Dr Claire Taylor learns more about the the UK's fastest growing health condition, she meets patients living with dementia, as well as scientists and experts working in the field. The GP puts herself through innovative tests to find out how to spot the earliest signs and learns about different types of the disease. Plus, Claire investigates cutting edge treatments and asks what can be done to prevent dementia developing.
2025 • Health
A two-part documentary recounting the Cold War space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Through newly colorized archival footage and firsthand accounts, it follows the rivalry from early satellites and rocket development to espionage, surveillance, and the Apollo Moon landings.
2026 • Astronomy
Explores the ever-present dangers faced by astronauts on the ISS, ranging from meteor strikes and docking disasters to the entire station backflipping out of control.
S1E2 • Terror on the Space Station • 2025 • Astronomy
Explores the danger and ambition of building the International Space Station in space, where a single mistake could prove fatal.
S1E1 • Terror on the Space Station • 2025 • Astronomy
How did Stone Age communities build enormous burial mounds, stone circles, temples, and tombs with the limited technology available to them? This episode visits major archaeological sites in Scotland, Brittany, Austria, Malta, Turkey, and Jordan to investigate how massive stones were transported, what these monuments meant, and what they reveal about early social organization and beliefs.
S1E2 • Secrets of the Stone Age • 2017 • History
Around 12,000 years ago, humans began abandoning a nomadic existence for settled life. The episode follows the emergence of agriculture and animal husbandry, the growth of settlements, changing diets, and the remarkable discovery of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey—where hunter-gatherers erected massive decorated stone columns long before farming became widespread.
S1E1 • Secrets of the Stone Age • 2017 • History
Philomena Cunk returns with her most ambitious quest yet - venturing right up the universe to examine life and existence. Mockumentary from Charlie Brooker starring Diane Morgan.
2024 • Nature
Simon Reeve embarks on a 3,000-mile journey across the deserts, plains and mountains of Mongolia in search of snow leopards and the nomadic people who hunt with golden eagles.
S2E4 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature
Simon Reeve treks and canoes through Canada’s rugged and frozen Yukon Territory to meet the people who make the wilderness home and to search for grizzly bears, the apex predator.
S2E3 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature
Simon Reeve voyages across Mexico’s beautiful and remote Sea of Cortez, known as the 'aquarium of the world', to dive with rare and dangerous sharks.
S2E2 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature
Simon Reeve journeys through the lost world of Papua New Guinea’s tropical rainforest in search of the tenkile tree kangaroo, one of the rarest animals on Earth.
S2E1 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2026 • Nature
Simon Reeve crosses the parched desert of southern Africa, tracking wildebeest with the famous hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari, before heading to the oasis of the Okavango Delta.
S1E4 • Wilderness with Simon Reeve • 2024 • Nature
David Attenborough presents a guide to wildlife that have adapted to survive in frozen mountain regions. On the high slopes of Mount Kenya, a pregnant High Casqued Chameleon must choose the right time in a daily cycle of tropical sun and frost at night to give birth. The mountains of Japan are the snowiest place on Earth, providing hostile conditions for a lone male Macaque cast out of his troop. In the remote Southern Alps of New Zealand, parrots feed on the dead, while in the Andes, flamingos thrive in high altitude volcanic lakes.
S1E3 • Frozen Planet II narrated by Sir David Attenborough • 2022 • Nature
On a cosmic time scale, human history is as brief as the blink of an eye. By compressing all 13.8 billion years of time into a 10 minute scale, this video shows just how young we truly are, and just how ancient and vast our universe is. Starting with the big bang and culminating in the appearance of homo sapiens, this experience follows the unfolding of time at 22 million years per second, adhering closely to current scientific understanding.
2018 • Astronomy
Is what you see real? Join neuroscientist Heather Berlin on a quest to understand how your brain shapes your reality, and why you can’t always trust what you perceive. Learn the surprising tricks and shortcuts the brain takes to help us survive.
S1E1 • Your Brain • 2023 • Brain
David Attenborough narrates a natural history of the oceans. The deadly game of hide-and-seek played by the sea's charismatic hunters - whales, shark and billfish.
S1E3 • Blue Planet I • 2001 • Nature
Planet Earth grows to outlandish proportions that causes lying down to become the new standing up, the sun gets big ideas giving us a 20,000-year winter before blowing up in the biggest explosion since the big bang, we meet a dog the size of a dinosaur and Joe himself turns into a 49ft giant.
