Video documentaries about science and technology
Making Scotland’s Landscape episode 5: During the Industrial Revolution, Scottish scientists and engineers helped unwittingly set off a chain of events that today we know as climate change – a process that is transforming our atmosphere and warming our planet. Professor Iain Stewart looks at how Scotland is on the verge of another revolution: the transformation of a carbon economy […]
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Making Scotland’s Landscape episode 4: As ‘natural’ icons, Scotland’s rivers and lochs represent how the nation imagines itself. However as Professor Iain Stewart discovers, the only thing that happens naturally is rain. As soon as it hits the ground, it is ours and we do with it what we will. Today there are scarcely any rivers or natural large bodies
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Making Scotland’s Landscape episode 3: Professor Stewart reveals how hearts and not heads have ruled the least understood landscape of them all – the sea. The public’s emotions have played a key role in the fate of Scotland’s maritime creatures and the upshot has been a form of lottery. While some species like seals and sea birds have been protected,
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Making Scotland’s Landscape episode 2: For centuries, the beauty and drama of Scotland’s landscape has been regarded by most visitors as natural. But in 1950, an eminent ecologist concluded the Highlands had been devastated. Once it was rich and diverse he said, but humans had destroyed it and in the process created what he described as a wet desert. Professor
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Making Scotland’s Landscape episode 1: Professor Iain Stewart presents a landmark five-part series in which he reveals how Scotland’s unique and beautiful landscape has been shaped over the centuries. In this first programme, he uncovers how, over thousands of years, the actions of mankind and the climate nearly led to the downfall of Scotland’s trees and forests.
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Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life: Ever since Darwin, major scientific discoveries have helped to underpin and strengthen Darwin’s revolutionary idea so that today, the pieces of the puzzle fit together so neatly that there can be little doubt that Darwin was right. As David says: ‘Now we can trace the ancestry of all animals in the tree of
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The Human Body: Secrets of Your Life Revealed episode 3 – Dr Chris and Dr Xand van Tullekan uncover how we develop new skills – whether riding a bike or learning to walk. This programme explores the way our experiences shape our minds and bodies as we make the journey from the most helpless to the most sophisticated organism on
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The Human Body: Secrets of Your Life Revealed episode 2 – Drs Chris and Xand van Tulleken discover the everyday miracles that keep you alive. They explore the extraordinary lengths our bodies go to in order to keep our organs working at every moment of every day. They see how powerful reflexes keep us safe from danger and uncover the
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The Human Body: Secrets of Your Life Revealed episode 1: Over your lifetime you undergo an extraordinary change – no other animal on earth goes through such a dramatic metamorphosis. In this programme, Chris and Xand van Tulleken explore the latest understanding of how we all grow. They uncover the reason our childhood is longer than any other creature on
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The Island episode 3: Everything we know about life comes from the rocks, and the island of Ireland is a treasure trove of ancient life. We meet the fossil experts and dinosaur hunters uncovering the secrets of our past, and in County Kerry, we reveal the world’s most reliable evidence of the first creature ever to emerge from the sea
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The Island – Water episode 2: With the rocks that make up the island of Ireland now in place, this is the story of the island’s intricate and intimate relationship with water and ice. At Killary Fjord, the immense bulldozing power of the glaciers which eroded and shaped the island through millenia-long cycles of formidable ice ages can be seen.
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The Island – Land episode 1: The story of the island of Ireland’s epic geological journey, spanning 1.8 billion years. In this first episode, we reveal how two ancient continents swallowed an ocean as they slowly approached each other over millions of years. The collision point would eventually become Ireland, and we show how the battle scar from this immense
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