coast to Miami and the Caribbean.
2001. Staffel 2001 (11 Episoden • 2001)
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Episode 1
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Episode 2
A trail from Greenland to Britain via Latvia offers new evidence into how evolution could have seen aquatic life form legs and walk.
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Episode 3
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Episode 4
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Episode 5
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Episode 6
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Episode 7
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Episode 8
In 2001, scientists announced an amazing discovery: the oldest skull of a human ancestor ever found. The 3 million year old fossil was remarkably complete, and unlike any previous fossil find. Its discovery - by a team led by Meave Leakey of the famous Leakey fossil-hunting family - has revolutionised our understanding of how humans evolved.
The great mystery of our evolution is how an ape could have evolved into the extraordinary creature that is a human being. There has never been another animal like us on the planet. And yet ten million years ago there was no sign that humans would take over the world. Instead the Earth was dominated by the apes. More than 50 different species of ape roamed the world - ten million years ago Earth really was the planet of the apes. Three million years later, most had vanished. In their place came something clearly related to the apes, but also completely different: human beings!
For years scientists searched for the first key characteristic which had allowed us to make the huge leap from ape to amazing human. At first they thought the development of our big brains was decisive. They even found the fossil that seemed to prove it, until along came the famous three million year old fossilised skeleton Lucy. This quashed the big brain theory, because here was a human ancestor which clearly walked on two legs, just as we do, but had the tiny brain of an ape. It seemed that the development of walking on two legs (bipedalism) was the first key human characteristic, the thing that set us on the road to becoming human.
Lucy soon became even more important. She seemed to defy the laws of evolution. Normally a major evolutionary adaptation like walking on two legs is followed by what scientists call an adaptive radiation. Many related species quickly evolve from an initial evolutionary innovation. It gives a very bushy evolutionary family tree, with many different but related species. Scientists knew that the human branch of the family tree had begun about six or seven million years ago, when the planet of the apes ended. And yet there was no sign of an adaptive radiation. The family tree showed just a straight line leading from the planet of the apes through to Lucy.
All that has changed with Meave Leakey's spectacular new discovery, named Kenyanthropus platyops or, less formally, Flat-faced Man. Her find is the same age as Lucy's species, but also completely different. It's proof that there were two different bipedal human ancestors living at the same time, more than three million years ago. And it's the first sign of the adaptive radiation that the theory of evolution says should have followed the planet of the apes.
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Episode 9
Matthew Farrow was born with a rare and fatal blood disease, Fanconi's anaemia. His family and doctors thought he was going to die. Instead, aged just five, he became the first person in the world to be given a radical new treatment that few believed would work. It saved his life.
The treatment was remarkably simple. A small quantity of blood taken from a newborn baby's umbilical cord and placenta was infused into him. Thanks to this cord blood, Matthew Farrow is now a healthy teenager and the treatment he helped to pioneer is giving hope to hundreds of critically ill children around the world.
Cord blood contains a large number of blood stem cells, the mysterious factory cells that make all the red and white blood cells our body needs. Stem cells can rebuild a sick child's blood system in just a few weeks, by producing healthy new blood cells.
Until Matthew's case, babies' umbilical cords and placentas were just thrown away at birth. Established medical thought said the only source of blood stem cells was the bone marrow and the only treatment for children with advanced blood cancers was a bone marrow transplant. One in three affected children cannot find a suitable bone marrow donor, and there was a desperate need for an alternative.
The first doctors to suggest cord blood as an answer were dismissed as dreamers.
But pioneering work over the last twenty years, mainly in America, has shown that the tiny quantity of blood contained in a newborn's umbilical cord and placenta is rich in the crucial stem cells. It is now being used to help to treat a broad range of blood cancers and serious genetic blood diseases.
However, even its advocates admit that cord blood is no miracle cure. Cord blood is a significant medical breakthrough, but it cannot save everyone who is treated with it.
This powerful and moving film follows patients and their doctors as they go through this arduous new treatment. Not all patients survive the transplant. However, for some patients this treatment is a lifeline when there is no option of a bone marrow transplant. Since 1990, over a thousand lives have been saved by this new treatment.
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Episode 10
2002. Staffel 2002 (18 Episoden • 2002)
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Episode 1
On a winter night in 373 BC, the classical Greek city of Helike was destroyed by a massive earthquake and tidal wave. The entire city and all its inhabitants were lost beneath the sea. What has bewitched archaeologists about Helike is that it was engulfed just when ancient Greece was reaching its height; when the philosophy and art that inspired the western world for thousands of years were invented.
Its destruction was one of the most appalling tragedies of the classical world and most probably the reality behind the myth of Atlantis. But now, unlike Atlantis, a team of archaeologists may have found Helike - a lost city from the heyday of Greek civilisation. If it is as well preserved as everyone hopes, Helike could be a time capsule from this crucial time in human development.
For centuries there had been just no sign of it. All archaeologists had to guide them were obscure and often contradictory ancient texts. So, despite numerous expeditions trawling the waters off the coast of Greece and vast amounts of money and technology thrown at the problem, no one could find anything except two small coins, unearthed over a hundred years ago.
Then, in 1988 Dora Katsonopoulou and Steven Soter took up the challenge. Dora had grown up with the legend from childhood and was determined to find the archaeological treasure on her doorstep. Together they went back to basics and re-examined the ancient texts. These said that Helike had sunk into a poros, which everyone had taken to mean Gulf of Corinthe. But Dora thought that a poros could also be an inland lagoon. If she was right, the lost city which had inspired Atlantis might not be under the sea, as everyone thought, but somewhere inland.
Studying the geology of the region, earthquake expert Iain Stewart argues that a large earthquake could well cause an inland lagoon. Small recent earthquakes in the region have caused ground liquefaction - a terrifying phenomenon where the ground literally turns to water beneath your feet. If the same had happened on a much larger scale then the whole city could have been plunged downwards, taking much of the city below sea level. But the earthquake in 373 BC could also have had a second more devastating effect. As well as liquifaction recent earthquakes have caused chunks of coastline to fall into the sea. If this happened on a large scale underwater landslides could cause a large wave, or tsunami. This would race across the Gulf of Corinthe, ricochet off the opposite bank and come charging back again, to crash over the sunken plain and fill in the lagoon. Dora's theory makes sense, except for one thing. There is no lagoon in the region today. There is, though, a trail of clues that explains what could have happened. An ancient bridge that is strangely nowhere near water shows how river sediment coming down from the mountains changes the shape of the plain - over hundreds of years the lagoon would have silted up, hiding the lost city beneath solid ground. A host of boreholes drilled into the plain and a remote cave with the legend attached to it have helped pinpoint where the now underground city might lie. Slowly Dora and Steven have pieced it all together, but there have been several false starts along the way. The first lot of ruins they found were Roman - a settlement built hundreds of years after Helike's disappearance to honour the famous lost city. Next they found ruins that turned out to be prehistoric - an early bronze age settlement built 2,500 years before Helike. It wasn't until 2001 that Dora and Steven at last got their breakthrough.
Whilst Horizon was filming, the team uncovered ruins from classical Greece. Securely dated by coins and pottery, the team are convinced they have at last found the city they've been looking for. It will take years to uncover Helike's riches, but for the first time in thousands of years, we have glimpses of the lost city that inspired Atlantis.
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Episode 2
It began with a ghastly tragedy. In 1985 the massive Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted, melting a glacier and sending a vast landslide of mud down on the people asleep in the town of Armero below. Twenty thousand died.
In the aftermath science was set a challenge: to make sure such a catastrophe never happened again, by finding a way of accurately predicting when a volcano will erupt. Now, at last, it seems that one scientist may have met that challenge. Anyone can tell when a volcano becomes active. You can see it and you can smell it. But a volcano can be active for years without erupting. For those living nearby, there is no way they will abandon their homes and livelihoods just because of a few rumblings. The only way to persuade them to seek safety is to predict an eruption almost to the day, leaving just enough time for an evacuation.
Scientists threw themselves at the problem, but there just seemed to be no way to make sense of the violent forces at work inside a volcano. Then along came Bernard Chouet. He is different from other volcanologists. His training lay in the complex equations and theories of physics, and he believed the answer had to lie in analysing the mysterious patterns drawn by seismographs. These measure the tremors caused by active volcanoes. Previous attempts to use these tremors to predict eruptions had proved fruitless. No one could find any correlation between the squiggles on the graph paper and the timing of eruptions. So Chouet locked himself away for five years and then emerged claiming he had found the answer. The key, he said, were seismic signals called long period events. These strange shapes had baffled volcanologists for years. Chouet said they were made by molten magma resonating - that is coming under pressure - inside the volcano. The more long period events there were, then the nearer the volcano was to exploding. Chouet could use the long period events to predict an eruption to within days.
But another scientist was working on a completely different method. Stanley Williams could not be more different from Chouet. Where Chouet crunched numbers and looked at graphs, Williams climbed into craters and got up close; because he believed the best clue to when a volcano would erupt was to measure how much gas it was belching out. In 1993 the two methods came head to head. A conference was held at the foot of another Colombian volcano, Galeras. The highlight was to be a trip into the crater. Williams's gas readings indicated the volcano was safe. Chouet's long period events suggested the volcano might blow. After some debate, Williams led a team of volcanologists up the mountain. Suddenly Galeras exploded, killing six scientists and three tourists. Williams himself survived but was maimed for life. Since that day on Galeras, Chouet's methods have commanded wide respect and have been increasingly used around the world. In a dramatic demonstration last year Mexican scientists used Chouet's method to predict an eruption of the mighty volcano Popocatepetl. Tens of thousands of people were safely evacuated just before the biggest eruption of the volcano for a thousand years. No one was hurt.