S1E1 • Size Matters • 2019 • Physics
Could a machine replace your doctor? Dr Hannah Fry explores the incredible ways AI is revolutionising healthcare - and what this means for all of us. This film chronicles the inside story of the AI health revolution, as one company, Babylon Health, prepare for a man vs machine showdown. Can Babylon succeed in their quest to prove their AI can outperform human doctors at safe triage and accurate diagnosis?
Renowned cosmologist Max Tegmark will take us on a journey through some of the greatest mysteries of our existence, and through the physics, astronomy and mathematics that are the foundation of his work.
S1E4 • Curiosity Retreats: 2016 Lectures • 2016 • Math
A witty and mind-expanding exploration of data, with mathematician Dr Hannah Fry. This high-tech romp reveals what data is and how it is captured, stored, shared and made sense of. Fry tells the story of the engineers of the data age, people most of us have never heard of despite the fact they brought about a technological and philosophical revolution. For Hannah, the joy of data is all about spotting patterns. Hannah sees data as the essential bridge between two universes - the tangible, messy world that we see and the clean, ordered world of maths, where everything can be captured beautifully with equations. The film reveals the connection between Scrabble scores and online movie streaming, explains why a herd of dairy cows are wearing pedometers, and uncovers the network map of Wikipedia. What's the mystery link between marmalade and One Direction? The film hails the contribution of Claude Shannon, the mathematician and electrical engineer who, in an attempt to solve the problem of noisy telephone lines, devised a way to digitise all information. Shannon singlehandedly launched the 'information age'. Meanwhile, Britain's National Physical Laboratory hosts a race between its young apprentices in order to demonstrate how and why data moves quickly around modern data networks. It's all thanks to the brilliant technique first invented there in the 1960s by Welshman Donald Davies - packet switching. But what of the future? Should we be worried by the pace of change and what our own data could be used for? Ultimately, Fry concludes, data has empowered all of us. We must have machines at our side if we're to find patterns in the modern-day data deluge. But, Fry believes, regardless of AI and machine learning, it will always take us to find the meaning in them.
2016 • Math
Using the fundamentals of set theory, explore the mind-bending concept of the "infinity of infinities" -- and how it led mathematicians to conclude that math itself contains unanswerable questions.
Documentary that reveals the secret story behind one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II, a feat that gave birth to the digital age. In 1943 a 24-year-old maths student and a GPO engineer combined to hack into Hitler's personal super code machine - not Enigma but an even tougher system, which he called his 'secrets writer'. Their break turned the Battle of Kursk, powered the D-day landings and orchestrated the end of the conflict in Europe. But it was also to be used during the Cold War - which meant both men's achievements were hushed up and never officially recognised.
2011 • Math
An algorithm is a method of solving problems both big and small. Though computers run algorithms constantly, humans can also solve problems with algorithms. David J. Malan explains how algorithms can be used in seemingly simple situations and also complex ones.
Hannah travels down the fastest zip wire in the world to learn more about Newton's ideas on gravity. His discoveries revealed the movement of the planets was regular and predictable. James Clerk Maxwell unified the ideas of electricity and magnetism, and explained what light was. As if that wasn't enough, he also predicted the existence of radio waves. His tools of the trade were nothing more than pure mathematics. All strong evidence for maths being discovered. But in the 19th century, maths is turned on its head when new types of geometry are invented. No longer is the kind of geometry we learned in school the final say on the subject. If maths is more like a game, albeit a complicated one, where we can change the rules, surely this points to maths being something we invent - a product of the human mind. To try and answer this question, Hannah travels to Halle in Germany on the trail of perhaps one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Georg Cantor. He showed that infinity, far from being infinitely big, actually comes in different sizes, some bigger than others. This increasingly weird world is feeling more and more like something we've invented. But if that's the case, why is maths so uncannily good at predicting the world around us? Invented or discovered, this question just got a lot harder to answer.
S1E2 • Magic Numbers: Hannah Fry's Mysterious World of Maths • 2018 • Math
In part 2, Prof. Arthur Shapiro takes us through visual illusions that show how our brain processes retinal impressions from light and dark. Watch as things "move" while they are standing still. It will be hard to believe your eyes after watching this program!
