Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

It's June 1942 and the world's fate is about to be decided by a handful of pilots and their untested aircraft. Experience an inside look at the Battle of Midway, captured through rarely seen battle footage and first-hand accounts from its hero dive-bombing pilot, "Dusty" Kleiss. This is an hour-by-hour recount of one of the most pivotal conflicts of the 20th century. Take a closer look at how this desperately needed victory came about through the design of U.S. air planes, the skill of the pilots, the element of surprise, and a stroke of luck.

The second episode looks at the challenges of hunting in the Arctic, the most seasonal place on Earth. To a predator, seasonal change is a problem. It means that all the parameters of the hunt - the conditions, the strategies, the prey - change too. The only option for the Arctic's top predators, the wolf, the Arctic fox and the polar bear, is to continually adapt to their changing world, exploiting the good times and enduring the bad.

At 11 o'clock on New Year's Eve of the Cosmic Calendar, Homo erectus stood up for the first time, freeing its hands and earning the species its name. They began to move around, to explore, daring to risk everything to get to unknown places. Our Neanderthal relatives lived much as we did and did many of the things we consider to be 'human.' More restless than their cousins the Neanderthals and Denisovans, our Homo sapiens ancestors crossed seas and unforgiving landscapes, changing the land, ocean and atmosphere, leading to mass extinction. The scientific community gave our age a new name, 'Anthropocene.'
Since the first civilizations we've wondered if there's something about human nature that contains the seeds of our destruction. Syukuro Manabe was born in rural Japan and took an intense interest in Earth's average global temperature. In the 1960's, he would assemble the evidence he needed to predict the increase of Earth's temperature due to greenhouse gases until it becomes an uninhabitable and toxic environment, leading to our extinction. 'This doesn't have to be,' says Neil deGrasse Tyson, 'it's not too late. There's another hallway, another future we can still have; we'll find a way.'

The second part, Nothing, explores science at the very limits of human perception, where we now understand the deepest mysteries of the universe lie. Professor Jim Al-Khalili sets out to answer one very simple question - what is nothing? His journey ends with perhaps the most profound insight about reality that humanity has ever made. Everything came from nothing. The quantum world of the super small shaped the vast universe we inhabit today, and Jim can prove it.

We will nvestigate the first skeleton that really looks like us –Turkana Boy– an astonishingly complete specimen of Homo erectus found by the famous Leakey team in Kenya. These early humans are thought to have developed key innovations that helped them thrive, including hunting large prey, the use of fire, and extensive social bonds. The program examines an intriguing theory that long-distance running –our ability to jog– was crucial for the survival of these early hominids. Not only did running help them escape from vicious predators roaming the grasslands, but it also gave them a unique hunting strategy: chasing down prey animals such as deer and antelope to the point of exhaustion. Birth of Humanity also probes how, why, and when humans' uniquely long period of childhood and parenting began.

The concept of a digital, decentralized currency is questioning things and the answers being spilled out are deep-seated, long-standing propositions that place a magnifying glass onto the seemingly untouchable financial institutions at the base of modern commerce. What may be uncovered in the philosophical, political, and economic questions could have radical implications for the rest of the 21st century". The documenteray ushers us in, not to explore simply Bitcoin, but to hint at the basis of trade, commerce, and civil society. Director Torsten's story of money is one filled with promise like a sunrise over a landscape of human spirit.