Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, with the help of the world’s most powerful telescope, ventures through the Milky Way and into the universe beyond, on the hunt for alien worlds.
S1E3 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Space scientist Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock continues her search for alien life with a grand tour of our solar system. Could any other planets or moons out there be habitable?
S1E2 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock begins her search for extraterrestrial life with an exploration of our nearest neighbour, and her favourite space rock, the moon.
S1E1 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Sir David Attenborough explores the wildlife of his London hometown, from urban deer to rooftop peregrines and many others, revealing how nature thrives in the world’s greenest major city.
2026 • Nature
Dan Cruickshank presents a documentary revealing the story of the Dalai Lama, his secret Himalayan kingdom and the story of his exile, using eyewitness accounts from Tibetans including the Dalai Lama himself and colour archive footage of Tibet from the 1930s to 50s.
2008 • History
This episode examines how people can work with nature to make this world thrive.
S1E4 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
A look at how forest ecosystems reduce global carbon levels and effect climate, meeting the people working to improve biodiversity, saving keystone species and using Indigenous wisdom to rebuild and restore our forests.
S1E3 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
Glimpse into grasslands where the biggest animal numbers are found, and see how animal life helps to draw down carbon.
S1E2 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
How oceans and organisms within them play a fundamental role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
S1E1 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
It's not as crazy as it sounds: life on Earth could be descended from space-faring microbes from Mars, or even further beyond, riding here on an interplanetary highway of asteroids. Extremophile bacteria may be resilient enough to survive the intense 3-stage journey, by repairing their own damaged DNA or hibernating for the long and deadly journey through space.
melodysheep • 2026 • Astronomy
A Madagascan chameleon and a Scottish water vole travel to secure their bloodline.
S1E3 • Big Little Journeys • 2023 • Nature
A Taiwanese pangolin and a Brazilian lion tamarin family travel to a strange new world.
S1E2 • Big Little Journeys • 2023 • Nature
Horizon goes behind the scenes at Nasa to discover how it is preparing for its most ambitious and daring mission: to land men - and possibly women - on the surface of Mars.
At a time when the Earth's surface is changing faster than ever in human history, watch cities grow, forest disappear and glaciers melt. In the ever-growing grey of cities one man is feeding thousands of parakeets; in Sumatra a female orangutan and her daughter face life in a forest under threat; while in Tanzania local people use satellites to replant a forest, securing the future for a family of chimpanzees. This is our home as we've never seen it before.
S1E4 • Earth from Space • 2019 • Environment
Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes how she discovered pulsars, the by-products of supernova explosions which make life in the universe possible. She describes the moments of despair and jubilation as the discovery unfolded and her excitement as pulsars took the scientific world by storm. Reflecting on the nature of scientific discovery, she talks about the connections between religion and science and how she sees science as a search for understanding rather than as a quest for truth.
S1E1 • Beautiful Minds • 2010 • Physics
The formation of continents with varied environments allowed for an explosion of biodiversity — and turbo-charged the evolution of mighty dinosaurs.
S1E5 • Life on Our Planet • 2023 • Nature
According to the UN, it is predicted that the human population could reach ten billion people by the year 2050. For broadcaster and naturalist Chris Packham, who has dedicated his life to championing the natural world, the subject of our growing population and the impact it is having on our planet is one of the most vital – and often overlooked – topics of discussion in an era of increasing environmental awareness. Chris is worried that a world of ten billion may simply be too many people for the earth to sustain, given the impact 7.7 billion humans are already having. Travelling around the globe in search of answers to difficult and sometimes controversial questions, Chris investigates why our population is growing so rapidly, what impact it is having on the natural world, and whether there is anything that can be done. Chris travels to Brazil to discover a megacity on the verge of running out of water and an industry expanding to feed our growing numbers – with dire consequences for biodiversity. In Nigeria, a country set to become the third most populous nation on earth by 2050, overtaking the United States, Chris visits an extraordinary community surviving against the odds and a school that might hold the answer to a future fall in the birth rate. Back home in Britain, Chris interviews Sir David Attenborough – like Chris, he is a patron of the charity Population Matters. Chris also examines the role of falling birth rates around the world, the impact of an aging population, and meets a couple who are struggling to get pregnant through IVF. With interviews from several population experts, Chris's focus ultimately turns to the impact our levels of consumption are already having, and asks whether the world can rebalance to accommodate the needs of over two billion more people.
Normal people can become monsters, given the right situation. That’s the standard narrative of the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time. But what if the cause of its participants’ cruel behavior wasn’t what we’ve always been told?
S3E4 • Mind Field • 2018 • Brain
David Attenborough talks to Brian Cox about his admiration for the achievements of Charles Darwin, and how On the Origin of Species inspires him in his work in the natural world.
S1E1 • People of Science with Brian Cox • 2018 • Science
Leonardo da Vinci is well known for his inventions as well as his art. New evidence shows that many of his ideas were realized long before he sketched them out in his notebooks-some even 1,700 years before him! Of these “inventions” Leonardo never affirmed that his projects came from his original ideas. The film features drawings of his most famous ideas and inventions some of which trace their original creation to ancient Greece while others were a product of the scientific inventions of golden age of Islamic learning. This knowledge seemed to be lost in Europe during the Dark Ages until the Renaissance when Leonardo recovered it.
Secrets of the Dead • 2017 • Science
Young black teens in South Africa's townships are learning to be radio reporters by trying to understand the concept of "Ubuntu" and what it means to their community.
S1E4 • Stories of Impact • 2019 • Science
In this mind-bending episode can the participants work out where the universe comes from?
