Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, with the help of the world’s most powerful telescope, ventures through the Milky Way and into the universe beyond, on the hunt for alien worlds.
S1E3 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Space scientist Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock continues her search for alien life with a grand tour of our solar system. Could any other planets or moons out there be habitable?
S1E2 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Dame Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock begins her search for extraterrestrial life with an exploration of our nearest neighbour, and her favourite space rock, the moon.
S1E1 • Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Is There Life Beyond Earth? • 2025 • Astronomy
Sir David Attenborough explores the wildlife of his London hometown, from urban deer to rooftop peregrines and many others, revealing how nature thrives in the world’s greenest major city.
2026 • Nature
Dan Cruickshank presents a documentary revealing the story of the Dalai Lama, his secret Himalayan kingdom and the story of his exile, using eyewitness accounts from Tibetans including the Dalai Lama himself and colour archive footage of Tibet from the 1930s to 50s.
2008 • History
This episode examines how people can work with nature to make this world thrive.
S1E4 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
A look at how forest ecosystems reduce global carbon levels and effect climate, meeting the people working to improve biodiversity, saving keystone species and using Indigenous wisdom to rebuild and restore our forests.
S1E3 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
Glimpse into grasslands where the biggest animal numbers are found, and see how animal life helps to draw down carbon.
S1E2 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
How oceans and organisms within them play a fundamental role in removing carbon from the atmosphere.
S1E1 • The Future of Nature • 2025 • Nature
It's not as crazy as it sounds: life on Earth could be descended from space-faring microbes from Mars, or even further beyond, riding here on an interplanetary highway of asteroids. Extremophile bacteria may be resilient enough to survive the intense 3-stage journey, by repairing their own damaged DNA or hibernating for the long and deadly journey through space.
melodysheep • 2026 • Astronomy
A Madagascan chameleon and a Scottish water vole travel to secure their bloodline.
S1E3 • Big Little Journeys • 2023 • Nature
A Taiwanese pangolin and a Brazilian lion tamarin family travel to a strange new world.
S1E2 • Big Little Journeys • 2023 • Nature
'To send a spacecraft there is a little bit insane,' says Scott Bolton when talking about Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system. But that is exactly what he has done, because Scott is head of Juno, the Nasa mission designed to peer through Jupiter's swirling clouds and reveal the wonders within. But this is no ordinary world. This documentary, narrated by Toby Jones, journeys with the scientists into the heart of a giant. Professor Kaitlin Kratter shows us how extreme Jupiter is. She has come to a quarry to measure out each planet's mass with rocks, starting with the smallest. Mercury is a single kilogram, and the Earth is 17. But Jupiter is on another scale entirely. It is seven tonnes - that is two and a half times the mass of all the other planets combined. On Kaitlin's scale it is not a pile of rocks, it is the truck delivering them. With extreme size comes extreme radiation. Juno is in the most extreme environment Nasa has visited. By projecting a 70-foot-wide, life-size Juno on a Houston rooftop, Scott shows us how its fragile electronics are encased in 200kg of titanium. As Scott puts it, 'we had to build an armoured tank to go there.' The team's efforts have been worthwhile. Professor Andrew Ingersoll, Juno's space weatherman, reveals they have seen lightning inside Jupiter, perhaps a thousand times more powerful than Earth's lightning. This might be evidence for huge quantities of water inside Jupiter. Prof Ingersoll also tells us that the Great Red Spot, a vast hurricane-like storm that could swallow the Earth whole, goes down as far as they can see - 'it could go down 1,000s of kilometres'. Deeper into the planet and things get stranger still. At the National Ignition facility in northern California, Dr Marius Millot is using powerful lasers normally used for nuclear fusion for an astonishing experiment. He uses '500 times the power that is used for the entire United States at a given moment' to crush hydrogen to the pressures inside Jupiter. Under these extreme conditions, hydrogen becomes a liquid metal. Juno is finding out how much liquid metallic hydrogen is inside Jupiter, and scientists hope to better understand how this flowing metal produces the most powerful aurora in the Solar System. But what is at Jupiter's heart? In Nice, Prof Tristan Guillot explains how Juno uses gravity to map the planet's centre. This can take scientists back to the earliest days of the solar system, because Jupiter is the oldest planet and it should contain clues to its own creation. By chalking out an outline of the Jupiter, Tristan reveals there is a huge rocky core - perhaps ten times the mass of Earth. It is now thought Jupiter started as a small rocky world. But there is a surprise, because Juno's findings suggest this core might be 'fuzzy'. Tristan thinks the planet was bombarded with something akin to shooting stars. As he puts it, 'Jupiter is quite unlike we thought'.
How Earth's five oceans connect to form the largest ecosystem on the planet, and how its network of currents supports the health of the seas and marine wildlife.
S1E4 • A Perfect Planet • 2021 • Nature
From desalination plants to the "Billion Oyster Project," witness humankind's efforts to meet our freshwater needs.
S1E3 • Age of Humans • 2021 • Environment
Brains and nervous systems do a lot of things, but overall their purpose seems to be to allow cells to communicate and behave together. But because gene's generally code for things that help reproduction, you can start to see harsh patterns in behavior.
This Place • 2014 • Brain
It is high summer in the Polar Regions, and the sun never sets. Vast hordes of summer visitors cram a lifetime of drama into one long, magical day; they must feed, fight and rear their young in this brief window of plenty. Summer is a tough time for the polar bear family, as their ice world melts away and the cubs take their first swimming lesson. Some bears save energy by dozing on icy sun beds, while others go egg-collecting in an Arctic tern colony, braving bombardment by sharp beaks. There are even bigger battles on the tundra; a herd of musk oxen gallop to the rescue as a calf is caught in a life and death struggle with a pair of Arctic wolves. But summer also brings surprises, as a huge colony of 400,000 king penguins cope with an unlikely problem - heat. The adults go surfing, while the woolly-coated chicks take a cooling mud bath. Nearby, a bull fur seal is prepared to fight to the death with a rival. Fur flies as the little pups struggle desperately to keep out of the way of the duelling giants. Further south, a minke whale is hunted amongst the ice floes by a family of killer whales. The dramatic chase lasts over 2 hours and has never been filmed before. The killers harry the minke whale, taking it in turns to wear it down. Eventually it succumbs to the relentless battering. Finally, comical adelie penguins waddle back to their half a million strong colony like clockwork toys. The fluffy chicks need constant feeding and protection as piratical skuas patrol the skies. When an unguarded chick is snatched, a dramatic "dogfight" ensues.
S1E3 • Frozen Planet • 2011 • Nature
What does it take to flush all the bad stuff from your body after a week-long bender? Or after several years of eating junk food? Can you atone for your health sins and start fresh?
S1E1 • A User's Guide to Cheating Death • 2017 • Health
Thanks to observations of galaxy redshifts, we can tell that the universe is EXPANDING! Knowing that the universe is expanding and how quickly its expanding also allows us to run the clock backwards 14 billion years to the way the universe began - with a bang.
42 • Crash Course Astronomy • 2015 • Astronomy
The story is told in a documentary way, looking at the present day. The future mission is filmed as a movie. In this episode scenes are changing in these timeframes.
The Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011 after leading international missions for three decades. This is the dramatic story of the tragedies and triumphs of the Space Shuttle fleet, and how it broadened humankind's exploration of space.
14 • Cosmic Front • 2014 • Astronomy
For millennia humans have seen our star, the Sun, through the Earth’s atmosphere. But the Space Age has given us a new perspective that has revealed the many faces of the Sun in X-rays, ultraviolet/visible light, heat, and radio. We reveal hidden secrets of the Sun, like the power of solar wind.
S1E5 • The Planets • 2004 • Astronomy
Brian Cox discusses the elements of which all living things, including humans, are made. He explores the beginnings of the universe and the origins of humanity, going far back in time to look at the process of stellar evolution.
S1E2 • Wonders of the Universe • Astronomy
Inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, adventure and role-playing computer games introduce unprecedented levels of choice and complexity to players.
S1E3 • High Score • 2020 • Technology
In the 21st century devices create more data than humans do. Rick Smolan, author of The Human Face of Big Data, shows the positive force of the collection of data in worldwide examples of the uses of medical data, personal data and business data to enrich people's lives.
S1E8 • Curiosity Retreats: 2015 Lectures • 2015 • Technology
Should a machine know right from wrong? Enlai explores how law, ethics, and spirituality shapes artificial intelligence.
S1E3 • Becoming Human • 2020 • Technology
To celebrate the webs big 50th birthday, Nat Geo takes a fun, nostalgic throwback romp down the cyber highway, from the early days through today. I LOVE THE INTERNET is one part glorious memory lane, one part "how the web changed everything" - our friendships, our habits, even our brains. It's nostalgia entertainment with enough gravitas to make it must-have content on Nat Geo.
2019 • Technology
Dirty water has killed more humans than all the wars of history combined, but in the last 150 years, a series of radical ideas, extraordinary innovations and unsung heroes have changed our world. Steven Johnson plunges into a sewer to understand what made a maverick engineer decide to lift the city of Chicago with jackscrews in order to build America’s first sewer system. He talks about John Leal, who deliberately “poisoned” the water supply of 200,000 people when, without authorization, he added chlorine, considered lethal in 1908, into Jersey City’s water and made it safe to drink. This isn’t only about the world becoming a cleaner place — the iPhone, the subway, flat screen TVs and even the two piece swimsuit are the result of the valiant efforts of the unsung heroes of clean.
S1E1 • How We Got to Now • 2014 • Technology
Space technologies are continuing to be refined and access to space is becoming cheaper. This episode looks at the development of new human-rated spacecraft, reusable boosters, laser communications, the Ion Drive, and new techniques to refuel satellites in space.
S1E13 • Zenith: Advances in Space Exploration • 2021 • Technology
In the final episode of the series, learn about "white hat" hackers, the U.S. Secret Service's cyber crime division working to protect us from the risks associated with persistent connectivity.
S1E3 • Digits • 2017 • Technology
In one of the richest soundscapes, howler monkeys attempt to out-voice each other and sloths break their silence to search for mates.
S1E3 • Earth Sounds • 2024 • Nature
In Indonesia, Simon visits a village of sea gypsies and meets tribespeople who want to adopt him.
S1E2 • Equator with Simon Reeve • Nature
James May takes a journey of discovery across the universe.
S1E2 • James May's Things You Need to Know • 2011 • Astronomy
Underwater parenting demands ingenuity—from reef navigation to teaching offspring how to hunt giants.
S1E2 • Parenthood • 2025 • Nature
In this episode, they unpick the dramatic shift in advice on drinking alcohol. After warnings that there's no longer any safe limit, what's the truth on whether it's still ok to have a drink? And what about all the previous reports that suggest the occasional drink might actually be a good thing? The shocking secrets of how Britain snacks are revealed, but it seems the mid-afternoon energy slump that prompts millions to reach for treats may just be all in the mind. Also, the controversial 5:2 diet is put to the test. With the experts still divided, could regular fast days really be the key to losing weight?
S1E5 • Food: Truth or Scare • 2016 • Health