The Great Hack • 2019

44:00

It's July 20, 1969. Four days after Apollo 11 thundered skyward from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin become the first humans to set foot upon the moon, thanks to a marvel of engineering: the lunar module. It's the culmination of years of toil and millions of man-hours of engineering prowess. This is the story of the unsung heroes who built the unconventional flying machines that carried 12 Americans to the moon on six separate missions and made the dream of a generation come true.

S1E2 • America's Secret Space Heroes • 2017 • Technology

58:36

Liz Bonnin delves in to the world of invention, revealing the people and technologies set to transform all our lives. She examines the conditions that are promising to make the 21st century a golden age of innovation and meets some of the world's foremost visionaries, mavericks and dreamers. From the entrepreneurs that are driving a new space race, to the Nobel Prize wining scientist leading a nanotech revolution, this is a tour of the people and ideas delivering the world of tomorrow, today.

Horizon • 2013 • 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

52:09

Mankind has always looked at nature to solve problems, taking a cue from the solutions that biological systems have refined through natural selection. In this episode we look at a robotic plant that mimics the mechanics of plant roots, and dive underwater to see robots inspired by fish.

S1E2 • The Age of Robots • 2016 • Technology

56:02

Vint Cerf, co-author of the TCP/IP protocol suite that provides the Internet with its basic architecture, is known as "one of the founding fathers of the Internet." Cerf discusses what the future may hold for the internet: will it ultimately connect us with the universe?

2/10 • Curiosity Retreats: 2014 Lectures • 2014 • Technology

42:30

The rise of the skyscraper coincided with the rise of America as a global superpower, and experts reveal how expert engineering and cutting-edge technology helped power humankind's race to conquer the sky.

S1E1 • Skyscrapers Engineering the Future • 2019 • Technology