World's Tallest Buildings • 2019 • episode "S1E6" • Skyscrapers Engineering the Future

104:04

Gabriel Gatehouse tries to solve the biggest mystery in tech: who is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin? Now a multi trillion-dollar industry, its pseudonymous inventor has not been heard from since 2011. Whoever it is could be one of the richest people on the planet, and yet their identity remains unknown. Whilst on the trail for Bitcoin's inventor, Gabriel uncovers a conspiracy to end democracy and transform the world as we know it.

2025 • Technology

46:59

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.

S2E2 • Breakthrough National Geographic • 2017 • Technology

51:51

This episode will reveal how new technologies will transform music by 2050 new robotic and intelligent instruments, intuitive composition software, virtual artists, collaborative composition and more. Tomorrow, music will be capable of adapting to our moods and offer us more than just entertainment.

S2E4 • Dream the Future • 2018 • 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

25:43

The most important planet in the solar system is our home, the Earth. It is the only planet we know that harbors life. This episode looks at the growing understanding of the Earth’s complex climatic systems and the part on-orbit observation plays in the growth of knowledge about our planet.

S1E12 • Zenith: Advances in Space Exploration • 2021 • Technology

55:40

Dirty water has killed more humans than all the wars of history combined, but in the last 150 years, a series of radical ideas, extraordinary innovations and unsung heroes have changed our world. Steven Johnson plunges into a sewer to understand what made a maverick engineer decide to lift the city of Chicago with jackscrews in order to build America’s first sewer system. He talks about John Leal, who deliberately “poisoned” the water supply of 200,000 people when, without authorization, he added chlorine, considered lethal in 1908, into Jersey City’s water and made it safe to drink. This isn’t only about the world becoming a cleaner place — the iPhone, the subway, flat screen TVs and even the two piece swimsuit are the result of the valiant efforts of the unsung heroes of clean.

S1E1 • How We Got to Now • 2014 • Technology