BBC - Dangerous Knowledge (2007)

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today.






Blood And Guts – The History Of Surgery
(5/5)

Documentary series looking at the brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery begins with the area of the body where it has been most frightening - the brain.

Just over 100 years ago, cutting into the brain was a terrifying prospect for both patient and surgeon. They could expect the result to be the surgeon bloodied and defeated and the patient dead. From freak accidents involving crowbars through the skull to notorious lobotomies with icepicks, this programme reveals how, through mishap and misadventure, brain surgery has become the life-saving discipline it is today.


Part 1


Part 2



Part 3

Part 4


Part 5



Hadrian (BBC)

As the British Museum prepares to launch its spectacular exhibition on the emperor Hadrian, Dan Snow takes us on a journey around Hadrian's vast empire.

As he does so, he uncovers the genius and the darker side of the man: peace-maker, frontier-builder, star-crossed lover, architect - and ruthless oppressor of the jews. But still, says Dan, "One of the greatest of all Roman Emperors".




An Islamic History of Europe

In this 90-minute documentary, Rageh Omaar uncovers the hidden story of Europe’s Islamic past and looks back to a golden age when European civilisation was enriched by Islamic learning.

Rageh travels across medieval Muslim Europe to reveal the vibrant civilisation that Muslims brought to the West.

This evocative film brings to life a time when emirs and caliphs dominated Spain and Sicily and Islamic scholarship swept into the major cities of Europe.

His journey reveals the debt owed to Islam for its vital contribution to the European Renaissance.




True Stories - Stanley Kubrick's Boxes

Eccentricity comes in many forms. In the case of perfectionist film-maker Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999, they clearly informed his genius. This trawl by journalist Jon Ronson through the archives of Kubrick's St Albans estate reveals a shy, meticulous stationery-obsessive who was a "Catherine wheel of ideas and projects". In hundreds of catalogued cardboard boxes, Ronson finds screen tests, fan letters, mind-bogglingly detailed location research, and memos about cat collars and barometric pressure. The documentary is a cinéaste's dream, but the remoteness - even coldness - of its subject's technical masterpieces such as 2001: a Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon remains, like the man himself, a compelling enigma.






Revealed - Jack the Ripper - The First Serial Killer

Eye-opening documentary following criminal psychologist Laura Richard's use of 21st-century investigation techniques to build a psychological portrait of history's most notorious murderer. Laura - head of the Violent Crime Command at New Scotland Yard - and a team of experts re-examine the case of the first modern serial killer, which has captured the public imagination and become a blur of conspiracy theories and myths.






Dispatches - The Truth About Street Weapons

In The Truth about Street Weapons, part of Channel 4's Disarming Britain season focusing on gun and knife crime, Dispatches follows Dr Tunji Lasoye, head of A&E at King's College Hospital in London, as he picks up the pieces of Britain's knife and gun culture. He's increasingly frustrated at the steady rise in the number of young victims of knife and gun crime he sees in the course of his job. "We cannot be a society that lives in fear any more - we shouldn't allow that to happen," he says. As a means of trying to alert future generations to the dangers of gangs, weapons and violence, he talks to children and shows them graphic images of the results of deadly assaults. Preview DVDs were unavailable. Though Bafta-winning director Jezza Neumann and producer Brian Woods's film Kids, Knives and Broken Lives (9pm) was still being completed as RT went to press, the few minutes we were able to see provided more than enough often unpalatable food for thought. The pair spoke to the type of young men you'll see swaggering around just about any British inner city - feckless, mouthy, baggy-trousered and probably armed. What emerges is a rundown of easily available armoury: "You can buy a long, shiny f*****g sword as sharp as anything you'd find in a butcher's shop... for £10 you can get yourself a machete... two grenades for £150... " One youth debates the relative merits of shooting and stabbing: shooting is easy, stabbing is more "personal". Through the course of the film, Neumann and Woods explore why youths who are little more than children would choose to arm themselves against other children. Fear and "defending territory" are prime motivations. Life, it seems, is cheap.





The Sky at Night - Rise of The Phoenix

An update on the NASA spacecraft Phoenix's mission to Mars. After a month on the planet's surface it has sent back unique images of the frozen ice caps.




The Boston Strangler: The True Story

Documentary exploring the truth behind the murders of several women
in Boston, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s. Were they the work of
one person?




BBC - The Sun

This exclusive BBC documentary accompanies the golden ball of fire from it's origin as a cold gas cloud to it's end as a red giant.

Unreachable, unimaginably hot and yet ever present. The sun is the source of all life on earth. It's little wonder many cultures still revere it as a deity. For 4.5 billion years the sun rises every morning on the horizon. But what do we really know about the heavenly ball of fire which provides us with light and warmth? This movie shows with impressive pictures the thrilling story of the creation of the sun, it's influence on our well-being, and how we could use it's power to change the future on earth dramatically.

The sun is the center of our universe and our calendar. The life-giver brightens our sky, provides us with light, warmth and nourishment. Yet the star itself is a very inhospitable place. At a surface temperature of 5.700 degree Celsius we have to be grateful that the sun is 150 million kilometers away from earth. But even at this distance it influences our lives more than we often care to imagine. Even in the age of electrical light the change from day to night remains obvious. But why are we so depressed when the sun doesn't reach us directly once in a while? Physicists have long since proved that depression is more likely to occur in winter than in summer. The culprit is very unlikely the cold of winter but rather the scarce natural light.

The activities of sunspots and cosmic weather often remain hidden to humans. Yet Galileo Galilei already documented the motion of the darker, colder spots on the surface of the sun. But their meaning was only discovered much later. In the middle of the 17th century the surface of the sun entered a phase where it remained completely free of sunspots. This in turn caused the last prolonged cold period in the northern hemisphere: the "miniature ice-age". Temperatures only fell by one to two degrees - but the distribution of polar pack ice obliterated entire viking settlements and caused the population of Iceland to go back by half. Why this was the case hasn't been revealed to the present day.

Though in the meantime another spectacle of the inconceivable solar forces is being observed: eruptions on the surface. Once the magnetic fields of of sunspots explode they fling billions of tons of plasma into space. These mighty gas-fountains often reach earth days later where the magnetic field of the earth blocks them to the greatest possible extent. Observable consequences of the impacts are polar lights, migratory birds which have lost their sense of orientation and stranded whales. Can humans use the unbelievable powers of the sun to avert a energy crisis and global warming?

Did you know...
... every chemical element leaves it's signature in sunlight?

Elements absorb different wavelengths of light which become visible as spectral lines. Separated into it's colors the light reveals the chemical composition of the sun like a bar-code.