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Episode 3
There is a new epidemic sweeping the world. It's been silently growing over the last few decades - only now is it reaching dramatic proportions. If current trends continue, more than one quarter of British adults will have this disease by the year 2010. This new epidemic is obesity. Scientists have recently made significant discoveries, which could lead to a drug treatment for obesity. In the meantime, until the drugs are developed, what should we do to keep off the pounds? One thing is certain. Willpower alone won't stop the epidemic of obesity; however, new research suggests there may be an easier way to fight the flab than joining the gym. Meet the Padded Lilies, a troupe of obese water ballet dancers who insist it is impossible to change our natural weight. They say they are born with a slow metabolic rate that has made them fat. But scientists now know that fat people actually have a faster metabolic rate. The Padded Lilies' suspicion that there is something wrong with their biology may well be true... but not in the way they thought.
In 1994, research into a fat mouse was the starting point for a revolution in the science of obesity. The obese mouse was missing a hormone called leptin, which turns off the feelings of hunger. Wall Street went mad and the patent for leptin was purchased by a biotechnology company for millions of dollars. It seemed that at last a quick fix for obesity had been found. However, researchers quickly discovered that fat people had lots of leptin. There seemed to be no connection between the fat mice and obesity in humans. Then four years ago at Cambridge University, a young researcher, examined the blood of two young children who were so obese they could hardly walk and were confined to wheelchairs. She discovered these children, just like the mouse, didn't have the genetic information to make leptin and so could not suppress their appetites.
She had for the first time ever identified human beings who were obese because of a genetic error and not because they didn't have the willpower to control their desire for food. In the last few years, research into obesity has snowballed and scientists around the world have begun to explore the area of genetic human obesity. Dr John Clapham is tackling the problem of obesity from another angle, by speeding up metabolism. Based in a top secret lab he has genetically manipulated a mouse that we all want to be. It can eat huge amounts of food yet, because it has an unnaturally high metabolism, it can't put on weight. This cutting edge science could lead to another target for the battle against obesity. However, we don't yet have this miracle treatment, so what can we do in the meantime? Dr James Levine has come up with an extraordinary idea. His study suggests there may be a way to shed those pounds without taking drugs or even joining a gym. He has found that people who fidget find it very difficult to put on weight. So we don't necessarily need exercise, we simply need to up the pace of our lives; walk rather than drive, climb the stairs rather than take the lift, don't sit still: fidget. All this should help us keep the calories at bay.
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Episode 4
The magnificent ancient city of pyramids at Caral in Peru hit the headlines in 2001. The site is a thousand years older than the earliest known civilisation in the Americas and, at 2,627 BC, is as old as the pyramids of Egypt. Many now believe it is the fabled missing link of archaeology - a 'mother city'. If so, then these extraordinary findings could finally answer one of the great questions of archaeology: why did humans become civilised? For over a century, archaeologists have been searching for what they call a mother city. Civilisation began in only six areas of the world: Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Peru and Central America. In each of these regions people moved from small family units to build cities of thousands of people. They crossed the historic divide, one of the great moments in human history. Why? To find the answer archaeologists needed to find a mother city - the first stage of city-building. They couldn't find one anywhere. Everywhere this first stage seemed destroyed or built over. And so, instead, scientists developed a number of theories. Some said it was because of the development of trade, others that it was irrigation. Some even today believe it was all because of aliens. Gradually an uneasy consensus emerged. The key force common to all civilisations was warfare. The theory was that only the fear of war could motivate people to give up the simple life and form complex societies. To prove it, archaeologists still had to find a city from that very first stage of civilisation. If it showed signs of warfare, then the theory had to be true. When archaeologist Ruth Shady discovered her 5,000 year old city of pyramids in the Peruvian desert, all eyes were on the New World. Ruth's extraordinary city, known as Caral, is so much older than anything else in South America that it is a clear candidate to be the mother city. It also is in pristine condition. Nothing has been built on it at all. Instead laid out before the world is an elaborate complex of pyramids, temples, an amphitheatre and ordinary houses. Crucially, there is not the faintest trace of warfare at Caral; no battlements, no weapons, no mutilated bodies. Instead, Ruth's findings suggest it was a gentle society, built on commerce and pleasure. In one of the pyramids they uncovered beautiful flutes made from condor and pelican bones. They have also found evidence of a culture that took drugs and perhaps aphrodisiacs. Most stunning of all, they have found the remains of a baby, lovingly wrapped and buried with a precious necklace made of stone beads.
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Episode 5
In September 1991 two hikers made a sensational discovery - a frozen body high in the mountains, near the border between Austria and Italy. It turned out to be 5,300 years old, the oldest frozen mummy ever found. Named Ötzi the Iceman after the Ötztal area where he was found, he became a worldwide sensation.
The body was taken to Austria where scientists soon got to work on him. They analysed his bone density to find out how old he was (in his 40s, an advanced age for the time) and examined his wonderfully preserved belongings. The cause of his death remained a mystery. Now archaeologists are being joined by forensic scientists to investigate this unique case and new research has revealed a shocking answer.
The investigation into Ötzi's death started at the scene of discovery. By examining photos which had been taken at the site, Austrian archaeologist Konrad Spindler worked out the layout. He was particularly intrigued by the position of the Iceman's copper axe, which was found propped up against a rock. He believed that this must have been placed in that position by Ötzi himself which meant that everything at the site had been preserved in the position it was when Ötzi died. His body was slumped face down on the ground, his cap lay nearby just as if it had fallen from his head.
Scientists also wanted to know when he died so they examined the ice in which he'd been found. This contained pollen that they could identify as coming from autumn-flowering plants, so they concluded that Ötzi had died in the autumn. Together, this evidence implied that the Iceman might have got caught in a storm and died of hypothermia. Then the scientists looked inside the iceman using X-rays and CAT (Computer Assisted Tomography) scans. They saw what looked like unhealed rib fractures. So Spindler came up with what he called his disaster theory. He believed Ötzi was a shepherd who, one autumn, was returning to his home village with his animals. When he got there he became involved in some kind of argument or battle. He suffered a severe injury to his chest, fracturing his ribs, but managed to escape. He fled into the mountains and made it to the top, but by then he was exhausted from his injuries. He lay down to rest in a sheltered gully where he died of hypothermia and was buried in ice.
The theory seemed to make sense, but it would not go unchallenged for long. In 1998, Ötzi was transferred to Italy since the body had actually been found just inside the Italian border. There the iceman was placed on display in a specially built museum in the town of Bolzano. To put the finishing touch to their display, the museum contacted forensic pathologist Peter Vanezis to reconstruct Ötzi's face, based on the shape of the skull. Vanezis normally works from the skull itself, but in this case, of course, that was impossible. So using the 3D CAT scan data and a rapid prototyping machine, the Austrian team created a detailed life-size replica of the Iceman's skull and gave this to Vanezis. He then used a laser to scan the skull into his facial reconstruction system. This measures the proportions of the skull and shapes a generic face to match. This allowed him to recreate Ötzi's face at last.
Vanezis also wanted to look again at the theory of Ötzi's death, to question assumptions that the archaeologists had made. More and more evidence was questioning the disaster theory. An examination of the contents of Ötzi's intestine found hop hornbeam pollen. This pollen was incredibly well preserved - the cell contents still intact. This could only mean that it had been consumed very soon after the flowering of the plant just before the Iceman died. And since the hop hornbeam only flowers between March and June he must have actually died in spring.
Also, evidence from the body and objects showed that the site had melted at least once and so things weren't necessarily in the same position. And finally, new examinations of the ribs showed that they hadn't been fractured before death - but been bent out of shape after death. Scientists seemed to be back to square one. IIt seemed his death might be shrouded in mystery forever. Then in June 2001, his new custodians, the Italians, decided to X-ray the body again. A local hospital radiologist noticed what looked like a foreign object near the shoulder, a shadow in the shape of an arrow. When they looked at its density they found it was denser than bone, it was the same density as flint. They'd discovered a stone arrowhead embedded in Ötzi's shoulder, which had been missed despite 10 years of intensive study. Now scientists can tell a new story of the Iceman's death. Ötzi was attacked and managed to flee. As he ran he was shot in the back with an arrow. He pulled out the arrow shaft but the head remained stuck in his shoulder. He reached the top of the mountains but was now exhausted and weakened from bleeding. He could go no further, lay down and died.
Although this story fits the latest results, there are still many unanswered questions. Scientists hope soon to conduct an autopsy to remove the arrowhead and only then will we be able to say for certain what killed Ötzi. The Iceman may still be hiding more secrets.
06
Episode 6
Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Yet it's all true.
Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimetre away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.
For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on the possible other universes which might exist. In one, they said, Elvis Presley might still be alive or in another the British Empire might still be going strong. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn't absurd enough. Parallel universes really do exist and they are much stranger than even the science fiction writers dared to imagine. It all started when superstring theory, hyperspace and dark matter made physicists realise that the three dimensions we thought described the Universe weren't enough. There are actually 11 dimensions. By the time they had finished they'd come to the conclusion that our Universe is just one bubble among an infinite number of membranous bubbles which ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension.
