Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano set sail to gain control of the global spice trade, but end up becoming the first expedition to circumnavigate the earth. The yearslong voyage—along with the suffering, the violence and the loss of life and property—were all in pursuit of a shorter route to the so-called Spice Islands (now the Maluku Islands) and their much-coveted aromatics. The film puts in perspective the 16th century—the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery and the Age, problematically, of Colonialism. It also was an age of heroes. As the documentary insists, the journeys undertaken by the men whose names we learned in grade school and whose exploits straddled the 1400s and 1500s—including Ponce de Leon, Vasco da Gama, Lope de Aguirre and even Columbus—were about money, sometimes trade, sometimes plunder. But just as advances in medicine have often been propelled by war, knowledge about the world has been a byproduct of profit-seeking. Likewise, heroism.
Richard Stanley had a dream of making a screen adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic The Island of Dr. Moreau. In the mid nineties, he finally managed to get the project up and running, but its shooting turned into a battle between art and industry interests that ended with the director being fired from the film. This documentary examines the story of a movie that could have been a masterpiece of fantasy that ended in an epic failure.
Visit the ghostly villages surrounding Chernobyl (abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear disaster), travel to remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for abandoned towns that have vanished from view in only a few decades, then head beneath the streets of New York to see how subway tunnels may become watery canals. A visual journey, LIFE AFTER PEOPLE is a thought provoking adventure that combines movie-quality visual effects with insights from experts in the fields of engineering, botany, ecology, biology, geology, climatology, and archaeology to demonstrate how the very landscape of our planet will change in our absence.
This documentary attempts to make history by finding the lost city of Atlantis once and for all. Adventurer-geologist Dr. Martin Pepper sets out to prove his theory – that the true Atlantis existed on the Greek island of Santorini, and was destroyed in the biggest volcanic eruption in human history". In order to achieve his goal, Pepper will use new scientific evidence gathered using state-of-the-art sonar scans of the sea bed and microscopic analysis of the ancient landscape. One of the challenges he faces is that he must also match Santorini to a series of key clues embedded in the first ever description of Atlantis by the Greek philosopher Plato – from the lost city’s strange ring-shaped design, to the role Egyptian priests played in recording the legend in the first place. His journey will take him across the Mediterranean and out into the Atlantic Ocean. By the end of the program, he reveals the stunning findings which may pinpoint the city and show exactly what it looked like.
Experience the world from the viewpoint of animals themselves. From spellbinding wildlife spectacle to intimate encounters, Planet Earth II takes you closer than ever before. Remote islands offer sanctuary for some of the planet's strangest and rarest creatures. The rare pygmy three-toed sloth enjoys a peaceful existence on an idyllic Caribbean island, while nesting albatross thrive in predator-free isolation. But island life always comes at a cost. On the Galapagos Islands, young marine iguana must escape an onslaught of deadly racer snakes the moment they hatch from the sand. On the sub-Antarctic island of Zavodovski, life gets more extreme still. Every day, one and a half million penguins risk being battered against the rocks by fierce waves as they try to get on and off the island.
Join scientists as they grab light from across the universe to prove quantum entanglement is real. Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance,' but today quantum entanglement is poised to revolutionize technology from computers to cryptography. Physicists have gradually become convinced that the phenomenontwo subatomic particles that mirror changes in each other instantaneously over any distance is real. But a few doubts remain. The film follows a ground-breaking experiment in the Canary Islands to use quasars at opposite ends of the universe to once and for all settle remaining questions.
The film puts in perspective the 16th century—the Age of Exploration, the Age of Discovery and the Age, problematically, of Colonialism. It also was an age of heroes. As the documentary insists, the journeys undertaken by the men whose names we learned in grade school and whose exploits straddled the 1400s and 1500s—including Ponce de Leon, Vasco da Gama, Lope de Aguirre and even Columbus—were about money, sometimes trade, sometimes plunder. But just as advances in medicine have often been propelled by war, knowledge about the world has been a byproduct of profit-seeking. Likewise, heroism.