This is War • 2020 • episode "S1E4" • High Score

47:42

Our cultural heritage is one of humanity’s most precious assets: how can we pass it on to the future? It’s a crucial challenge: sharing it with the greatest number but also help it stand up against threats of destruction. New technologies and virtual reality open up unprecedented perspectives.

S2E6 • Dream the Future • 2018 • Technology

49:00

We explore the revolutionary gene-editing tech now giving humankind the freedom to redraw the blueprint of biological life itself. We investigate not only the tremendous potential the technology holds, whether in the fight to eliminate diseases or in transforming agriculture to adapt to unprecedented climate extremes, but also probe the inherent risks involved and the potential for widespread abuse, dangers that could take our future down a very dark, dystopian path.

2022 • Technology

45:16

With its survival challenged by a rapidly growing and aging population and by accelerating climate change, where can land-poor Singapore expand? The futurists offer a radical solution: a massive vertical city. What will it be like living high up in the sky?

S1E1 • Futuropolis: Mapping the City of Tomorrow • 2018 • Technology

53:31

Can new engineering techniques help prevent deadly bridge collapses? In 2018, Italy’s Morandi Bridge collapsed, tragically killing 43 people. For 50 years, the iconic bridge had withstood the elements—and stress from ever-increasing traffic. What went wrong that fateful day? And how can new engineering technology protect bridge infrastructure to prevent such tragic failures in the future? Through eyewitness testimony, expert interviews, and dramatic archival footage, NOVA investigates the Morandi disaster and other deadly bridge collapses.

NOVA PBS • 2019 • Technology

58:56

From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, materials have helped drive forward our civilisation. By manipulating materials we have been able to transform our world and our lives - and never more so than in the past century when we have discovered and designed more materials than at any other time in human history. (Part 2: Plastic) Professor Mark Miodownik tells the story of plastics - created in the lab, they have brought luxury to the masses and shaped the modern age. He recounts tales of the mavericks responsible for some of plastic's most outrageous failures and heady successes, from the explosive attempts to make a replacement for ivory billiard balls to the ultimately ubiquitous Bakelite. Investigating at atomic level, Mark discovers the properties that have allowed plastics to dominate our world and reveals how the next generation of plastics will take its inspiration from nature, creating man-made materials which behave as though they are alive and which could help rebuild the human body.

S1E2 • How It Works • 2012 • Technology

55:41

Only in the last 200 years have humans learned how to make things cold. Steven Johnson explains how ice entrepreneur Frederic Tudor made ice delivery one of the biggest export business in the U.S. and describes the place where Clarence Birdseye, the father of the frozen food industry, experienced his eureka moment. He also travels to Dubai to see how mastery of cold has led to penguins in the desert. From IVF to food, politics and Hollywood to human migration, the unsung heroes of cold have led the way.

S1E5 • How We Got to Now • 2014 • Technology