Discover how restoring your natural "primal posture" can help reduce back pain, neck pain, and other common musculoskeletal problems
Hannah takes a drive to the National Highways control centre for the UK’s busiest motorway to meet the team that keep the motorways running 24/7.
S3E5 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology
The rise of the smart doorbell is one of the great tech success stories of the 21st century. Hannah heads to Los Angeles to take a deep dive into doorbell history and talk to market leaders Ring.
S3E4 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology
Hannah uncovers the wild origins of the modern-day rollercoaster and gets the inside story on the UK’s newest, tallest and fastest coaster – Thorpe Park's Hyperia.
S3E3 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology
Hannah hits the production line with appliance giants Bosch to find the lifeblood at the heart of every fridge and gets a lesson in carrot droop.
S3E2 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology
Hannah takes a look at the air fryer – a device that is rapidly taking over people's kitchens, cooking up everything from bread rolls to baked Alaska and almost making ovens obsolete.
S3E1 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2025 • Technology
Hannah goes behind the scenes to look at the technology behind the lift, entering a 246m high lift shaft to test everything from the brakes to her own fear of heights.
S2E6 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
Headphones: these marvels of miniaturisation are worn by 30 million people in the UK. Hannah Fry visits Bose to find out how the teeny earbud tech works and meets the human testers with ‘golden ears’.
S2E5 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
Hannah Fry discovers the hidden WWII radar technology that heats up baked beans, learns the legend of the melted candy bar in an engineer’s pocket that kick-started a kitchen revolution and puts her life on the line to demonstrate why microwaves zap food but not people!
S2E4 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
With rare access to electronics giant Samsung, Hannah uncovers the technological game changers that have made the smartphone a reality.
S2E3 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
Hannah takes a look at the vacuum cleaner, going behind the scenes with Dyson and discovering how the motor in their latest vacuum spins nine times faster than that of a Formula One race car.
S2E2 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
Hannah gains access to a top-secret site where anonymous staff and the latest tech work to make the British passport one of the most secure documents on the planet.
S2E1 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2023 • Technology
The traditional narrative is that humans are selfish. If pushed, the story goes, we look after ourselves first and others later. In this episode, we see how modern neuroscience has blown that myth apart.
S1E2 • The Curious Mind • 2020 • Brain
The elements that constitute every living being were formed within the very first stars. Today, a green sea turtle searches the ocean for them.
S1E4 • Our Universe • 2022 • Nature
Jungles and rainforests are home to an incredible variety of species like preening birds, intelligent orangutans and remarkably ambitious ants.
S1E3 • Our Planet • 2019 • Nature
This instalment is the first of several to concentrate on mammals. The platypus and the echidna are the only mammals that lay eggs (in much the same manner of reptiles), and it is from such animals that others in the group evolved. Since mammals have warm blood and most have dense fur, they can hunt at night when temperatures drop. It is for this reason that they became more successful than their reptile ancestors, who needed to heat themselves externally. Much of the programme is devoted to marsupials (whose young are partially formed at birth) of which fossils have been found in the Americas dating back 60 million years.
9/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature
Just as humans have always sought food to survive, we have also sought the means to preserve that food. Right from the very moment of a kill or a harvest, food begins to break down. With preservation, we can plan for times of scarcity during times of plenty.
S1E3 • The History of Food • 2018 • Health
Brian Cox considers what it is about our world that makes it a home for life.
S1E5 • Wonders of Life • Nature
Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it — and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections.
2008 • Creativity
Auguste Rodin followed his intuition and was inspired as well by the relationships with his models. Behind each of his works there was either a scandal or a controversy. He left us "The Thinker" and "The Kiss", two of the most famous sculptures in the world. Here is his story.
2 • Behind the Artist • 2016 • Creativity
Mark turns to horror and shows how film-makers have devilishly deployed a range of cinematic tricks to exploit our deepest, darkest and most elemental fears. He explores the recurring elements of horror, including the journey, the jump scare, the scary place, the monster and the chase. He reveals how they have been refined and reinvented in films as diverse as the silent classic The Phantom of the Opera, low-budget cult shockers The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Evil Dead, and Oscar-winners The Silence of the Lambs and Get Out. Mark analyses the importance of archetypal figures such as the clown, the savant and the 'final girl'. And of course, he celebrates his beloved Exorcist films by examining two unforgettable but very different shock moments in The Exorcist and The Exorcist III. Ultimately, Mark argues, horror is the most cinematic of genres, because no other kind of film deploys images and sound to such powerful and primal effect.
Part 5 • Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema • 2018 • Creativity
Vincent van Gogh's life has long captured the imagination, but who was he really? Tim Marlow delves into his fascinating and sometimes deeply troubled world.
S2E2 • Great Art • 2018 • Creativity
Alastair Sooke champions pop art as one of the most important art forms of the 20th century, peeling back pop's frothy, ironic surface to reveal an art style full of subversive wit and radical ideas. In charting its story, Alastair brings a fresh eye to the work of pop art superstars Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and tracks down pop's pioneers, from American artists like James Rosenquist, Claes Oldenburg and Ed Ruscha to British godfathers Peter Blake and Allen Jones. Alastair also explores how pop's fascination with celebrity, advertising and the mass media was part of a global art movement, and he travels to China to discover how a new generation of artists are reinventing pop art's satirical, political edge for the 21st century.