Now imagine what might happen if two such bubble universes touched. Neil Turok from Cambridge, Burt Ovrut from the University of Pennsylvania and Paul Steinhardt from Princeton believe that has happened. The result? A very big bang indeed and a new universe was born - our Universe. The idea has shocked the scientific community; it turns the conventional Big Bang theory on its head. It may well be that the Big Bang wasn't really the beginning of everything after all. Time and space all existed before it. In fact Big Bangs may happen all the time.
Of course this extraordinary story about the origin of our Universe has one alarming implication. If a collision started our Universe, could it happen again? Anything is possible in this extra-dimensional cosmos. Perhaps out there in space there is another universe heading directly towards us - it may only be a matter of time before we collide.
07
Episode 7
In the mid 1800s, when Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, one species of animal remained a mystery; where did birds fit on his evolutionary tree? Several years later his friend and colleague, Thomas Henry Huxley, came up with an answer. Huxley had recently examined a new fossil from southern Germany called Archaeopteryx which was causing considerable excitement in palaeontological circles. There were clear signs of feathers and it was obvious this was the earliest fossil evidence of a bird ever found. Huxley noticed something else as well. To him it looked as though the skeleton bore a striking similarity to that of a family of meat eating dinosaurs known as therapods.
In the 1860s, on the basis of this observation, he announced a new theory; birds must have evolved from dinosaurs. The theory ignited what was to become one of the biggest controversies in palaeontology. Could Huxley possibly be right; how could a large, land-bound creature like a dinosaur have ever evolved into something as light and sleek as a bird? Many questioned the accuracy of Huxley's observations and ever since there has been a search for further fossil evidence to confirm the theory; a transitional animal which would incontrovertibly show how, in one creature, birds had evolved from dinosaurs. It has become one of the big missing links in palaeontology.
In Spring 1999, at the Tucson Gem and Fossil Fair in Arizona, an American collector came across a new Chinese fossil which seemed to be just this transitional animal. It had the head and upper body of a bird but the tail of a dinosaur. It was called Archaeoraptor or 'ancient hunter'.
Throughout the 1990s a number of important fossils emerged from China showing an apparent relationship between dinosaurs and birds. Practically all come from a region in the north of the country called Liaoning, one of the richest fossil areas in the world. Here, 130 million years ago, volcanic eruptions buried a wetland once teeming in wildlife. Many of the fossils have been magnificently preserved in the fine silt; some even have the remains of soft tissue attached to them.
It was here, in 1996, that Chinese scientists found a creature they called Sinosauropteryx, an animal which bore many similarities to a dinosaur but appeared to have been covered in a feathery like coat. Two years later a joint Chinese/American team found an even more striking creature; a dinosaur like animal with very clear feathers which they called Caudipteryx. Other similar feathered dinosaurs followed, including in 1999, an important specimen called Sinornithosurus. Yet to those who questioned the relationship between dinosaurs and birds, these fabulous finds raised as many questions as they answered. Were the feather-like markings really signs of feathers, or were they something else? And were the skeletons really those of dinosaurs or were they, in fact, the skeletons of new, as yet unidentified, birds? What was still missing was the piece of evidence which would satisfy everybody.
The new Archaeoraptor fossil, also from the Liaoning region of China, seemed to be just that. Here, in one animal, was a unique range of dinosaur and bird features. It had the skull and upper body of a bird, but the teeth and hands of a dinosaur. It also had the legs of a bird but the tail of a dinosaur. It was the most complete set of transitional features ever found in one creature. In November 1999 National Geographic Magazine gave it a special mention in an article about the origins of birds, calling it, "a true missing link.". The debate, started by Thomas Huxley in the 1860s, seemed to have been resolved.
Yet within months, new finds in China showed Archaeoraptor to be an extremely clever fake. The head and upper body of a hitherto unidentified bird had been glued onto the tail of a previously unknown dinosaur. It was a journalistic disaster for National Geographic Magazine. The fossil, however, was anything but a disaster for palaeontology. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, as scientists in China and America examined the head and tail separately, they found that both were, in their own right, unique and extremely valuable specimens. Both, in their different ways, contained powerful evidence that birds had evolved from dinosaurs.
08
Episode 8
The World Trade Center was built on revolutionary design principles. It turned conventional architectural and structural techniques on their head. Built from a thin web of steel, its design was efficient, cost-effective and would inspire a new wave in modern building techniques.
The result was two towers that were both lightweight and strong. When they were completed they were the tallest in the world. They were also milestones of architecture for another reason. The two towers were the first skyscrapers explicitly designed to withstand being hit by a jet plane. Although they had considered an aircraft impact, the designers of the World Trade towers had not anticipated the effect of an aeroplane's fuel load. British-born survivor Paul Neal tells how he smelt jet fuel rushing through the lift shafts close to his desk. "I recognised it because I'm a private pilot. I recall smelling it and instantly dismissed it as being illogical because it didn't have any place in the World Trade Center."
Survivor, Bill Forney, recalls the instant that the 767 aircraft hit the North Tower one floor above where he was sitting. "The building started shaking. It lurched back and forth. It was the first time that I had truly thought that I might die. After a terrifying six to ten movements back and forth it was over and it was done."
The World Trade Center had ultra-lightweight floors, and used the latest fireproof 'drywall' to protect the stairwells and lift shafts. Much of this internal structure seems to have been vaporized when the planes crashed, exposing the underlying steel to the intense heat of multiple fires. Brian Clark was one of the only four survivors from both towers to escape from above where the planes hit. He describess clambering over the shattered walls to break through a smoke-filled stairwell to get out. "Drywall had been blown off and was lying up against the stair railing." he says, "We had to shovel it aside." Another survivor, window cleaner Jan Demczur, found the drywall so soft that he was able to dig through it with a squeegee to break out of a lift he was trapped in.
The two towers responded differently to the initial impacts, because there were crucial differences between the collisions. The South Tower, struck second, was hit lower, and the damaged zone of the tower then had to support a much greater weight of building above it . Rather than being hit head-on, the South Tower was hit at an angle. The plane wreckage scraped along the inside of the east wall and piled up in the northeast corner. Here, the fire burned intensely.
At the South Tower's inner core, one escape stair was left intact - the one furthest from the plane's path. Even then, only four people, one of them Brian Clark, managed to get down it.
At the northeast corner and along the east wall, the connections between the floors and the outer wall began to break as the floors sagged in the heat. The floors were an essential part of the structure, bracing both the outer walls and the inner core. Already weakened by the impact and now unbraced, the outer wall columns of the South Tower could not support the weight above them. At 9.59am Eastern Time, they snapped. The entire top third of the tower then lurched to the north and east; the floors inside the rest of the tower piled down onto those below. The downward wave of destruction - a progressive collapse - was then unstoppable.
Meanwhile, the North Tower, which had been hit first, was still standing. The core of the Tower had been hit head-on, and the core had been left mostly undamaged by the impact. However, the direct hit cut off all the escape routes without exception. Meanwhile, the fire inside the North Tower was spread around the core. Again, connections between floors and columns started to fail in the heat, but here in the North Tower, it was the connections at the core that gave way first. Without the floors to brace it, the core could not stand alone. 29 minutes after the first collapse, the core in the North Tower collapsed vertically, pulling the rest of the tower down with it.
The implications of the Twin Towers collapse are disturbing. Whether anything can be done to make modern lightweight skyscrapers more robust in the aftermath of 11 September is a vital question that must now be answered.
09
Episode 9
This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book, yet it sold at Christies for over $2m. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings - words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years.
The text is the only record of work by one of the world's greatest minds - the ancient Greek, Archimedes - a mathematical genius centuries ahead of his time. Hidden for a millennium in a middle eastern library, it has been written over, broken up, painted on, cut up and re-glued. But in the nick of time scientists have saved the precious, fragile document, and for the first time it is revealing just how revolutionary Archimedes' ideas were. If it had been available to scholars during the Renaissance, we might have reached the Moon over a hundred years ago.
The trail begins in the tenth century, when a scribe made a unique copy of the most important mathematics that Archimedes ever developed. For 200 years the document survived, but the mathematics in it was so complex that no one paid it any attention. So when one day a monk was looking for some new parchment - an expensive commodity at the time - to write a new prayer book, the answer seemed obvious. He used the Archimedes manuscript. He washed the Greek text off the pages, cut them in half, rebound them, and turned the Archimedes manuscript into an everyday prayer book. As he piously wrote out his prayers, he had no idea of the genius he was obliterating.
Several hundred years later, the Renaissance was under way. Scientists were beginning to grapple with new concepts, working out how mathematics could be used to explain the World around them. Little did they know that many of the problems they were just encountering Archimedes had already solved more than a thousand years before. So, tragically, they had to do that research all over again, setting back the development of science and technology immeasurably.
Then in 1906, in Constantinople, the document mysteriously turned up in a monastic library. An opportunistic scholar called Johan Ludwig Heiberg identified the text as Archimedes' writings. Although the Greek text was very faint, Heiberg was able to decipher some of it. What he found astonished him, and made the front page of the New York Times. He revealed that Archimedes' manuscript contained something called 'The Method', which showed not only Archimedes' final proofs, but for the first time revealed the process of how he went about making his discoveries.
But then disaster struck again. World War One broke out and in its aftermath the Archimedes manuscript disappeared.