Part 4 • Genius by Stephen Hawking • 2016 • Science
For decades, scientists have tried to unlock the secrets of ancient DNA. But life's genetic blueprint is incredibly fragile, and researchers have struggled to find genetic material in fossils that has survived for millions of years. Then, one maverick scientist had the controversial idea of looking for DNA not in fossils or frozen ancient tissue - but in the soil. Follows the scientists deciphering the oldest DNA ever found and revealing for the first time the genes of long-extinct creatures that once thrived in warm, lush Arctic landscapes.
2024 • Science
How do you know you’re real? Is existence all just a big dream? Has some mad scientist duped us into simply believing that we exist? James Zucker investigates all of these questions (and more) in this mind-boggling tribute to René Descartes’s "Meditations on First Philosophy."
In the first episode, we are exploring technologies that promise to provide humans with superpowers, and witness experiments that are literally changing minds!
S1E1 • Supersapiens Rise of the Mind • 2017 • Brain
Could the power of fake pills be used to treat some of our most common medical complaints? To find out, Dr Michael Mosley embarks on Britain's largest ever trial to investigate the placebo effect. He is heading to Blackpool to gather 117 people suffering from backache - one of the leading types of chronic pain - before trying to treat them with nothing but fake pills and the power of the mind. Working with experts from the University of Oxford, Michael discovers that the placebo effect is more than just a medical curiosity. The brain is actually capable of producing its own drugs, and these can be more powerful than prescription painkillers. Michael's volunteers come from all walks of life, but they have all suffered with bad backs for years and feel their conventional medication isn't up to the job. They include Stacey, who is struggling to keep up with her two energetic daughters, wheelchair user Jim, who longs to be able to get back on a boat, and poker player Moyra, who is looking for a painkiller which doesn't affect her performance. They think they are taking part in the trial of a powerful new painkiller, but their blue and white capsules actually contain nothing but ground-up rice. Can this fake treatment make a real difference? And how will the volunteers react when Michael reveals the truth? Michael also finds out about some remarkable placebo experiments from around the world, including a woman in Oxfordshire who experienced a near-miraculous recovery after undergoing fake surgery to fix her chronic shoulder pain. Plus a team in Lancashire who want to see if the placebo effect can cure a broken heart. And Michael discovers a team in Germany working on a placebo that works even if you know you are taking it, which might improve the lives of transplant patients. Michael also tests this out on himself - attempting to train his own body to respond to a fake treatment - a foul-tasting green drink - as if he were taking actual drugs.
Our minds store our entire lives, our memories and our deepest desires. Tell no one, and our thoughts remain our own. But our brains are biological computers. Computer hackers can tamper with our email. Could brain hackers someday be able to rewrite our thoughts?
S4E06 • Through the Wormhole • Brain
Jim Al-Khalili goes on a journey through 600 million years of evolution to uncover how the human brain, the most complex structure known in the universe, came to exist. Chapter 1: With some 100 billion neurons and over 100 trillion connections - more than all the stars in the Milky Way - the human brain is one of nature's greatest achievements. But how did something so incredibly sophisticated evolve from its simple beginnings? Chapter 2: Jim watches primates in action to see how they tackle survival challenges, revealing the clever tricks that shaped the brain's thinking. But the real breakthrough came when brains learned to be social. Teaming up with his wife, Jim investigates how relationships and friendships made people more intelligent. With AI getting smarter by the day, Jim wants to know what makes biological brains so special. Through scans, fossil discoveries and cutting-edge research, he uncovers what makes the brain so hard to emulate.
What's your earliest memory? Why can't we remember being babies?
Artists like M.C. Escher played with our visual perception in their art. In this 4th installment of the series, Prof. Arthur Shapiro returns to the classic visual illusions that show us that what we see is not exactly in plain sight.
How animals ranging from albatrosses to ants can navigate themselves over long distances.
5/12 • Trials of Life • 1990 • Nature
He shows how 20th-century attention turned from civilisation and kings to the search for the common man against a background of science and competing political ideologies.
S1E3 • Archaeology: A Secret History • 2013 • History
Explore the wild blue Caribbean waters of Cozumel, a lush paradise packed with marine surprises. From the spectacular Paso Del Cedral coral reef to the world's longest subterranean underwater cave system, go where only the bravest divers dare venture.
4 • Great Blue Wild • 2017 • Nature
Episode 3 – spotlights some of nature's tiniest packages that deliver a powerful protein punch. Protein is an essential component of our diet, and for centuries, products of animal origin were thought to be one of the best sources. But, new evidence proves diets high in beans are one of the most important dietary predictors of survival for older people around the world.
S1E3 • Prescription: Nutrition • 2017 • Health
This documentary travels through a world of joblessness, debt, and economic uncertainty to the sovereign nation of the plutocrats, where each crisis seems to offer a new business opportunity. In America, where the 2008 financial meltdown cost $4 trillion in economic output, fortunes were made by the very people who precipitated the disaster while millions lost their homes and their savings. Austerity in Europe, economic stagnation in Asia, a lost generation of the young and unemployed - signs we are living through a fundamental global reorganization, the result of which no-one can predict. The world of the 1% has arrived, and the wealth gap is now greater in many countries than during the Gilded Age, the era of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Vanderbilts. Can our stressed democracies deal with the fallout? Or have governments simply become instruments of the new elite?
2017 • Economics
Levison Wood returns to the site of his car crash to resume the journey, and is reunited with the people who saved his life. He keeps a promise to Binod by accompanying him on a trek to his family home in Pokhara, before continuing their travels with members of the Gurung tribe, who risk their lives to collect honey from wild bees living on high cliffs. They visit the site of an earthquake in 2014 and visit Kathmandu, before crossing the border into Bhutan.