2015 • Creativity
Have you noticed how the full moon looks bigger on the horizon than high overhead? Actually, the two images are exactly the same size -- so why do we perceive them differently? Scientists aren't sure, but there are plenty of intriguing theories. Andrew Vanden Heuvel unravels the details of focus, distance and proportion that contribute to this mystifying optical illusion.
Are you in control of your brain, or is your brain controlling you? Dive into the latest research on the subconscious with neuroscientist Heather Berlin to see what’s really driving the decisions you make.
S1E2 • Your Brain • 2023 • Brain
The best-selling authors of Super Brain, Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Rudy Tanzi, describe the basic rules about how our brain functions. Your brain always eavesdrops on your thoughts. Can you teach your brain to become unlimited, by thinking that you have that potential?
10/10 • Curiosity Retreats: 2014 Lectures • 2014 • Brain
To prove that brain training can overcome fear, Todd uses all his previous brain training to face his fears and achieve the ultimate challenge - a skywalk between two buildings 21 floors high.
S2E3 • Redesign my brain • 2015 • Brain
Follow the dramatic personal journey of Hugh Herr, a biophysicist working to create brain-controlled robotic limbs. At age 17, Herr’s legs were amputated after a climbing accident. Frustrated by the crude prosthetic limbs he was given, Herr set out to remedy their design, leading him to a career as an inventor of innovative prosthetic devices.
A 200,000 year old jawbone tells the story of an elderly woman who was kept alive thanks to the kindness of her companions. From this first known example of human compassion to modern day heroes, the final programme in the Human Instinct series explores the most complex of instincts. The instinct to put others first.
S1E4 • Human Instinct • Brain
A disastrous grain shortage reveals Cleander's treachery and leaves Commodus isolated, inspiring him to train as a gladiator in a bid to unite Rome.
S1E5 • Roman Empire • 2016 • History
How do we know what matter is made of? The quest for the atom has been a long one, beginning 2,400 years ago with the work of a Greek philosopher and later continued by a Quaker and a few Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Theresa Doud details the history of atomic theory.?
Xand van Tulleken, Raksha Dave and John Sergeant discover the parallels of the Great Plague of 1665 with the Covid-19 pandemic. Ch1. Outbreak The epidemic is traced back to its source in the parish of St Giles in the Fields, now at the heart of London's theatre district. The program also examines the symptoms of the disease and uncovers new research into the plague bacteria that could overthrow accepted ideas about how the infection was spread. Ch2. Decimation Xand heads to St Barts hospital to look back at historical records which show that nursing staff stayed behind and risked their lives to help the sick. Elsewhere, John investigates why infection rates were so different between the rich and poor, examining clothes typical for each group in the 17th century. Ch3. Aftermath Xand visits Samuel Pepys' parish church and discovers the sad tale of the Poole family, who within 11 days lost all five of their children. He also heads to Eyam in Derbyshire, revealing the heroic story of self-sacrifice that saw all 700 villagers lock themselves in to try to stop the disease from spreading to surrounding areas. Raksha Dave trials 17th-century disinfection methods and reveal a surprising substitute that can be just as effective as modern antibacterial cleaners.
2020 • Health
Episode 2 – exposes how the industrial revolution opened the floodgates for highly-processed convenience foods that became "our daily bread." But those pseudo-grains are known to contribute to chronic disease. Natural, whole grains support longevity and lower the risk of heart disease. Grain of Truth also explores the debate over gluten as a dietary evil.
S1E2 • Prescription: Nutrition • 2017 • Health
Last week we covered multiple star systems, but what if we added thousands or even millions of stars to the mix? A star cluster. There are different kinds of clusters, though. Open clusters contain hundreds or thousands of stars held together by gravity. They’re young, and evaporate over time, their stars let loose to roam space freely. Globular clusters, on the other hand, are larger, have hundreds of thousands of stars, and are more spherical. They’re very old, a significant fraction of the age of the Universe itself, and that means their stars have less heavy elements in them, are redder, and probably don’t have planets (though we’re not really sure).
35 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy
Elephant poaching worldwide has reached epidemic proportions. In Kenya, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust provides a sanctuary for baby elephants who are its greatest victims, left to die without the nurture and protection of their matriarchal herds. In 2010 a baby elephant named Sities was rescued and brought to the Trust’s Nairobi Nursery to begin her rehabilitation. Her remarkable story was followed by audiences worldwide who watched her progress from day one. Now three years later we catch up with Sities, who has reached the age where she can be integrated into the wild elephant herds of Tsavo East National Park. HOW TO BE A WILD ELEPHANT observes the challenges Sities will face as she leaves the safety of the Nursery and moves on to the next phase of her journey back to freedom.
S53E11 • The Nature of Things • 2014 • Nature