Scholars had given up any hope of seeing the manuscript again, but in the 1960s odd rumours began to surface that it was to be found in Paris. It took 30 more years, but in 1991 an expert from Christies found it in the hands of a French family. When it reached auction, it was sold to an anonymous millionaire, who has now loaned it to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore for conservation.
Although the text is incredibly difficult to read, with state-of-the-art imaging equipment, they are gradually piecing together all of the writing for the very first time. And as the team in Baltimore peel back the glue, leather and centuries of dirt, dissolve the blue-tack and unfold the lines of Greek that are buried in the spine of the book, they are building up a picture of a man who was thousands of years ahead of his time. Not only was Archimedes coming to terms with the profound subject of infinity, he had taken the first crucial steps towards calculus, a branch of mathematics that had to be reinvented after the Renaissance, and which is today used to describe every physical phenomenon from the movement of the planets to the construction of a skyscraper. Who knows what human minds could have achieved if they had only known what Archimedes already knew?
10
Episode 10
For years scientists have been trying to find the mysterious evolutionary master key responsible for transforming the dinosaurs into world-beaters. In the early Jurassic, 200 million years ago, they were a relatively small group of primitive creatures. By the late Jurassic, 50 million years later, they had become the magnificent array of carnivores and giant plant eaters that would dominate the planet for millions of years. In between lies the mysterious period of the middle Jurassic in which all these changes must have happened. But what were they? What was it that transformed the dinosaurs?
Was there some terrible mass extinction? Had there been an amazing change in the environment? All this was speculation and theory. How and where would evidence come to light? Fossils from the middle Jurassic are incredibly rare. All anyone had to go on were a few small outcrops of rock dotted around the world.
Then a treasure trove of fossils emerged from the midst of an Argentinian wilderness in the 1990s; thousands of square miles of mid-Jurassic rocks. On their first season in the field, palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut and his team unearthed two giant meat-eating dinosaurs and six huge long-necked dinosaurs. And there was much more: early mammals, crocodiles, fish and even plant life. They had uncovered a complete mid-Jurassic eco-system, a wonderful snapshot of life from this dark age of dinosaurs.
"It's as if someone has unearthed a holy grail of dinosaur palaeontology," says British geologist, Dr Phil Manning. Oliver Rauhut describes the site as, "an extraordinary window on the mid-Jurassic." Above all, the hope is that this site may contain all the information they need to find the mysterious evolutionary forces that have eluded palaeontologists for so long. Already they've been able to test out many of their theories and draw some exciting conclusions. For instance, one theory about what might have happened in the mid-Jurassic clearly does not seem to be supported by the finds in Argentina: the mass extinction theory.
The laws of evolution say that a major extinction event could have caused an explosion in dinosaur diversity like the one in the mid-Jurassic. Death on such a vast scale clears away the competition, allowing the survivors to evolve rapidly into new ecological niches. But there's no evidence in Argentina for an extinction event affecting the dinosaurs. A second theory was that a major climate change could have transformed the dinosaurs' environment, leading to the evolution of many new types of dinosaur. In Argentina there is indeed evidence for a dramatic change in the climate. At the time of the early, primitive dinosaurs all the continents were gathered together in one giant super-continent (Pangea). The climate of the super-continent was dominated by extremely hot and dry conditions - with rainfall concentrated in a short bursts. Scientists call this the time of the mega-monsoon. Then in the middle Jurassic Pangea began to split apart. The Argentinian site offers evidence that as the super-continent split up, the climate changed to a more moderate, less extreme climate. Many scientists believe that on its own climate change isn't enough to explain what happened to the dinosaurs in the mid-Jurassic. As Phil Manning points out, the dinosaurs could in theory simply move to find the climates they were most adapted to - unless something stopped them from moving, some major physical barrier that meant they couldn't follow the climate zones. When scientists looked into this, it became clear that as the super-continent split up, such a barrier was being formed. Today it's called the Atlantic Ocean. This major barrier would allow an evolutionary process called vicariance to operate - animals on different sides of the barrier are able to evolve separately. The problem was there was no proof of vicariance in the mid-Jurassic. Until Argentina.
Fortunately the site has fossils from just before and just after the super-continent split in two, so it's ideally placed to judge whether vicariance was beginning to take effect. And the early results are lending support that this may have been a key factor in explaining what happened to the dinosaurs in the mid-Jurassic.
2003. Staffel 2003 (19 Episoden • 2003)
01
Episode 1
On Easter Day 1722, Dutch explorers landed on Easter Island. A civilisation isolated by 4,000km of Pacific Ocean was about to meet the outside world for the first time in centuries. The strangers were about to find something very strange themselves - an island dotted with hundreds of huge stone statues and a society that was not as primitive as they expected. The first meeting was an immense clash of cultures. (Bloody too: the sailors killed ten natives within minutes of landing.) Where had the Islanders originally come from? Why and how had they built the figures? Modern science is piecing together the story, but it is far too late for the Easter Islanders themselves.
They were virtually wiped out by a series of disasters - natural and man made - that brought a population of 12,000 down to just 111 in a few centuries. The Island's inhabitants today all have Chilean roots, making solving the mysteries even harder. There is no one to ask about the first people of Easter Island. Although fragmentary legends have been passed down, only science can hope to explain the rise and fall of this unusual civilisation.
02
Episode 2
Sleeping is an essential part of everyone's life yet it remains little understood is barely understood. You might think it's a relaxing recharge but in fact your brain is working harder at times overnight than when you're conscious in the day.
Fresh insight into why and how we sleep has come from studying people with sleep disorders, especially sufferers of narcolepsy. The condition means that people fall asleep many times a day, completely out of the blue. A less known symptom is paralysing attacks, that can cause narcoleptics to fall to the ground - unable to move - several times a day. If a way can be found to ease their symptoms, it could open the way to helping any of us to control our sleep patterns and perhaps even to go without rest while staying alert.
Gaynor Carr has been nodding off routinely since the age of seven. Her narcolepsy has made holding down a job impossible and made her question the idea of ever having children. Gary Beattie used to work in construction, until he fell asleep 7m up a ladder. He not only loses consciousness, his body becomes paralysed in a so-called cataleptic attack. Both of them say that showing emotion sparks the paralysing attacks and that has forced them to avoid laughing and crying. Bill Baird worked in finance but describes his stockbroking days as a race. The emotion of closing a deal would bring on a fit; he had constantly to hope he could get a client's signature before his almost inevitable collapse. His sleep is restless, with vivid nightmares when he is able to hear his surroundings while seeing terrifying hallucinations.
03
Episode 3
The Earth is under constant bombardment. Each year, many fragments of debris hit our planet. Fortunately for us, most are so small that they burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.
However, there are hundreds of larger asteroids orbiting near the Earth. Many scientists now believe that one of these hit the Earth 65 million years ago, killing the dinosaurs, along with 90% of all life on the planet. What is more, it is only a matter of time before the Earth is hit again.
Experts warn that nuclear weapons might not destroy an approaching asteroid. But Jay Meloch thinks he can use the power of the Sun to nudge an asteroid away from the Earth.
Until recently, no one took the asteroid threat very seriously. Yet the evidence that we are in danger is on our own doorstep. We need only look at the cratered surface of the Moon to realise that it has been pounded by impacts throughout its history.
04
Episode 4
A dirty bomb is a radiological weapon but unlike a nuclear bomb, its purpose is to contaminate rather than destroy. It uses normal explosives to disperse radioactive materials in the local environment, creating a hazard to health that could last for years unless cleaned up.
The relative ease of making such a bomb means it is a potent terrorist weapon but Horizon's investigation shows that the risk to health from most such devices need not be great. It also underlines the need for governments to act to secure radioactive sources from falling into criminal hands. Horizon deliberately avoids outlining the production process in any detail.
Horizon publishes the results of specially commissioned research, modelling two possible dirty bomb scenarios: attacks on either London or Washington DC. The main conclusion is that the health risks from a dirty bomb explosion are localised to people who are close to the incident or are in contact with the contamination. Although the modelled attack scenarios could have wide-ranging economic repercussions, the majority of the population of either capital city would have only a negligible increase in their risk of developing cancer.
05
Episode 5
The drug Viagra revolutionised the treatment of sexual dysfunction in men on its launch five years ago. An accidental discovery, the tablet that gave impotent men the chance once more to have natural erections became the fastest selling pill in history and has earned its manufacturer, Pfizer, over $6bn.
The search is now on for a similar drug that could help women. Research is revealing that female sexuality is more complex than expected. For women suffering from a loss of desire many scientists believe that drugs acting on the brain may be the way forward. A pioneering Scottish study may have identified just such a drug and begun testing it scientifically.
An erection is achieved by filling the erectile tissue of the penis with blood. Blood vessels widen to allow blood in and then constrict to maintain the pressure. Male impotence was long thought to be a psychiatric effect, a result of stress, anxiety or depression. Medical advice was that there was not much to be done. Some patients refused to take this message on board.
06
Episode 6
Understanding of humans' earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of ochre pigment, 70,000 years old, has raised some very interesting questions.
Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa roughly 100,000 years ago. We know from fossil evidence that Homo sapiens replaced other hominids around them and moved out of Africa into Asia and the Middle East, reaching Europe 40,000 years ago.
Prof Richard Klein believes art is a landmark in human evolution. Unquestionable art that's widespread and common suggests you're dealing with people just like us. No other animals, after all, are able to define a painting as anything other than a collection of colours and shapes. This ability is unique to humans.
