Down the Deep Dark Web • 2016

26:35

Jeff cycles through the history of the bicycle and considers future advancements for the common mode of transport.

S1E7 • The World According to Jeff Goldblum • 2020 • Technology

10:05

The promise of quantum computers is that what would otherwise take a billion years to calculate, could be done in a few seconds. First-generation quantum computers have started to appear. Indeed, earlier this year, Google bought one, The D-Wave 2. How will this advance change our future lives?

5/10 • Catalyst: Season 1 • 2015 • Technology

42:05

Volkswagen’s Chattanooga facility, situated on 1,400 acres, is more than 3 million square feet. It employs about 3,500 people. In 2011, the Chattanooga plant became the first automobile manufacturing facility in the world to be certified LEED Platinum. More than 100,000 Atlas SUVs and 700,000 Passats have been manufactured at the plant.

S1E4 • Super Factories • 2020 • 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

40:31

Inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, adventure and role-playing computer games introduce unprecedented levels of choice and complexity to players.

S1E3 • High Score • 2020 • Technology

41:29

What if we could travel not just through space, but through time itself? If you could travel through time, would you change the past or the future? What if you found it couldn’t be changed? What price does the time traveller — and the people they are closest to — pay? This is a journey from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine through ideas like The Grandfather Paradox and The Butterfly Effect to the professional time traveller that is the ever popular Doctor Who. Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Karen Gillan, and Neil Gaiman offer a unique perspective on the Doctor. Edward James Olmos reveals the hidden meaning of the language he created for the vision of the future that is Blade Runner. Bob Gale and Christopher Lloyd take us behind the scenes of Back to the Future, while Ed Solomon describes the joy of solving a time travel conundrum for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But what would be the physical and emotional cost to the time traveller? Audrey Niffenegger explains what inspired her novel The Time Traveller’s Wife. And what if someone from the future tried to travel back in time to warn us? Would we believe them? From the apocalyptic tones of 12 Monkeys to the drama of Quantum Leap and the comedy of Groundhog Day, time travel is a subject that has been irresistible to the creators of every type of science fiction.

Part 4 • The Real History of Science Fiction • 2014 • Technology