In order to understand the daily life and experiences of a nursing staff confronted with the coronavirus, filmmakers followed the doctors, nurses and paramedics of the Erasmus hospital in Brussels for three weeks. A moving report of the raw, terrifying reality behind a global pandemic.
Mankind has been searching for the elixir of life for centuries. This goal seems closer now than ever before, with the average age having more than doubled over the last hundred years. While developments in medicine are allowing us to live longer, scientific advances are revealing the mechanisms behind ageing.
El Mundo en Pausa is a documentary that reveals the daily confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin American countries, reflecting the variety of situations and emotions experienced in a single day.
World experts in the fields of futurology, anthropology, neuroscience, and philosophy consider the impact of technological advances on the two 'certainties' of human life; work and death. Charting human developments from Homo habilis, past the Industrial Revolution, to the digital age and beyond, the film looks at the shocking exponential rate at which mankind has managed to create technologies to ease the process of living.
Spacesuits - Space is a hostile environment. For humans to live and work beyond the atmosphere requires a sophisticated suite of technology. This episode looks at the health effects of space on the human body and the techniques used to allow people to function in the micro-gravity vacuum.
We are in a crisis: While Canada consistently has one of the worst organ donor rates in the Western world, its hospitals are overcrowded with patients who desperately need an organ transplant. And within Canada, Alberta is the province with the lowest donor rates. 40 per cent of patients die while waiting for an organ. Strongly character driven, the one-hour documentary «The Ward» features the work of the nurses, surgeons and physicians at the University Hospital in Edmonton.
If the internet were a country, it would be the fifth largest consumer of electricity in the world. A whopping 247 billion emails are sent through the web every day, and growing. Though it is thought of as a ’green’ method of communication, the virtual universe is just as damaging for the environment as it is heavy in its energy consumption.
The Launchers - The first step in leaving the Earth’s surface must be made via the huge power and precision control of a rocket. It’s expensive to reach space but new technology is bringing the cost down. This episode examines the range of launchers available today.
Mars is our nearest planetary neighbour and its environment resembles own more closely than any other member of our planetary family. Robotic probes have revealed that water once flowed on the surface. This episode follows the quest to find traces of life on Mars.
Saturn and its disc of rings has become more bewildering the more closely we are able to observe it. The dynamic system of moons, moonlets and orbiting dust are drawing scientific attention. This episode looks at the Saturnian system, its unique moons and the probes that have began penetrating this planetary mystery.
The International Space Station - Since the 1970 the space powers have been sending to orbit craft in which people could live and work for extended periods, but the expense and complexity has been daunting. This episode focuses on the international collaboration required to maintain a permanently crewed laboratory orbiting the Earth.
Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system but it’s only recently that we’ve been able to get a glimpse into the intricacies of this giant and the fascinating moons that orbit it. This episode looks at what we know about Jupiter and how we know it.
At a time when jobs in the tech sector are outpacing growth in all other sectors, where are all the women? Some of the most important pioneer coders were women but today, only 15% of software engineers in Silicon Valley are. This lack of diversity can have serious consequences – as was the case with airbags, designed by and modelled on men and often fatal to women, whose smaller size wasn’t taken into account.
"The idea that the poor are genetically different from the rich or that men are naturally more intelligent than women may seem laughable but it’s an argument regularly used as a social weapon to stall the advancement of equality and maintain the status quo. Since the discovery of DNA, the idea that genes are somehow responsible for everything has permeated society."
What should the cities of the future look like? Urban planners are broadly in agreement that they should be green, efficient, technologically advanced, and above all sustainable, and to this end are planning the smart cities of the future
In the first episode we explore the apparently very simple question: What is your brain? This is something humans have been struggling to understand for millennia, and science for several decades. We’re still a long way from knowing everything, but the things we’ve discovered so far are literally astounding.
The traditional narrative is that humans are selfish. If pushed, the story goes, we look after ourselves first and others later. In this episode we see how modern neuroscience has blown that myth apart. Connecting with other people is one of the most important functions of the human brain. Which is why our brain constantly pushes us towards other brains, because it knows that connecting with other humans is the single best thing that we have going for us.
Our brain is always making decisions - Nigel explores how it does this, and if we can help it to make better ones? Is it possible to change the brain we’re born with to a supercharged brain?
For most of human history our brains dealt with pretty straight forward problems. But that brain is the exact same one we now use to grapple with the modern world.
The Dunedin Study has identified a fundamental developmental mechanism that completely rewrites the nature versus nurture argument. It is a genetic switch which is thrown by life events – nature loads the gun but nurture pulls the trigger. This episode tracks the hunt for the mechanism using three specific examples - violence in men, depression, & cannabis induced schizophrenia.
Sébastien, Rodrigue, Richard, Pascal and Lionel are not top athletes like the others: they have a mental handicap, obvious in one, barely visible in the other. They all have one thing in common: they proudly wear the colors of the France team and claim their membership in adapted sport, reserved for the mentally retarded.
Bipolarity is a serious psychiatric illness that affects 1% of the French population. Known by all, very little understood, the pathology carries a number of received ideas and deserves a light in order to twist the neck in particular that of being a "fun" disease. 20% of bipolar people die by suicide, and globally a bipolar has a life expectancy of 20 years less than an average subject. Not really fun in reality!
When JR Cairns was two years old, doctors diagnosed him as autistic and mentally retarded, and predicted that he would be institutionalized by age 17. But the Cairns family refused to accept this grim life sentence. And against the odds, they won. Now, for the first time ever, JR’s family and therapists unite to celebrate his recovery and share their story of hope.
This crazy dream belongs to a man who almost lost his mind, and who, having recovered from his own illness, has devoted himself to helping the poorest of Africa’s sick: the insane.In the big cities of Africa, the mentally ill can be seen wandering the streets, yelling and shouting, often completely naked and feeding here and there on waste. In the countryside, their helpless families respond by chaining them to trees, so that they cannot leave, hurt anyone or disappear.
After suffering with an eating disorder for more than 20 years, Kylie van der Veer shares intimate details on her fight for recovery, documented by her partner Annie over the last 3.5 years.
The heart-warming tale of four famous astronomers 50 years after they forged new understandings of the universe.