07
Episode 7
It was the simplest idea but one with enormous potential. If a gene is defective in the human body, just replace it with one that works properly. Gene therapy would mean that genetic disorders would become a thing of the past. Cancer would be cured, as would cystic fibrosis and hundreds of other genetic illnesses. Scientists were justifiably excited about the idea but, this enthusiasm that would end up costing one young man his life.
Jesse Gelsinger was born with a liver disorder, a rare condition called ornithine transcarbamylase (OTC) deficiency that stops the liver metabolising ammonia. People with the disease can suffer from brain damage or coma. At its most extreme the illness is fatal.
Jesse was lucky, able to lead a fairly normal life although he had a daily cocktail of drugs to control his condition. Jesse wanted to help others. When he was offered a chance to take part in a medical trial to test the safety of using gene therapy for OTC deficiency, he was keen to participate. He knew this was not a cure for his condition but that, by volunteering he might be able to help others in the future.
Although the concept of gene therapy is simple, the practice of administering the treatment is much more difficult. In order to replace defective genes, doctors must get working ones into the body and to the place where they are needed.
08
Episode 8
Earthquakes are among the most devastating natural disasters on the planet. In the last hundred years they have claimed the lives of over one million people. Earthquakes are destructive mainly because of their unpredictable nature. It is impossible to say accurately when a quake will strike but a new theory could help save lives by preparing cities long in advance for an earthquake.
The surface of the Earth is made up of large 'tectonic' plates. These plates are in slow but constant motion. When two plates push against each other friction generates a great deal of energy. For this reason earthquakes occur most frequently on tectonic fault lines, where two plates meet. However these fault lines run for thousands of kilometres; predicting exactly where a quake will occur is nearly impossible.
In 1992, Dr Ross Stein was monitoring a large earthquake in a town in California called Landers. Three hours later, there was another quake 67km away at Great Bear. Stein believed that this was not simply an aftershock, instead he theorised the event at Landers had set off the earthquake at Big Bear. Stein believes that when an earthquake occurs the stress that has built up along the fault, is in part, transferred along the fault line. It is this energy transfer that causes other quakes to occur hours, days or months after the original.
09
Episode 9
Are we alone in the Universe? Or are there aliens somewhere in space? New evidence suggests not only might other life-forms be out there, they may even be living on the planet right next door to us - Mars.
Recent discoveries have shown that Mars has all the ingredients for life, including water. Now the Mars Odyssey probe, launched in April 2001, has detected huge frozen areas of permafrost, just like that found in the Antarctic on Earth.
According to astronomers, the position of this frozen slush could hold the key to Mars' mysterious water cycle. And the surface ice may hide something even more exciting below.
10
Episode 10
Set against the back drop of awe inspiring geological beauty, a strange scientific adventure sets out to discover how a mineral clad cave network - the height of a 30 storey building and the length of six football fields - came to exist deep below the Guadalupe Mountains in North America.
But this journey soon unravels a multitude of inexplicable phenomena and obscure geological formations, leading to the discovery of extreme rock-eating microbes - a testimony from primordial Earth and a glimpse of life elsewhere in the Solar System.
Geologists believed that all limestone caves were formed by rain and underground water percolating through cracks in the rocks. Absorbing carbon dioxide from the soil, this water becomes weak carbonic acid, nibbling away at limestone, etching out networks of subterranean caves.
2004. Staffel 2004 (18 Episoden • 2004)
01
Episode 1
02
Episode 2
With the help of doctors and scientists in America, Germany and Britain, Horizon unpicks the mystery of the Moscow theatre siege.
In October 2002, Chechen terrorists took a thousand people hostage in a Moscow theatre and threatened to kill them. The problem was how to get them out alive. A bloodbath seemed inevitable.
Three days later Russian special forces stormed the theatre using a secret gas to knock everybody out. 129 hostages died - apparently killed by the very gas that was meant to save them. Horizon investigates the mystery substance, and why so many died.
The Russian authorities insisted their secret weapon was not lethal. The claim provoked contempt from the victims families, and incredulity among doctors and scientists around the world. But were the Russians actually right?
The Russians offered just one clue. And in Germany there was a scientist who had the means to test it: a urine sample taken from one of the survivors shortly after he was freed. Horizon follows as extremely sensitive tests are performed to find out if the Russians were telling the truth, and uncovers a deeper secret.
03
Episode 3
04
Episode 4
05
Episode 5
06
Episode 6
07
Episode 7
Top quality diamonds at knock down prices? The only catch is: these rocks don't come out of the ground, but are made in a lab. This is the promise offered by a series of recent scientific breakthroughs.
For most of us, it seems we may soon be able to bejewel ourselves like movie stars. But for De Beers, the world's largest diamond trader, could this, one day, be a serious threat?
Following a dodgy meeting in Moscow, retired US Army General Carter Clarke acquired some experimental diamond growing machines, originally destined for the Russian military. He created the world's first gem diamond production line, to mass produce highly prized coloured diamonds.
In a secret location south of Boston, a father and son team developed a different technique. Robert Linares and son Bryant have made colourless diamonds, allegedly higher quality than those found in nature.
De Beers, at vast cost, set up a new scientific division called the Gem Defensive Programme. Its goal: to find ways to tell apart their natural diamonds from these new synthetic gems.
But will the new synthetics slip through De Beers detection net? And could anyone really tell the difference? Horizon tells the story of the Diamond Labs.
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Episode 8
Tyrannosaurus rex - it's the scariest, meanest, most bewitching dinosaur of them all. Children are captivated by the sheer savagery of the teeth. Experts marvelled at the force of its bite - ten times more powerful than anything we know today. Movie makers made millions out of the terror it inspired. But could our picture of this monster be completely wrong?
Was T. rex in fact a slow lumbering creature, with hideously bad breath, that couldn't get anywhere close to catching a Triceratops. Was it really a scavenger that lived off the scraps left by others? Was T. rex, in fact, a wimp?
Featuring fabulous graphics and interviews with T. rex experts from around the world, Horizon looks at the new science that is challenging the legend of the dinosaur we love to hate.
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2005. Staffel 2005 (20 Episoden • 2005)
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2006. Staffel 2006 (19 Episoden • 2006)
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Episode 1
Is a space tourism revolution just around the corner?
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The story of three women as they attempt to overcome the odds and give birth to a baby.
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Horizon explores a new theory of evolution.
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Episode 4
The coastline that protects the city of New Orleans is sinking into the ocean. Horizon explores what can be done to save the city if it is worth saving at all.
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Only 4% of our universe is made from stuff we understand. Horizon explores the 96% that is made up of the elusive substance 'Dark Matter'.
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An investigation into the scientific approach to sporting success, as demonstrated by the former East Germany and latterly Australia. British children are already in training for the London Olympics and the programme looks at what it takes to produce a successful modern Olympian.
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The amazing story of Dr Temple Grandin's ability to read the animal mind, which has made her the most famous autistic woman on the planet.
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Episode 8
The curious tale of an American millionaire optometrist and his dream to save humanity.
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Is Pluto really a planet? Is it just an asteroid? Horizon investigates.
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The science series explores varying attitudes to smoking around the world. Filmed in a single day, the documentary meets the people whose lives are defined by the cigarette. Contributors include Allen Carr, who claims he may get viewers to quit by the end of the programme, the inventor of the nicotine patch Dr Jed Rose and Dr Chris Proctor, the chief scientist at British American Tobacco who has the tricky task of making a safer cigarette.
2007. Staffel 2007 (9 Episoden • 2007)
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Episode 1
What if dinosaurs were still alive today? Would we hunt them, farm them - or even keep them as pets?
It's a palaeontologist's dream: the chance to live in a world where dinosaurs are not something to be dug out of the ground but are living among us. It may sound far-fetched but dinosaurs were actually rather unlucky. The meteorite impact that doomed them to extinction was an event with a probability of millions to one. What if the meteorite had missed?
Had dinosaurs survived, the world today would be very different. If humans managed to survive alongside them, we wouldn't have the company of most, if not all, of the mammals with which we are familiar today. Giraffes, elephants and other mammals wouldn't have had space to evolve.
Would we be hunting Hadrosaurs instead of elk? Or farming Protoceratops instead of pigs? Would dinosaurs be kept as pets? And could the brighter dinosaurs have evolved into something humanoid?
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Episode 2
How do you save an endangered species? Get the animals in the mood for love.
Thomas Hildebrandt possesses one of the world's most extraordinary jobs - getting the planet's endangered animals in the mood for love.
The planet's creatures are facing the biggest mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out. Species are currently disappearing at up to 10,000 times the natural rate. Coming to the rescue are men like Dr Hildebrandt and his team. They are world leaders in the art of animal manipulation.
The billions of pounds spent benefiting human reproduction are now being applied to save endangered species. Techniques such as artificial insemination and IVF have been crucial to the successes in breeding giant pandas, big cats and other mammals in zoos across the world. As Thomas Hildebrandt says "Man has created this annihilation of species. It's up to man to use his ingenuity to save them."
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Episode 3
Professor Lesley Regan is on a mission to fill her bathroom cabinet with cosmetics that actually work.
Professor Lesley Regan, one of the UK's most well-respected (and glamorous) medical experts, turns her scientific eye on the world of cosmetics. She's just turned 50, and is out to create an experimentally proven beauty cabinet.
Unafraid to examine the wrinkles, age spots and broken veins on her own face, Professor Regan explores just what makes us look old, and if we can slow down the ageing process. The extraordinary world of cosmetic testing is revealed, from the British hair lab which makes New York tap water, to the volunteers sun-bathing for science.
