Particle physicist Professor Brian Cox asks, ‘What time is it?’ It’s a simple question and it sounds like it has a simple answer. But do we really know what it is that we’re asking? Brian visits the ancient Mayan pyramids in Mexico where the Maya built temples to time. He finds out that a day is never 24 hours and meets Earth’s very own Director of Time. He journeys to the beginning of time, and [...]

Rome – Engineering an Empire tells the story of the expansion of the Roman Empire by means of amazing engineering feats. One of the more impressive anecdotes of this History Channel production is that the Roman aqueducts procured more water for the city of Rome during the Empire than New York City could supply its inhabitants in 1985. The production is sleek, seamlessly flowing from historical period to engineering accomplishment to imperial biography, using on-site [...]

Drugs, Violence and God. Those are three things that are well present in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. With unprecedented access to Rio de Janeiro’s dangerous backstreets, Oscar-winning filmmaker Jon Blair provides an unflinching look at one of the bloodiest urban conflicts in the world, which leaves more than 1,000 people dead each year. What has previously only been portrayed in fictional films like the famous City of God is now on screen and for real, [...]

Troublemaking duo Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, posing as their industrious alter-egos, expose the people profiting from Hurricane Katrina, the faces behind the environmental disaster in Bhopal, and other shocking events. The two pose as executives from Exxon, Dow Chemical, Halliburton and the H.U.D. They give faux corporate interviews pretending to be DOW executives in which they supposedly announce setting up a $12 billion fund for the victims of the 1984 Bhopal disaster that killed [...]

Good Hair visits hair salons and styling battles, scientific laboratories, and Indian temples to explore the way black hairstyles impact the activities, pocketbooks, sexual relationships, and self-esteem of black people. Celebrities such as Ice-T, Kerry Washington, Nia Long, Paul Mooney, Raven Symoné, Maya Angelou, and Reverend Al Sharpton all candidly offer their stories and observations to Rock while he struggles with the task of figuring out how to respond to his daughter’s question. What he [...]

The credit crunch has shown how the global financial system has become increasingly dependent on mathematical models trying to quantify human (economic) behaviour. Now the quants are at the heart of yet another technological revolution in finance: trading at the speed of light. What are the risks of treating the economy and its markets as a complex machine? Will we be able to keep control of this model-based financial system, or have we created a [...]

The World History of Organized Crime travels the globe to get an insider’s view of some of the most active, dangerous and diabolical criminal syndicates in existence. In the episode about Russia, the breakup of the Soviet Union paving the way for a new breed of ruthless criminals. Organized crime has existed in Russia since the days of the Czars and Imperial Russia in the form of banditry, pornography, and thievery. In the Soviet period [...]