Last Watched

Quantum Computing

   2016    Technology
These scientists are part of a global race. It's been running for over a decade... to build a mythical machine, the holy grail of calculations - a quantum computer. Remarkably, first-generation quantum computers have started to appear. Indeed, earlier this year, Google bought one. The D-Wave 2.
Series: Catalyst

Life Rocky Start

   2016    Science
Four and a half billion years ago, the young Earth was a hellish place, a seething chaos of meteorite impacts, volcanoes belching noxious gases, and lightning flashing through a thin, torrid atmosphere. Then, in a process that has puzzled scientists for decades, life emerged. But how? Join mineralogist Robert Hazen as he journeys around the globe. From an ancient Moroccan market to the Australian Outback, he advances a startling and counterintuitive idea—that the rocks beneath our feet were not only essential to jump-starting life, but that microbial life helped give birth to hundreds of minerals we know and depend on today. It's a theory of the co-evolution of Earth and life that is reshaping the grand-narrative of our planet’s story.

Age of Extremes

   2017    History
Lucy Worsley continues her journey through Russia in the footsteps of the Romanovs, the most powerful royal dynasty in modern European history. In this episode she examines the extraordinary reign of Catherine the Great, and the traumatic conflict with napoleonic France that provides the setting for the novel War and Peace. At the magnificent palace of Peterhof near St Petersburg, Lucy charts the meteoric rise of Catherine the Great, who seized the Russian throne from her husband Peter III in 1762 and became the most powerful woman in the world. Catherine was a woman of huge passions - for art, for her adopted country (she was German by birth) and for her many lovers.
Catherine expanded her empire through military victories overseas, while at home she encouraged education and introduced smallpox inoculation to Russia. But Catherine struggled to introduce deeper reforms, and the institution of serfdom remained largely unchanged. Lucy explains how this injustice fuelled a violent rebellion. Nevertheless, Catherine left Russia more powerful on the world stage than ever. But all she had achieved looked set to be undone when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Lucy relives the pivotal battle of Borodino, when the Russian army finally confronted the French forces; the traumatic destruction of Moscow; and, under Catherine's grandson Alexander, the eventual victory over the French that provided the Romanov dynasty with its most glorious hour.
Series: Empire of the Tsars

The Mountains

   2011    Culture
From lush cloud forests to bare summits that take your breath away, the higher you climb the tougher life gets on a mountain. Human Planet explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extreme altitudes where nature becomes utterly unforgiving. In the Altai Mountains in Western Mongolia the vast open spaces make hunting for animals almost impossible, so the locals have forged an astonishing partnership with golden eagles which can do the hunting for them. On the precipitous cliffs of the Simien Mountains of Ethiopia we join a young boy locked in a dramatic battle with fearsome gelada monkeys which are hell-bent on raiding his family's meagre grain harvest. In the Himalayan state of Nepal - the roof of the world - we witness a rarely seen ceremony: a sky burial. In a land where there is little wood to burn for cremation, and where burying the dead is virtually impossible, the dead are fed to vultures in the ultimate reverence of nature.
Series: Human Planet

Willy and Sal

   2021    History
A Six-part Saga on the South Florida traffickers indicted in one of the largest drug cases in U.S. history. Alleged to be the chief U.S. distributors for two of Colombia's biggest cartels, Cuban exiles Augusto 'Willy' Falcon and Salvador 'Sal' Magluta were accused of smuggling over 75 tons of cocaine into the U.S. in the 1980s. The high school friends built a reputed $2 billion empire that made Willy and Sal two of Miami's biggest celebrities. Featuring colourful interviews with those closest to them, their defence team, and the Feds tasked with taking them down, the series paints a vivid portrait of the last of Miami's 'cocaine cowboys.'
The first episode shows how in the 1970s and '80s, friends Willy Falcon and Sal Magluta leave humble beginnings behind as they allegedly ascend to the top of Miami's drug trade.
Series: Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami

Blood Brother

   2013    Medicine
Rocky Braat went to India as a disillusioned tourist. When he met a group of children with AIDS, he decided to stay. He never could have imagined the obstacles he would face, or the love he would find.