The Series 'In Search of' conducted investigations into the controversial, paranormal and mysterious. The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries examined. The 2018 revival is presented by Zachary Quinto. In this episode, Zach wants to understand how a person can be superhuman. He meets a man who bent the metal frame of a car door with his bare hands in a moment of crisis; a man who can feel no pain; and a Shaolin warrior monk, who teaches him how to harness superhuman powers of his own.
As the journey continues, there's beauty and danger in equal measure for Charley Boorman and Ewan McGrego. The duo ride their electric Harleys through the exotic and breathtaking Bolivian countryside in a tough ascent. The sixth episode showcases some of the challenges the hosts and the crew face when they scale the terrain. One of the Rivians runs into trouble while sandy roads and a heavy breeze sees Boorman take a tumble. Apart from all the accidents, the chapter also shows some quality work done by UNICEF when it comes to educating and working with the children in Bolivia. The altitude sickness hits Taylor, their logistics man real bad and McGregor starts feeling it as well. The episode ends with a doctor heading to his hotel room to check up on him.
Dr Hannah Fry travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn't enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered. But in the 19th century, maths is turned on its head when new types of geometry are invented. No longer is the kind of geometry we learned in school the final say on the subject. If maths is more like a game, albeit a complicated one, where we can change the rules, surely this points to maths being something we invent - a product of the human mind. To try and answer this question, Hannah travels to Halle in Germany on the trail of perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes, some bigger than others. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented. But if that's the case, why is maths so uncannily good at predicting the world around us? Invented or discovered, this question just got a lot harder to answer.
We now know that the brain - the organ that more than any other makes us human - is one of the wonders of the universe, and yet until the 17th century it was barely studied. The twin sciences of brain anatomy and psychology have offered different visions of who we are. Now these sciences are coming together and in the process have revealed some surprising and uncomfortable truths about what really shapes our thoughts, feelings and desires. And the search to understand how our brains work has also revealed that we are all - whether we realise it or not - carrying out science from the moment we are born.
Autistic minds provide windows into how we all think, feel, and behave. A complete brain science should be able to account for all kinds of minds and brains. As long as some minds remain a mystery, so too will all minds. Michael Stevens travels to London to meet a blind, autistic savant with astonishing musical abilities, and volunteers to have his brain's function temporarily disrupted at UCLA's Neuromodulation Lab.
We feel it every moment of our lives but for physicists, gravity is the longest running unsolved mystery of the universe. Why do all objects that have mass pull on one another? Cutting-edge theories are proposing unexpected answers: Gravity could be another force in disguise, a thermodynamic mirage, or even, a shadow of a hidden holographic universe. If so, the force that holds us to the surface of the earth, and holds the earth in orbit around the sun, may be a trick of the mind. We feel it, but it may not be real. Is Gravity an Illusion?
In this episode, Zach wants to understand how a person can be superhuman. He meets a man who bent the metal frame of a car door with his bare hands in a moment of crisis; a man who can feel no pain; and a Shaolin warrior monk, who teaches him how to harness superhuman powers of his own.