Origins: The Journey of Humankind

Professor Robert Winston meets Lucy, the first upright ape, and follows her ancestors on the three-million-year journey to civilisation.

David Attenborough embarks on a remarkable 500 million-year journey revealing the extraordinary group of animals that dominate our world, and how their evolution defines our human bodies.

Sir David shines the spotlight on some of nature’s evolutionary anomalies and reveals how these curious animals continue to baffle and fascinate.

Sir David discovers a microscopic world that’s invisible to the naked eye, where insects feed and breed, where flowers fluoresce and where plants communicate with each other and with animals using scent and sound.

Andrew Marr explores how Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has taken on a life of its own far beyond the world of science.

In this "entertaining medical series" (The Sunday Times, U.K.), Dr. Michael Mosley shows how drugs have revolutionized medicine and changed the course of human history. Unfolding over a period of 200 years, it's an extraordinary tale of daring, self-experimentation, revelation, genius, and outright luck.

Historian Niall Ferguson tells the story of money and the rise of global finance. Bringing context and understanding to the current economic crisis, he reveals how the history of finance has been punctuated by gut-wrenching crashes.

Carl Sagan covers a wide range of scientific subjects, including the origin of life and a perspective of our place in the universe.

Odissea Nelle Lingue

Which of the great primates of 25 million years ago is our common ancestor? Is it pierolapithecus? Follow the journey of primates developing into Homo erectus and then to Homo sapiens through the millions of years of evolution and the thousands of miles of migrations.

Traveling to the far corners of the world, we discover the extraordinary ways animals are adapting to our rapidly changing planet. We witness nature’s remarkable resilience, as our perception of evolution and its potential is forever transformed.

All the incredible diversity of animal life sprang from a single organism. Every animal, no matter how weird, is related to every other. And behind each species is an incredible story of the millions of generations that gave rise to it - every animal we know and love today sprang from creatures that looked nothing like it.

Nowhere else in the world is so regularly ravaged by infernos of the intensity, scale and destructive force of the Australian bushfire. As our population grows and spreads and as the effects of climate change are felt, the danger to loss of life and property escalates. What do we know about bushfires and how can we prevent their devastating consequences? Not surprisingly, Australia is a world leader in fire research and the complex and technologically sophisticated job of fire fighting and prevention. Inside The Inferno takes us into the terrifying heart of major fire events, unfolding the research that explains how fires start, grow and change; and how we predict them, prevent them, fight them and hopefully survive these violent natural disasters. Inside The Inferno explores not only the devastating mega fires such as Black Saturday in Victoria 2009 and the Canberra fires of 2003, but also major fire-fronts that received little attention.

Bill meets wildlife in Borneo and Indonesia to tell the story of Darwin's rival Wallace.

Some people see their lives dramatically turned upside down because they waited for too long before seeking care. The documentary series showcases individual who should have rapidly consulted with a doctor when the first signs of illness appeared, before the situation became critical.

Michael Mosley embarks on three journeys to understand science's last great frontier - the human mind - as he traces the history of the attempts to understand and manipulate the brain.

Mike Maloney takes you to Egypt to unravel the difference between currency and money. This is one of the most important lessons you will ever learn, and will pave the way for your understanding of future episodes. Because without knowing exactly what money is...how on earth can we expect to learn about it?

A long journey in 8 episodes to discover the human body, with Piero Angela who closely observes our organism, focusing each time on a theme: the eye, the ear, taste and smell, the stomach and the intestine, liver, bones, lungs and heart. How does our "wonder machine" work? To make each explanation direct and clear, the program uses films, animations and photographs developed with the scanning electron microscope.

This three-part series follows comedian Jon Richardson and his friend Matt Forde as they face up to the adult realities of mortgages, marriage and parenthood.

The series investigates Paolo Macchiarini’s claims to have invented a ground-breaking method to create new organs. His method using plastic tracheas sown with stemcells has been operated on patients in the US, Russia, Sweden and the UK. So far, unfortunately, the track record of his plastic organs is not very good. Almost all patients are dead. And several of his former surgeon colleagues in Sweden claim that not only does the method not work, but that his scientific claim to fame is based on falsified and misrepresented data. Some even claim that his patients have been used as human guinea-pigs.