Could the power of fake pills be used to treat some of our most common medical complaints? To find out, Dr Michael Mosley embarks on Britain's largest ever trial to investigate the placebo effect. He is heading to Blackpool to gather 117 people suffering from backache - one of the leading types of chronic pain - before trying to treat them with nothing but fake pills and the power of the mind. Working with experts from the University of Oxford, Michael discovers that the placebo effect is more than just a medical curiosity. The brain is actually capable of producing its own drugs, and these can be more powerful than prescription painkillers. Michael's volunteers come from all walks of life, but they have all suffered with bad backs for years and feel their conventional medication isn't up to the job. They include Stacey, who is struggling to keep up with her two energetic daughters, wheelchair user Jim, who longs to be able to get back on a boat, and poker player Moyra, who is looking for a painkiller which doesn't affect her performance. They think they are taking part in the trial of a powerful new painkiller, but their blue and white capsules actually contain nothing but ground-up rice. Can this fake treatment make a real difference? And how will the volunteers react when Michael reveals the truth? Michael also finds out about some remarkable placebo experiments from around the world, including a woman in Oxfordshire who experienced a near-miraculous recovery after undergoing fake surgery to fix her chronic shoulder pain. Plus a team in Lancashire who want to see if the placebo effect can cure a broken heart. And Michael discovers a team in Germany working on a placebo that works even if you know you are taking it, which might improve the lives of transplant patients. Michael also tests this out on himself - attempting to train his own body to respond to a fake treatment - a foul-tasting green drink - as if he were taking actual drugs.
This is what you look like, on the inside, when smoking cannabis. The effects of Marijuana on your brain, and how it defines your experience.
An investigation into hate, produced by Steven Spielberg and Alex Gibney. Cognitive scientist Laurie Santos examines how tribalism shapes perceptions of other groups.
S1E2 • Why We Hate • 2019 • Brain
How can a lie become true? In this episode, Dr. Aaron Blaisdell and I create a game show that is actually a giant “human Skinner Box” to observe the formation of superstitious beliefs. And Dr. Samuel Veissière helps me design and perform a placebo reverse exorcism, harnessing the power of belief in both science and religion to convince normal people that a spirit has possessed their bodies.
S3E7 • Mind Field • 2019 • Brain
What would the world be like if we could expand our senses beyond our current capacities? Neuroscientist David Eagleman is working on the cutting edge of technology that will change what it means to be human.
S1E1 • Curiosity Retreats: 2016 Lectures • 2016 • Brain
Scotland is a ground zero for some of the most significant geologic cataclysms in Earth's history. Understanding of these titanic shifts was prompted by a mysterious lake known as Loch Ness.
S1E4 • How the Earth Was Made • 2009 • Environment
Eric Drexler, the "founding father of nanotechnology," and Jim Phillips, the CEO of Nanomech, discuss the potential applications and implications of nanotechnology. How will this atomically precise manufacturing impact the future of technology, global governance, and the environment?
4/10 • Curiosity Retreats: 2014 Lectures • 2014 • Technology
Many people believe the Hiroshima atomic bomb instantly incinerated nearly everyone in the Japanese city. That was true at ground zero, but not everywhere. Hiroshima government officials have been tirelessly collecting records on those killed to find out how they died. Using this "big data", NHK created a visualization of the movements of the 557,000 victims of the 6th August 1945 attack. Some did indeed perish instantly. Others burned to death in collapsed buildings. But what about the people who died in a strange "donut zone of death" days after the bombing and in areas more than 2 kilometers from ground zero? This documentary goes beyond big data to provide heart-rending accounts from people close to victims and survivors, revealing the true story of what happened on that dark day more than 70 years ago.
2017 • History
Joanna's adventures in and around Iran, from where she followed the Silk Road through Azerbaijan and Georgia, finally moving on to Venice. Also presents behind the scenes footage from Joanna's travels in Haiti and Cuba.
S1E3 • Joanna Lumley’s Unseen Adventures • 2020 • Travel
Embark on a journey to Spain and Portugal, In Europe’s Carpathian Mountains, the introduction of Bison is helping numerous other species to thrive, while just beyond this mountainous region, Gray Wolves are staging an astonishing return.
S1E2 • Europe's New Wild • 2021 • Nature
The third episode opens on a world of drug trafficking that has been fragmented by the efforts of the police. Dealers have now changed; invisibility is their chief weapon. The trade has shifted to areas beyond law-and-order, like war zones in Afghanistan or areas with guerilla activity like Colombia. Designer drugs, which are easy to manufacture and conceal, play a key role in the transformation of the traffic. In Mexico, the cartels have dragged the whole country into a merciless spiral of violence – wherever one looks, the toll of the war on drugs makes for grim reading. Synthetic drugs, which are easy to manufacture and conceal, herald the fourth generation to come: traffickers in white coats. This poses the question: Is it time to legalize drugs, radically changing the current situation and perhaps the way we perceive them?
S1E3 • The Story of Drug Trafficking • 2020 • People