Alan Davies discovers that answering that question is much harder than he originally thought after visiting mathematician Marcus du Sautoy to help him find an answer. However, this creates more questions, which requires a trip...
The Mandelbrot set - someone has called it the thumb-print of God - is one of the most beautiful and remarkable discoveries in the entire history of mathematics. With Arthur C. Clarke as narrator and interviews with a number of...
In this three-part BBC series, Dr Adam Rutherford tells the extraordinary story of the scientific quest to discover the secrets of the living cell. The first part, The Hidden Kingdom, explores how centuries of scientific and...
Richard Feynman was a scientific genius with - in his words - a "limited intelligence". This dichotomy is just one of the characteristics that made him a fascinating subject. The...
Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand....
For years scientists have been trying to find the mysterious evolutionary master key responsible for transforming the dinosaurs into world-beaters. In the early Jurassic, 200 million years ago, they were a relatively small...
42,000 Years ago, the only humans in Europe made clothes, educated their young, made tools. But they weren’t the same as us. Now the very latest technology can reveal exactly how they lived, the dangers they faced and the...
In Secrets of the Mind we gain insights through various tragedies that have affected others, thanks to the logic and insights of Professor Ramachandran regarding what he calls the most complex organized matter in the universe....
The quest to live longer has been one of humanities oldest dreams, but while scientists have been searching, a few isolated communities have stumbled across the answer. On the remote Japanese island of Okinawa, In the...
The great PBS science series Nova scores another hit with Mars: Dead or Alive, capturing all the excitement surrounding the Mars rover landings of early 2004. Originally broadcast just as the first of the twin rovers ("Spirit"...
250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years,...
Without the moon, humans wouldn't exist. Life, if it had started at all, would be in the earliest stages of evolution. Days would last four hours, winds would blow at hurricane force and there would be a dense and toxic...
In 2001, scientists announced an amazing discovery: the oldest skull of a human ancestor ever found. The 3½ million year old fossil was remarkably complete, and unlike any previous fossil find. Its discovery - by a team led by...
When Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution nearly 150 years ago, he shattered the dominant belief of his day – that humans were the product of divine creation. Through his observations of nature, Darwin proposed...