Sun damage, cellulite and balding all face Professor Regan's scrutiny as she discovers which cosmetics do - and don't - have the scientific evidence to back up their claims.
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Episode 4
Pianist Nick van Bloss has Tourette's syndrome. Is his illness a blessing or a curse?
Is there really such a thing as the mad genius? Can an illness be both a blessing and a curse?
At seven years old, Nick van Bloss started shaking his head, grinding his teeth and making wild whooping noises. Nick had Tourette's syndrome. No medical intervention helped him. But one activity stopped it all...
The moment Nick placed his hands on the piano keys his symptoms vanished. By the age of 20, he was an award winning international pianist. He felt sure that his illness had made him the success he was.
But there is a catch. The brain state necessary for his genius can also be dangerously close to mental chaos. Nick's personal journey reveals how close he came to the edge and how determined he is to triumph.
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Episode 5
After 40 years man is going back to the Moon. But this time astronauts plan to stay there.
After 40 years, man is preparing to return to the Moon. But this time the astronauts won't just land on the Moon - they plan to stay.
From his office in Nevada, Dennis Hope has spawned a multi-million dollar business selling lunar real estate.
But scientists believe the real prize is trapped in the Moon's rocks. It contains large deposits of an extremely rare gas called Helium-3. Could Helium-3 be mined and used as a new source of almost inexhaustible, clean and pollution-free energy on Earth? Whoever succeeds in transporting Helium-3 back to Earth could solve the world's energy crisis.
Who will win what has been dubbed the second Moon race? And should we be exploiting the Moon's valuable resources at all?
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Episode 6
Seven high-flyers are put through a series of tests to measure their intelligence
Can you think of 100 different uses for a sock? How would you cope with glasses that turn everything upside down? What's your emotional intelligence? Can you create a work of art in ten minutes?
Horizon takes seven people who are some of the highest flyers in their field - a musical prodigy, a quantum physicist, an artist, a dramatist, an RAF fighter pilot, a chess grandmaster and a Wall Street trader. Each is put through a series of tests to discover who is the most intelligent?
The principle way that we measure intelligence, the IQ test, remains popular and convenient. Yet most psychologists agree that it only tells half the story... at most. Where they disagree is how to measure intelligence, for the simple reason that the experts still don't know exactly what it is.
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Episode 7
Could Professor Jose Torero's fire protection system have saved the Twin Towers?
When a fire gets out of control in a skyscraper it tests fire fighters to their limits. Predicting how a fire is behaving high up in a building is almost impossible.
The fire fighters who entered the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 could only guess at what was happening almost 1000 feet above them. That fateful day brought about the death of 343 New York fire fighters.
Jose Torero believes fire fighters need not be put in such danger and that new technology could have saved many of the 343 fire fighters who died doing their duty that day. He believes he could even have saved the Twin Towers.
He has spent the last ten years developing a system that could change the way fires are fought forever. It's called Firegrid. It's a revolutionary approach to fire fighting that could save thousands of lives, giving man the upper hand on one of his oldest enemies.
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Episode 8
Will the Large Hadron Collider finally reveal the elusive God particle?
In the coming months the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be switched on. The Large Hadron Collider promises to recreate the conditions right after the Big Bang. By revisiting the beginning of time, scientists hope to unravel some of the deepest secrets of our Universe.
Within these first few moments the building blocks of the Universe were created. The search for these fundamental particles has occupied scientists for decades but there remains one particle that has stubbornly refused to appear in any experiment. The Higgs Boson is so crucial to our understanding of the Universe that it has been dubbed the God particle. It explains how fundamental particles acquire mass, or as one scientist plainly states: "It is what makes stuff stuff..."
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Is it possible to use a knowledge of forensic science, not to catch a killer, but to commit a perfect murder?
Modern forensic science should make it impossible to commit murder and get away with it. But how easy would it be to outfox the detectives? With the help of top forensic scientists, and real-life murder investigations, we explore whether it's possible to commit a perfect murder.
The body is the most important piece of evidence in any murder. Pathologist Dr Richard Shepherd reveals the crucial clues that give away the secrets of a suspicious death. Dr Lee Goff can work out a time of death from just a few maggots on a corpse. To really understand the way a human decomposes he relies on experiments - and dead pigs make ideal human models.
And what is the perfect murder weapon? Probably Agatha Christie's favourite - poison. It leaves no marks on the body, and the victim may not even realise what has happened until it's too late. But there still might not be a perfect murder. The world's most notorious poisoner - Harold Shipman - was eventually caught.
2008. Staffel 2008 (17 Episoden • 2008)
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2009. Staffel 2009 (17 Episoden • 2009)
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The world is affected by an obesity epidemic, but why is it that not everyone is succumbing? Medical science has been obsessed with this subject and is coming up with some unexpected answers. As it turns out, it is not all about exercise and diet.
At the centre of this programme is a controversial overeating experiment that aims to identify exactly what it is about some people that makes it hard for them to bulk up.
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Cannabis is the world's favourite drug, but also one of the least understood. Can cannabis cause schizophrenia? Is it addictive? Can it lead you on to harder drugs? Or is it simply a herb, an undervalued medicine?
Addiction specialist Dr John Marsden discovers that modern science is finally beginning to find answers to these questions. John traces the cannabis plants' birthplace in Kazakhstan; finds the origins of our sensitivity to cannabis in the simple sea squirt; and finds out just what it does to our brains.
He meets people who have been changed by this drug in drastically different ways - from those whose lives have been shattered to those who lives have been revived.
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Horizon uncovers the secret world of our dreams. In a series of cutting-edge experiments and personal stories, we go in search of the science behind this most enduring mystery and ask: where do dreams come from? Do they have meaning? And ultimately, why do we dream?
What the film reveals is that much of what we thought we knew no longer stands true. Dreams are not simply wild imaginings but play a significant part in all our lives as they have an impact on our memories, the ability to learn, and our mental health. Most surprisingly, we find nightmares, too, are beneficial and may even explain the survival of our species.
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Professor Brian Cox takes a global journey in search of the energy source of the future. Called nuclear fusion, it is the process that fuels the sun and every other star in the universe. Yet despite over five decades of effort, scientists have been unable to get even a single watt of fusion electricity onto the grid.
Brian returns to Horizon to find out why. Granted extraordinary access to the biggest and most ambitious fusion experiments on the planet, Brian travels to the USA to see a high security fusion bomb testing facility in action and is given a tour of the world's most powerful laser. In South Korea, he clambers inside the reaction chamber of K-Star, the world's first super-cooled, super-conducting fusion reactor where the fate of future fusion research will be decided.
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Why are you more likely to have a heart attack at eight o'clock in the morning or crash your car on the motorway at two o'clock in the afternoon? Can taking your medication at the right time of day really save your life? And have you ever wondered why teenagers will not get out of bed in the morning?
The answers to these questions lie in the secret world of the biological clock.
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What is wrong with nudity? Why are people embarrassed about their bodies? How and why did they get the way they are?
Horizon takes a group of volunteers and subjects them to a series of psychological and physical tests to challenge attitudes to the naked human form. The questions raised strike at the heart of human physical and social evolution.
Human beings are the only creatures that can be 'naked' - but why, how and when did people lose their fur? That question takes Horizon around the world to meet scientists from Africa to Florida, and they are finding answers in unexpected places: the chest hair of Finnish students, the genetic history of lice, and the sweat of an unusual monkey.
It turns out that something everyone takes for granted may hold the key to the success of the entire human species.
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When disaster strikes who lives and who dies is not purely a matter of luck. In every disaster, from those people face once in a lifetime, to those they face every day, there are things that can be done to increase the chances of getting out alive.
Horizon has gathered a team of leading experts to produce the ultimate guide to disaster survival. Through controversial experiments, computer simulations and analysis of hundreds of survivor testimonies from plane crashes to ferry disasters and even 9/11, they will reveal what happens in the mind in the moment of crisis and how the human brain can be programmed for survival.
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Episode 8
David Baddiel, father of two, sets out to answer one of the greatest questions a parent can ask: how best to educate your child.
Taking in the latest scientific research, David uncovers some unconventional approaches: from the parent hot-hosing his child to record-breaking feats of maths, to a school that pays hard cash for good grades.
David witnesses a ground-breaking experiment that suggests a child's destiny can be predicted at four, and hears the three little words that can ruin a child's chance of success for good. He also uncovers the neurological basis for why teenagers can be stroppy and explosive and has his own brain tinkered with to experience what it is like to struggle at school.
Through it all, David's quest remains true: to maximise his child's potential for success and happiness.
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Last century, earthquakes killed over one million, and it is predicted that this century might see ten times as many deaths. Yet when an earthquake strikes, it always takes people by surprise.
So why hasn't science worked out how to predict when and where the next big quake is going to happen? This is the story of the men and women who chase earthquakes and try to understand this mysterious force of nature.
Journeying to China's Sichuan Province, which still lies devastated by the earthquake that struck in May 2008, as well as the notorious San Andreas Fault in California, Horizon asks why science has so far fallen short of answering this fundamental question.
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Ever since he was at school, actor and comedian Alan Davies has hated maths. And like many people, he is not much good at it either. But Alan has always had a sneaking suspicion that he was missing out.
So, with the help of top mathematician Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Alan is going to embark on a maths odyssey. Together they visit the fourth dimension, cross the universe and explore the concept of infinity. Along the way, Alan does battle with some of the toughest maths questions of our age.
