Speed Limits: Richard Hammond explores the extraordinary wonders of the world of detail hidden in the blink of an eye. The human eye takes about fifty milliseconds to blink. But it takes our brain around a hundred and fifty milliseconds to process what we see. We’re not aware of this time lag going on, but in those few milliseconds, there are extraordinary things happening that completely pass us
Horizon reveals the latest research into one of the most mysterious and common human experiences – pain.Breakthroughs have come from studying a remarkable woman in London who has felt no pain at all in her life, a man in the US who cut off his own arm to survive, and three generations of an Italian family who don’t feel extremes of temperature.We witness a new treatment that involves a pioneer
Comedian Ben Miller returns to his roots as a physicist to try to answer a deceptively simple question: what is one degree of temperature?His quest takes him to the frontiers of current science as he meets researchers working on the hottest and coldest temperatures in the universe, and to a lab where he experiences some of the strangest effects of quantum physics – a place where super-cooled liq
The Battle of the Somme, fought in the summer and autumn of 1916, was one of the largest battles of the First World War. With more than one million casualties, it was also one of the bloodiest battles in human history. The Allied forces attempted to break through the German lines along a 25-mile (40 km) front north and south of the River Somme in northern France. One purpose of the battle was to d
Based on the book They Marched Into Sunlight by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, Two Days in October tells the story of two turbulent days in October 1967 when history turned a corner.In Vietnam, a U.S. battalion unwittingly marched into a Viet Cong trap. Sixty-one young men were killed and as many wounded. The ambush prompted some in power to wonder whether the war might be unw
There is a strange and mysterious world that surrounds us, a world largely hidden from our senses. The quest to explain the true nature of reality is one of the great scientific detective stories.Clues have been pieced together from deep within the atom, from the event horizon of black holes, and from the far reaches of the cosmos. It may be that that we are part of a cosmic hologram, projected
Terry Jones (of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) goes on a humor-filled journey to recount the amazing tale behind the world’s simplest number.Using computer graphics, “One” is brought to life, in all his various guises. One’s story reveals how celebrated civilizations in history were achieved, where our modern numbers came from and how the invention of zero changed the world forever; and saved us
In 1931, two white women stepped off from a box car in Paint Rock, Alabama to make a shocking accusation: they had been raped by nine black teenagers on the train. So began one of the most significant legal fights of the twentieth century.The trial of the nine falsely accused teens would draw North and South into their sharpest conflict since the Civil War, yield two momentous Supreme Court deci
In the War of Currents era in the late 1880s, George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison’s promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over alternating current (AC) advocated by Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla.During the initial years of electricity distribution, Edison’s direct current was the standard for the United States and Edison did not wan