In recent years, close study of the aging process has opened up new ways that could help us all live healthier for longer. Can we move beyond treating individual diseases, and instead treat the aging process itself? But would a longer life necessarily be a better life? A loose-knit group of researchers believe the real breakthrough is extending our health span - the period of life spent free of disease.
The Ebola outbreak of 2014 almost brought the world to its knees, but this crisis has mobilized scientists and researchers, paving the way for new treatments and vaccines. From antibiotics and vaccines to computer programs that predict how viruses will spread, new lifesaving tools will be used to fight a wide range of viruses in the near future, including HIV, influenza, dengue fever, malaria, and a host of other killer diseases.
2015 • Health
Scientific advancements are challenging the concept of what it means to be human. Technology embedded in our bodies is fairly common: artificial limbs, pacemakers. But new research is taking us beyond replacement parts and into a new realm that is changing the nature of the human body and the human mind. Will the fusion of biology and technology change how we think, how we feel, how we experience the world?
2015 • Technology
After millennia of speculation about what goes on inside the human brain, we now have the tools to explore its hidden reaches. These tools are leading to research that may help those suffering from afflictions such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease. They are also shedding light on the mystery of consciousness and what makes us who we are.
2015 • Brain
In recent years, close study of the aging process has opened up new ways that could help us all live healthier for longer. Can we move beyond treating individual diseases, and instead treat the aging process itself? But would a longer life necessarily be a better life? A loose-knit group of researchers believe the real breakthrough is extending our health span - the period of life spent free of disease.
2015 • Health
We are surrounded by clean, raw energy waiting to be tapped - energy that could eventually replace fossil fuels. Finding new ways to harness the energy around us takes a rare breed of scientist-engineers: men and women with a combination of technical skill, imagination, and unwavering focus. If we act now, developments in energy production could avert disaster and usher in a new era of clean, safe energy.
2015 • Economics
California is on the brink of an apocalypse. The state faces a future of drought that will cost billions in lost farm revenue and thousands of jobs. But the challenges facing the state are not unique: All over the world, governments are struggling with bigger populations and a diminishing supply of freshwater. Innovators across the globe are seeking solutions in emergent technologies to prevent a planet-wide water crisis.
2015 • Environment
Renegade researchers are fighting the medical establishment by exploring a controversial cure for our vices: psychedelic drugs.
2017 • Health
A look inside the shadowy world of hackers, where good battles evil. "White-hat" hackers stage a risky raid on a bank; a "black-hat" ISIS recruiter organizes a terrorist attack.
2017 • Technology
Maverick doctors supercharge killer T cells, creating a breakthrough treatment for cancer.
2017 • Health
The military and defence industry are looking for ways to defend against a mass drone attack, and they'll learn how at the Game of Drones competition.
2017 • Technology
By finding hidden patterns in big data, computers powered by a new form of artificial intelligence can predict the future with amazing accuracy.
2017 • Technology
The world's electric grids are aging and vulnerable. Now, engineers are making a dangerous trek to prove there is a better way to bring power to the people. Engineers make a dangerous trek across the Himalayas to bring power to a remote monastery.
2017 • Technology
From Oscar-nominated director Scott Hamilton Kennedy (The Garden) and narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Food Evolution investigates the brutally polarized debate surrounding GMOs and our food. Traveling from Hawaiian papaya groves to banana farms in Uganda to the cornfields of Iowa, Food Evolution wrestles with the emotions and the science driving one of the most heated arguments of our time.
2018 • Health
Imagine if the food you eat could 'clean' your body and make you feel well. Dr Giles Yeo investigates the latest diet craze and social media sensation - clean eating. In a television first, Giles cooks with Ella Mills, the Instagram entrepreneur behind Deliciously Ella, one of the most popular brands associated with clean eating, and examines how far her plant-based cooking is based on science. She tells him clean has lost its way: "Clean now implies dirty and that's negative. I haven't used it, but as far as I understood it when I first read the term, it meant natural, kind of unprocessed, and now it doesn't mean that at all. It means diet, it means fad". Giles sifts through the claims of the Hemsley sisters, who advocate not just gluten-free but grain-free cooking, and Natasha Corrett, who popularises alkaline eating through her Honestly Healthy brand. In America, Giles reveals the key alternative health figures whose food philosophies are influencing the new gurus of clean. He discovers that when it comes to their promises about food and our health, all is not always what it appears to be. Inside a Californian ranch where cancer patients have been treated with alkaline food, Giles sees for himself what can happen when pseudoscience is taken to a shocking extreme.
Michael Mosley puts himself through a battery of health tests available to people who feel perfectly well. From an expensive heart scan to a new national screening procedure to detect the earliest signs of bowel cancer, Mosley sets out to discover which if any of the tests are worth doing.
Amidst radical changes in nicotine use globally, one filmmaker's journey through the confusion & fear leads to a startling discovery about Earth's most hated stimulant. Society may be changed forever.
2020 • Health
Beginning with the first eight weeks when a single cell, no bigger than a speck of dust, transforms into a human foetus, the most sophisticated organism on the planet. This period is the most perilous time in the womb and determines the layout of body organs, when our heart makes its first beat, and when the length of our lives could be decided.
1/3 • Countdown to Life: The Extraordinary Making of You • 2015 • Health
As the narrative goes, fat is bad. Well, it's actually more nuanced than that. The type of fat you eat is more impactful on your health than the quantity. George Zaidan examines triglycerides, the varied molecules that make up fat, and how to identify which types of fat you are consuming.