But did his abilities peak 25 years ago when he got his grade C O-Level? Or will Alan be able to master the most complex maths concept there is?
2010. Staffel 2010 (15 Episoden • 2009)
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Episode 1
Alcohol is by far the most widely used drug - and a dangerous one at that. So why are so many of us drinking over the recommended limits? Why does alcohol have such a powerful grip on us? How much of our relationship with this drug is written in our genes? What are the real dangers of our children drinking too young? Addiction expert John Marsden, who likes a drink, makes a professional and personal exploration of our relationship with alcohol. He undergoes physical and neurological examinations to determine its impact, and finds out why some people will find it much harder than others to resist alcohol. Even at the age of 14 there may be a way of determining which healthy children will turn into addicts. John experiments with a designer drug being developed that hopes to replicate all the benefits of alcohol without the dangers. Could this drug replace alcohol in the future?
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With the help of a hammer-wielding scientist, Jennifer Aniston and a general anaesthetic, Professor Marcus du Sautoy goes in search of answers to one of science's greatest mysteries: how do we know who we are? While the thoughts that make us feel as though we know ourselves are easy to experience, they are notoriously difficult to explain. So, in order to find out where they come from, Marcus subjects himself to a series of probing experiments.
He learns at what age our self-awareness emerges and whether other species share this trait. Next, he has his mind scrambled by a cutting-edge experiment in anaesthesia. Having survived that ordeal, Marcus is given an out-of-body experience in a bid to locate his true self. And in Hollywood, he learns how celebrities are helping scientists understand the microscopic activities of our brain. Finally, he takes part in a mind-reading experiment that both helps explain and radically alters his understanding of who he is.
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Horizon follows the emotional journey of three young people with currently untreatable conditions to see if, within their lifetime, they can be cured. Sophie Morgan is determined not to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She is tempted by the online claims of unregulated private clinics promising a cure using stem cells. Anthony Bath was just 20 when his right leg was amputated after a botched pinning procedure. In Finland, Anthony witnesses one of the world's first operations in which stem cells are used to replace bone. Dean Third was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which his damaged heart could cause his death at any moment. Desperate for a cure, he visits Dr Anthony Mathur from University College London to witness the world's first trial using stem cells taken from bone marrow.
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Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question - what was there before the Big Bang?
The trouble is that researching them is next to impossible. Black holes are by definition invisible and there's no scientific theory able to explain them. Despite these obvious obstacles, Horizon meets the astronomers attempting to image a black hole for the very first time and the theoretical physicists getting ever closer to unlocking their mysteries. It's a story that takes us into the heart of a black hole and to the very edge of what we think we know about the universe.
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Episode 5
Talking is something that is unique to humans, yet it still remains a mystery. Horizon meets the scientists beginning to unlock the secrets of speech - including a father who is filming every second of his son's first three years in order to discover how we learn to talk, the autistic savant who can speak more than 20 languages, and the first scientist to identify a gene that makes speech possible.
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Episode 6
Alan Davies attempts to answer the proverbial question: how long is a piece of string? But what appears to be a simple task soon turns into a mind-bending voyage of discovery where nothing is as it seems.
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Episode 7
We have an extraordinary relationship with dogs - closer than with any other animal on the planet. But what makes the bond between us so special?
Research into dogs is gaining momentum, and scientists are investigating them like never before. From the latest fossil evidence, to the sequencing of the canine genome, to cognitive experiments, dogs are fast turning into the new chimps as a window into understanding ourselves.
Where does this relationship come from? In Siberia, a unique breeding experiment reveals the astonishing secret of how dogs evolved from wolves. Swedish scientists demonstrate how the human/dog bond is controlled by a powerful hormone also responsible for bonding mothers to their babies.
Why are dogs so good at reading our emotions? Horizon meets Betsy, the world's most intelligent dog, and compares her incredible abilities to those of children. Man's best friend has recently gone one step further - helping us identify genes responsible for causing human diseases.
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Just months ago, the world stood in fear of an emerging new disease that threatened to kill millions. A new flu variant H1N1 had arrived. In the UK alone, 65,000 deaths were predicted. Yet to date, these dire warnings have not materialised.
If this latest pandemic has taught anything, it is just how little is understood about the invisible world of viruses. But that has not stopped scientists trying.
Horizon follows the leading researchers from across the world, who are attempting to unravel the many secrets of viruses to understand when and why they kill.
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Episode 9
Over a person's lifetime they are likely to be prescribed more than 14,000 pills. Antibiotics, cholesterol lowering tablets, anti-depressants, painkillers, even tablets to extend youth and improve performance in bed. These drugs perform minor miracles day after day, but how much is really known about them?
Drug discovery often owes as much to serendipity as to science, and that means much is learnt about how medicines work, or even what they do, when they're taken. By investigating some of the most popular pills people pop, Horizon asks, how much can they be trusted to do what they are supposed to?
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For centuries scientists have been attempting to come up with an elixir of youth. Now remarkable discoveries are suggesting that ageing is something flexible that can ultimately be manipulated.
Horizon meets the scientists who are attempting to piece together why we age and more vitally for all of us, what we can do to prevent it. But which theory will prevail?
Does the 95-year-old woman who smokes two packets of cigarettes a day hold the clue? Do blueberries really delay signs of ageing or is it more a question of attitude? Does the real key to controlling how we age lie with a five-year-old boy with an extraordinary ageing disease or with a self-experimenting Harvard professor?
Could one of these breakthroughs really see our lives extend past 120 years?
2011. Staffel 2011 (15 Episoden • 2010)
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Horizon explores the strange and wonderful world of illusions - and reveals the tricks they play on our senses and why they fool us. We show how easy it is to trick your sense of taste by changing the colours of food and drink, explain how what you see can change what you hear, and see just how unreliable our sense of colour can be. But all this trickery has a serious purpose. It's helping scientists to create a new understanding of how our senses work - not as individual senses, but connected together.
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Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature? His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics - a place where super-cooled liquids simply pass through solid glass. Plus, Ben installs his very own Met office weather station at home. Ben's investigations in this personal and passionate film highlight the importance of measurement and accuracy in the 21st century.
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2012. Staffel 2012 (15 Episoden • 2011)
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Six months after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the release of radiation there, Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to discover whether nuclear power is safe. He begins in Japan, where he meets some of the tens of thousands of people who have been evacuated from the exclusion zone. He travels to an abandoned village just outside the zone to witness a nuclear clean-up operation. Jim draws on the latest scientific findings from Japan and from the previous explosion at Chernobyl to understand how dangerous the release of radiation is likely to be and what that means for our trust in nuclear power.
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2013. Staffel 2013 (16 Episoden • 2012)
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Plastic surgeon Dr Rozina Ali leaves the operating theatre behind for the frontiers of skin science and asks if it is possible to make your skin look younger without surgery. She discovers the latest research about how the foods we eat can protect our skin from damage, and how a chemical found in a squid's eye is at the forefront of a new sun protection cream. She also finds out how sugar in our blood can make us look older, and explores an exciting new science called glycobiology which promises a breakthrough in making us look younger.
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Horizon goes behind the scenes at NASA as they countdown to the landing of a 2.5 billion-dollar rover on the surface of Mars. In six days time, the nuclear-powered vehicle - the size of a car - will be winched down onto the surface of the Red Planet from a rocket-powered crane. That's if things go according to plan: Mars has become known as the Bermuda Triangle of space because so many missions there have ended in failure. The Curiosity mission is the most audacious - and expensive - attempt to answer the question: is there life on Mars?
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Episode 3
Michael Mosley has set himself a truly ambitious goal: he wants to live longer, stay younger and lose weight in the bargain. And he wants to make as few changes to his life as possible along the way. He discovers the powerful new science behind the ancient idea of fasting, and he thinks he's found a way of doing it that still allows him to enjoy his food. Michael tests out the science of fasting on himself - with life-changing results.
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Cosmologists talk about their project to create a map of everything in existence, and also reveal that their research has some highly unexpected results, creating a picture stranger than anything they had ever imagined.
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Horizon plunges down the biggest rabbit-hole in history in search of the smallest thing in the Universe. It is a journey where things don't just become smaller but also a whole lot weirder. Scientists hope to catch a glimpse of miniature black holes, multiple dimensions and even parallel Universes. As they start to explore this wonderland, where nothing is quite what it seems, they may have to rewrite the fundamental laws of time and space.
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Episode 6
Across the world we are seeing the emergence of bacteria that have gone rogue. These are the superbugs, dangerous bacteria that are becoming resistant to our only defense; antibiotics. Horizon meets the scientists who are tracking the spread of these potential killers around the globe, and discovers the new techniques researchers are developing to help defeat these superbugs.
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Episode 7
It is a feeling we all know - the moment when a light goes on in your head. In a sudden flash of inspiration, a new idea is born.
Today, scientists are using some unusual techniques to try to work out how these moments of creativity - whether big, small or life-changing - come about. They have devised a series of puzzles and brainteasers to draw out our creative behaviour, while the very latest neuroimaging technology means researchers can actually peer inside our brains and witness the creative spark as it happens. What they are discovering could have the power to make every one of us more creative.
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Episode 8
A&E doctor Kevin Fong finds out how doctors can avoid making mistakes in the high-pressure, high-stakes world of the operating theatre.
