Writing itself is 5,000 years old, and for most of that time words were written by hand using a variety of tools. The Romans were able to run an empire thanks to documents written on papyrus. Scroll books could be made quite cheaply and, as a result, ancient Rome had a thriving written culture. With the fall of the Roman Empire, papyrus became more difficult to obtain. Europeans were forced to turn to a much more expensive surface on which to write: Parchment. Medieval handwritten books could cost as much as a house, they also represent a limitation on literacy and scholarship. No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater. That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.
To help Andrew in his search for love, relationship specialist Jodi Rodgers has come to work with him - on his dating skills. Olivia hasn't given up in her search for love. Today, she's on her way to meet someone new. She's meeting Jackson. Jackson likes origami and the smell of perfume. He hates the sound of nails on a blackboard and people slurping their tea. Jimmy and Sharnae are arriving at the Gold Coast for their first-ever holiday together. And Jimmy has a surprise in store for tomorrow.
Ewan and Charley make their way to Peru from Bolivia, and the scenery is just beautiful. Ewan wanted to visit Machu Picchu since he was a kid and decides to show the world the Incan citadel set high in the Andes Mountains. Next up, they make their way to the Cutivireni, a community of Ashaninka people in the Amazon rainforest, with its carbon program to limit the magnitude or rate of global warming and its related effects.
The story of Tilikum, a captive killer whale that has taken the lives of several people , including a top killer whale trainer, underscores the consequences of keeping these powerful animals in captivity, the problems within the sea-park industry, the man's relationship to nature, and how little has been learned about these highly intelligent and sentient mammals. Tilikum was captured in the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1983 and taken to Sealand of the Pacific, a now-shuttered park near Victoria, British Columbia. Former Sealand trainers interviewed in 'Blackfish' say the park’s female killer whales would aggressively gang up on Tilikum, particularly when they were confined in a 20-foot-by- 30-foot pool overnight.
In the last episode, despite disturbing revelations of wrongdoing at Three Mile Island before and after the accident, the utility fights to bring the plant back online. Its Unit 1 had its license temporarily suspended following the incident at Unit 2. Although the citizens of the three counties surrounding the site voted by an overwhelming margin to retire Unit 1 permanently in a non-binding resolution in 1982, it was permitted to resume operations in 1985 following a 4–1 vote by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In 2017, it was announced that operations would cease by 2019 due to financial pressure from cheap natural gas, unless lawmakers stepped in to keep it open. Unit 1 shut down on September 20, 2019. Billed as the worst nuclear incident in U.S. history, what’s particularly scary here is how close Three Mile Island incident came to becoming a national disaster. Without giving away the whole story, cost-cutting 'solutions' almost cause a catastrophic disaster.
Oceans are the largest ecosystem on earth, covering two thirds of our world’s surface and providing half the oxygen in our atmosphere. They are home to as much as 80 per cent of all life on earth, and nearly three billion people rely on them for their primary source of food. But our planet’s oceans would be little more than stagnant wastelands, and life on planet earth would cease to exist, were it not for one simple factor: a global network of powerful ocean currents. Every drop of seawater on earth rides these currents, taking 1,000 years to complete a single circuit. Without the constant mixing of currents, tides and waves, our oceans would stop supporting life - and a healthy ocean is vital to a healthy planet.
No such limitations were felt in China, where paper had been invented in the second century. Paper was the foundation of Chinese culture and power, and for centuries how to make it was kept secret. When the secret was out, paper mills soon sprang up across central Asia. The result was an intellectual flourishing known as the Islamic Golden Age. Muslim scholars made discoveries in biology, geology, astronomy and mathematics. By contrast, Europe was an intellectual backwater.
That changed with Gutenberg’s development of movable type printing. The letters of the Latin alphabet have very simple block-like shapes, which made it relatively simple to turn them into type pieces. When printers tried to use movable type to print Arabic texts, they found themselves hampered by the cursive nature of Arabic writing. The success of movable type printing in Europe led to a thousand-fold increase in the availability of information, which produced an explosion of ideas that led directly to the European Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed.