When French engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps returned triumphantly to Paris after completing the Suez Canal in 1869, he was hailed as a national hero. Thousands raced to invest in his next, even bolder scheme: to build a great canal across Panama. His dream would cut a swathe across the South American continent and unite the vast oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific. Fortunes seemed assured as shipping would no longer have to face the terrors of Cape Horn...

Like Earth, most of the worlds that orbit the Sun are made of rock, but, geologically speaking, any kinship among the interplanetary legion largely ends there. Some of our neighbors are alive, as it were, while others are frozen artifacts of a long-vanished era. This program visits subjects in the solar kingdom that still show a pulse and examines the factors that have kept them active. Creating a frame of reference with a discussion of planetary...

In this episode, host John Watt discovers what advances in science and technology are doing to assist unwell and elderly citizens in New Zealand. Ever Wondered? sheds light on an amazing technicolor breakthrough led by a father-and-son team from Christchurch and on a flow cytometry suite in Wellington, where lasers are used to excite fluorescent dyes in a quest to develop immune-based therapies for the treatment of a host of diseases. Back in Auckland,...

Neil Oliver goes in search of Bronze and Iron Age sites that were sacred to ancient Britons, with water seen not just as a source of life, but also of reverence. At Flag Fen near Peterborough he discovers a vast ancient causeway. At Maiden Castle's hill fort in Dorset he unearths evidence of human sacrifices to ward off evil spirits. Neil travels to Anglesey, where Druids deposited Iron Age artifacts and were viewed as religious extremists by the...

In this episode Brian Cox visits South East Asia's 'Ring of Fire'. Attending the annual Day of the Dead in the Philippine highlands, he explores the thin line between life and death, and raises the question: what is life? Brian explains the laws governing energy and reveals life to be a conduit through which energy passes. Visiting a volcano, he demonstrates how the first spark of life may have arisen through a source of energy created by chemical...

Visit extreme locales—from the highest mountain to the greatest canyon—and learn how these places test their inhabitants to the limit. On Mount Everest, a Sherpa has to rope a route across the notorious Khumbu Icefall in time for the hundreds of foreign mountaineers who will arrive for climbing season. In the Grand Canyon, conservationists desperately try to ensure the survival of one of America’s few surviving condor chicks. And, on the slopes...

Chris Packham investigates mysteries and new discoveries from the natural world. He solves the puzzle of strange balls of worms on a road and fish stuck in fences in Texas. He explains how an Australian town became plagued by giant bats and why so many sperm whales became stranded around the North Sea in 2015. Chris also explores how a robot could help save the Great Barrier Reef, why eagles might be the best defense against dangerous drones and how...

The ocean is full of wonders, but creating them has been a bloody battle for over half a billion years, as evermore complex animals fight for survival. They evolved new ways to hunt, overpower and kill and eat each other. And astonishing adaptations to defend themselves, hide and escape detection. Passing those amazing new abilities on to the next generation can be a bruising battle in itself as males fight each other for the right to mate.