He sets out to learn how other professionals make life and death decisions under pressure, from airline pilots facing emergencies, to the Fire Service dealing with lethal blazes, to the world of Formula One pit crews. Kevin discovers how all these fields are helping to make surgery safer.
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Episode 9
Taste is our most indulgent sense but it is only in recent years that we have started to understand why we really love the foods we do - and it is a lot more surprising than you might think.
There may a way to make food taste sweeter without adding any extra sugar and it is all down to a trick that happens in your brain. Horizon meets the scientist who has grown the perfect tomato, that is sweeter and juicier than anything you are likely to find on a shelf, as well as the men and women hoping to become elite, professional tasters.
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Episode 10
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.
Horizon meets the people at the forefront of the data revolution, and reveals the possibilities and the promise of the age of big data
2014. Staffel 2014 (15 Episoden • 2013)
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Exploring the murky and fast-paced world of the hackers out to steal money and identities and wreak havoc with people's online lives, and the scientists who are joining forces to help defeat them. Horizon meets the two men who uncovered the world's first cyber weapon, the pioneers of what is called ultra paranoid computing, and the computer expert who worked out how to hack into cash machines.
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The hunt for life within the long-dead bones of dinosaurs may sound like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy - but one woman has found traces of life within the fossilised bones of a T Rex. Dr Mary Schweitzer has seen the remains of red blood cells and touched the soft tissue of an animal that died 68 million years ago. Most excitingly of all, she believes she may just have found signs of DNA. Her work is revolutionising our understanding of these iconic beasts.
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2015. Staffel 2015 (18 Episoden • 2014)
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2016. Staffel 2016 (17 Episoden • 2016)
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Investigating the story of how a Russian internet millionaire, Dmitry Itskov, is turning to cutting edge science to try to unlock the secret of living forever. The programme investigates the real science inspiring his bold plan to upload the human mind to a computer, and examines whether his goal of bringing about immortality for humans within thirty years is attainable.
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Documentary exploring science's long-standing obsession with the idea of gravity control, including recent breakthroughs in the search for loopholes in conventional physics. The programme examines how the groundwork carried out by Project Greenglow in the mid-1990s by UK defence manufacturer BAE Systems (based on the work of Eugene Podkletnov[82]) has changed the understanding of the universe, making the dream of flying cars and journeys to the stars no longer quite so distant.
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Examining Dark Energy, the mysterious force that is unexpectedly causing the universe's expansion to speed up. Its effects were discovered in 1998, but physicists still do not know what it is, and its very existence calls into question Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity; the cornerstone of modern physics. The hunt for the identity of Dark Energy is on, and although experiments conducted on earth and in space generate data that might provide a clue, physics is hoping another Einstein might emerge and write a new theory that explains the mystery.
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The oceans define the earth. They are crucial to life and we used to think that they were unique to our blue planet. But we were wrong.
It has recently been discovered that there are oceans all over our solar system and they are very similar to our own. And now scientists are going on an epic journey in search of new life in places that never seemed possible. Nasa is even planning to dive to the depths of a strange, distant ocean in a remarkable submarine.
Horizon discovers that the hunt for oceans in space is marking the dawn of a new era in the search for alien life.
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Episode 5
This is the story of how our solar system will be transformed by the aging sun before coming to a spectacular end in about eight billion years. Astronomers can peer into the far future to predict how it will happen by analysing distant galaxies, stars and even planets in their final moments.
In this film, Horizon brings these predictions to life in a peaceful midwestern town that has a giant scale model of the solar system spread out all over the city. As it ages, the sun will bloat into a red giant star, swallowing planets... as well as half the town. The fate of the Earth itself hangs in the balance. How will the solar system end?
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Episode 6
Liz Bonnin presents a controversial and provocative episode of Horizon, investigating how new scientific research is raising hard questions about zoos - the film explores how and why zoos keep animals, and whether they need to change to keep up with modern science or ultimately be consigned to history.
Should zoos cull their animals to manage populations? Liz travels to Copenhagen Zoo, who killed a giraffe and fed it to the lions, to witness their culling process first hand. They think it is a natural part of zoo keeping that is often swept under the carpet. Should some animals never be kept in captivity? In a world exclusive, Liz visits SeaWorld in Florida and asks if captivity drove one of their orcas to kill his trainer.
But could zoos be the answer to conserving endangered species? Liz examines their record, from helping breed pandas for the wild to efforts to save the rhinos. She meets one of the last surviving northern white rhinos and discovers the future of this species now lies in a multimillion-dollar programme to engineer them from stem cells. Veteran conservation scientist Dr Sarah Bexell tells Liz the science of captive breeding is giving humanity false hope.
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Episode 7
Dr Xand Van Tulleken is single and looking for love. Mathematician Dr Hannah Fry wants to use him as her guinea pig to test whether the algorithms that dating sites use to match people actually work.
While Hannah builds a dating site, Xand meets the scientists investigating online dating - and learns what pictures to use and what to write in his profile. He tries out a 'bot' that has automated a swiping app and has an MRI scan to find out whether his brain is equipped for love.
50 members of the public take part in some mini experiments at a date night - and Xand goes on various dates to test whether the algorithm is better than him choosing randomly.
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Episode 8
Antarctica is the last great wilderness. It's the coldest, windiest, driest and most isolated place on Earth. And every winter, for over three months of the year, the sun never rises. But it's also home to the British Antarctic Survey's Halley Research Station.
A veteran of living and working at Halley in the early eighties, BBC weatherman Peter Gibbs makes an emotional return to the place he once called home. A place that, during his time, was key to the discovery of the ozone hole.
The journey starts with an arduous 12-day, 3000-mile voyage onboard the RRS Ernest Shackleton. Once on the ice shelf, Peter is delighted to finally arrive at the futuristic research station and marvels at the cutting edge science being done at Halley today. From vital discoveries about how our lives are vulnerable to the sun's activities, to studying interplanetary travel and the threat of man-made climate change.
But Peter's journey is also something of a rescue mission. The research station's home is a floating ice shelf that constantly moves and cracks, and the ice shelf has developed a chasm that could cast Halley adrift on a massive iceberg.
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Episode 9
Horizon investigates a new era of Alzheimer's research, which is bringing hope to millions of sufferers across the world. New scanning and gene technology is allowing scientists to identify the disease at its earliest stages, often 15 years before symptoms appear and the brain cells are destroyed. A series of new drugs trials in Colombia, the USA and Europe are showing startling success in reducing beta amyloid, the protein which is a hallmark of the disease.
It is also becoming clear that changes in lifestyle can prevent the development of the disease. A new system inside the brain has been discovered which clears amyloid when we are in deep sleep, but allows it to accumulate if we don't sleep well.
The programme reveals that for sufferers in the early stages of the disease, brain connections, or synapses, can be strengthened and even replaced by absorbing enough of the right nutrients. A UK-wide trail helps sufferers in the early stages to concentrate on improving everyday tasks, and in the process not only make their lives easier, but helps to reactivate the planning and organisational parts of the brain.
In an aging world, where the biggest risk of developing Alzheimer's is old age, the scientific breakthroughs in Alzheimer's disease are bringing hope where once there was despair.
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Episode 10
Michael Mosley investigates the dramatic rise in e-cigarettes. They're everywhere these days, but what does the latest scientific research on them reveal? Michael reveals what e-cigarettes are really doing to your health. Are they really better for you than cigarettes? What is actually in them? Is passive vapour harmful? And can they really stop you from smoking? Michael meets some of the scientists around the world studying them, asks a group of volunteers to try to give up smoking regular cigarettes using them, and even takes up 'vaping' himself, smoking an e-cigarette every day for a month to see the effects on his own health - no easy task for such a committed non-smoker.
2017. Staffel 2017 (15 Episoden • 2017)
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The Horizon team have gathered together a team of scientists and doctors to investigate the incredible, natural material that is growing out of our heads - our hair. With access to the research laboratories of some of the world's leading hair care companies, including L'Oreal and ghd, the team explore the latest cutting-edge research and technology designed to push the boundaries of hair and hair care.
Each one of us has a unique head of hair - an average of 150,000 individual hair strands growing approximately one centimetre every month. Over your lifetime, that is over 800 miles. The time and effort we put into styling, sculpting and maintaining this precious material has created a global hair care market worth a staggering £60 billion pounds. With such high stakes, it is inevitable that when developing hair-care products, science and business operate hand in hand. The team reveal how this industry science compares to the rigorous academic standards that they are used to.
These investigations also reveal why we care so much about our hair, and whether or not it is worth splashing out on expensive shampoos. They uncover the magic ingredients found in conditioners and lay bare the secrets of the shiny, glossy hair seen in the adverts.
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For decades some have suspected that there might be others out there, intelligent beings capable of communicating with us, even visiting our world. It might sound like science fiction, but today scientists from across the globe are scouring the universe for signals from extraterrestrials.
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2018. Staffel 2018 (14 Episoden • 2018)
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The rarely seen journey back to recovery of Richard Gray after a life-changing catastrophic stroke. Initially bed bound and unable to do anything, including speak, the initial outlook was bleak, yet occasionally small glimmers of hope emerged. Armed always with her camera, his film-maker wife Fiona captures the moment Richard moves his fingers for the first time, and then over months she documents his struggle to relearn how to walk again.
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2019. Staffel 2019 (6 Episoden • 2019)
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2020. Staffel 2020 (10 Episoden • 2020)
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2021. Staffel 2021 (1 Episode • 2021)
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