Every day, the world over, large amounts of high-level radioactive waste created by nuclear power plants is placed in interim storage, which is vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and societal changes. In Finland, the world’s first permanent repository is being hewn out of solid rock – a huge system of underground tunnels – that must last the entire period the waste remains hazard
Famed for their ability to inflict Armageddon from outer space, asteroids are now revealing the secrets of how they are responsible for both life and death on our planet.Armed with an array of powerful telescopes, scientists are finding up to 3000 new asteroids every night. And some are heading our way.But astronomers have discovered that it’s not the giant rocks that are the greatest dang
Nobel Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse examines why science appears to be under attack, and why public trust in key scientific theories has been eroded – from the theory that man-made climate change is warming our planet, to the safety of GM food, or that HIV causes AIDS.He interviews scientists and campaigners from both sides of the climate change debate, and travels to New York to meet Tony, who ha
The Moon is such a familiar presence in the sky that most of us take it for granted. But what if it wasn’t where it is now? How would that affect life on Earth?Space scientist and lunar fanatic Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock explores our intimate relationship with the Moon. Besides orchestrating the tides, the moon dictates the length of a day, the rhythm of the seasons and the very stability of our pl
Off the Scale: The human eye can see extraordinary detail, but the eye of a needle held at arm’s length is pretty much at the limit of our vision. Anything smaller is simply invisible, at least to the naked eye.?But what if we could see this hidden world all around us in greater detail and magnification than ever before? How different would our familiar surroundings then seem? Richard Hammond expl
Out of Sight : The human eye is a remarkable piece of precision engineering, but it is also extremely limited. Beyond the narrow range of light that makes up the familiar colours of the rainbow is a vast spectrum of light, entirely unseen. But what if we could see beyond the narrow boundaries of our eyes and peer into this invisible realm? Richard Hammond does just that, using groundbreaking new i
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
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
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