Tokyo Flood Prevention • 2015 • episode "8/10" • Catalyst: Season 1

58:57

Dallas and Hannah conclude the series by examining the process of bringing a plane safely to the ground. Hannah meets air traffic controllers at the world's busiest airport and visits a site that has seen over 2000 unscheduled landings in the last decade. Dallas sits in the cockpit of a plane heading for Paro, Bhutan, a place where only 26 pilots in the world are qualified to land.

Part 3 • City in the Sky • 2016 • Technology

56:12

First-hand accounts of those who made possible mankind's greatest achievement.

S1E3 • Blue Sky Metropolis • 2020 • Technology

26:09

Before spaceflight aviators began wearing pressure suits to allow them to function at higher ceilings. These aviation suits were adapted for the early Cosmonauts and Astronauts but as requirements became more demanding spacesuit design became more elaborate.

S1E6 • Zenith: Advances in Space Exploration • 2021 • Technology

44:00

It's July 20, 1969. Four days after Apollo 11 thundered skyward from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to set foot upon the moon, thanks to a marvel of engineering: the lunar module. It's the culmination of years of toil and millions of man-hours of engineering prowess. This is the story of the unsung heroes who built the unconventional flying machines that carried 12 Americans to the moon on six separate missions and made the dream of a generation come true.

S1E2 • America's Secret Space Heroes • 2017 • Technology

17:59

The term eSports is short for "electronic sports". It is introduced to describe competitive video gaming. What's competitive video gaming? It's basically just people playing video games in some form of competition.

S1E8 • Explained • 2018 • Technology

59:00

Mike Wooldridge reveals the huge role AI already plays in our daily lives – sometimes without us even realising its role. Mike investigates how games like chess and Go have become a training ground for AI, helping to bring about key advances we are now seeing in the field, and he reveals how simple methods of learning, like rewarding success, have been used to train AI in spectacular ways. We also feature some of the revolutionary innovations that AI has brought about in healthcare, from the use of AI tools in planning cancer treatment, to monitoring Parkinson's. Mike is joined by members of DeepMind's AlphaFold team, who use AI to predict the structures of large numbers of proteins, which will revolutionise the creation of new drugs across the world. We also reveal the huge impact AI has had on our creative lives – as it is able to write songs and create artworks in seconds. With the help of artist Eric Drass (aka shardcore), the audience creates a collaborative artwork and discovers how image generation works. Mike explores the thorny question of who the creator is – the AI itself, the human who set it to work, or the creators of the art that AI has learned from? The Christmas Lectures are the most prestigious event in the Royal Institution calendar, dating from 1825, when Michael Faraday founded the series. They are the world's longest running science television series, and always promise to inspire and amaze each year through explosive demonstrations and interactive experiments with the live theatre audience.

S1E2 • BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: The Truth about AI • 2023 • Technology