Documentary AreaSimply the best Documentaries

The Culture High is the riveting story that tears into the very fibre of modern day marijuana prohibition to reveal the truth behind the arguments and motives governing both those who support and those who oppose the existing pot laws. With budgets to fight the war reaching billions and arrests for simple possession skyrocketing to nearly a million annually, the debate over marijuana's legality has reached epic proportions. "The Culture High raises the stakes with some of today's biggest names, unprecedented access to footage previously unobtainable, and incredibly moving testimonials from both sides of the spectrum. Top celebrities, former undercover agents, university professors and a slew of unforgettable characters from all points of view come together for an amusing yet insightful portrait of cannabis prohibition and the grasp it has on society as a whole. "The Culture High" will strip search the oddity of human nature and dare to ask the question: What exactly is going on here?

By the time he died in 1931, Thomas Alva Edison was one of the most famous men in the world. The holder of more patents than any other inventor in history, Edison had achieved glory as the genius behind such revolutionary inventions as sound recording, motion pictures, and electric light. Edison's curiosity led him to its cutting edge. With just three months of formal schooling, he took on one seemingly impossible technical challenge after another, and through intuition, persistence, and a unique team approach to innovation, invariably solved it." Driven and intensely competitive, Edison was often neglectful in his private life and could be ruthless in business. Challenged by competition in the industry he'd founded, Edison launched an ugly propaganda campaign against his rivals, and used his credibility as an electrical expert to help ensure that high-voltage electrocution became a form of capital punishment. Edison explores the complex alchemy that accounts for the enduring celebrity of America's most famous inventor, offering new perspectives on the man and his milieu, and illuminating not only the true nature of invention, but its role in turn-of-the-century America's rush into the future.

Dark energy - the mysterious force that is unexpectedly causing the universe's expansion to speed up. The effects of dark energy were discovered in 1998 but physicists still don't know what it is. Worse, its very existence calls into question Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity - the cornerstone of modern physics. The hunt for the identity of dark energy is on". Experiments on earth and in space generate data that might provide a clue, but there are also hopes that another Einstein might emerge - someone who can write a new theory explaining the mystery of the dark energy.

Horizon investigates the idea that the best way to lose weight successfully is a personalised approach, diets tailored to our individual biology and psychology. In a groundbreaking experiment, Dr Chris van Tulleken and Tanya Byron join a team of experts to put 75 overweight volunteers on diets designed to tackle the specific reasons why they eat too much. The volunteers are put through a series of tests at a residential clinic to understand how their genes, hormones and psychology influence their eating behaviour. They are then put on the diets the experts believe are best suited to them. Can science succeed where other diets have failed?

He was stalked, attacked and left to die alone. Murdered more than 5,000 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman is Europe’s oldest known natural mummy. Miraculously preserved in glacial ice, his remarkably intact remains continue to provide scientists, historians, and archeologists with ground-breaking discoveries about a crucial time in human history.

With the rapid emergence of digital devices, an unstoppable, invisible force is changing human lives: Big Data, a word that was barely used a few years ago but now governs the day for many of us. The real time visualization of data streaming in from satellites, billions of sensors and GPS enabled cameras and smart phones is beginning to enable us to sense, measure and understand aspects of our existence in ways never possible before". This massive gathering and analysing of data in real time is also allowing us to address to some of humanity biggest challenges, including pollution, world hunger and illness, and it is also helping create a new kind of planetary nervous system. But as Edward Snowden and the release of the NSA documents have shown, the accessibility of all this data comes at a steep price. The Human Face of Big Data captures the promise and peril of this extraordinary knowledge revolution.