Artificial Love • 2020 • episode "S1E1" • Becoming Human

59:11

Dallas Campbell and Dr Hannah Fry present a documentary exploring aviation, beginning with a look at the challenges of getting aircraft into the air. The programme features a visit to the world's busiest airport to discover the work that goes into getting its millions of visitors off the ground. Plus, the construction of the world's largest passenger plane and the dangers of taking off from the coldest city on Earth.

Part 1 • City in the Sky • 2016 • 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

59:12

This episode reveals the fascinating chain of events that made quick and safe travel possible even across the greatest distances a possibility. From the Rolls Royce aero-engine factory in Derby, Michael Mosley, Prof Mark Miodownik and Dr Cassie Newland tell the amazing story of three more of the greatest and most transformative inventions of all time, the steam locomotive, the internal combustion engine and the jet engine. Our experts explain how these inventions came about by sparks of inventive genius and steady incremental improvements hammered out in workshops. They separate myth from reality in the lives of the great inventors and celebrate some of the most remarkable stories in British history.

Part 2 • The Genius of Invention • 2013 • Technology

50:00

For centuries, cities have been built near a fresh water supply. Without water, we'd be lucky to live three days. This most basic human need can be deadly too... the wrong supply can poison us, or get too close or careless and it can drown thousands in an instant. With every passing year, the challenge of providing water to billions of people becomes harder and harder.

S1E5 • How Cities Work • 2013 • Technology

54:31

Miami is beloved for its beaches and waterfront homes and businesses. See how engineers and planners are trying to protect Miami from rising seas and ever-more-frequent and violent storm surges that could destroy the city’s tourist and business economy.

S1E4 • Sinking Cities • 2018 • Technology

58:33

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 1: Metal) Professor Mark Miodownik travels to Israel to trace the history of our love affair with gleaming, lustrous metal. He learns how we first extracted glinting copper from dull rock and used it to shape our world and reveals how our eternal quest for lighter, stronger metals led us to forge hard, sharp steel from malleable iron and to create complex alloys in order to conquer the skies. He investigates metals at the atomic level to reveal mysterious properties such as why they get stronger when they are hit, and he discovers how metal crystals can be grown to survive inside one of our most extreme environments - the jet engine.

S1E1 • How It Works • 2012 • Technology