* Royal Institution Christmas Lectures - Size Matters (2010)

Material scientist Dr Mark Miodownik gives a series of lectures on how size influences everything in science and nature, including the shape of the universe.

Why Elephants Can't Dance
How can a hamster survive falling from the top of a skyscraper, ants carry over 100 times their own body weight and geckos climb across the ceiling? In the first of this year's Christmas lectures, material scientist and engineer Dr Mark Miodownik investigates why size matters in animal behaviour. He reveals how the science of materials - the stuff from which everything is made - can explain some of the most extraordinary and surprising feats in the animal kingdom.

Why Chocolate Melts and Jet Engines Don't
Dr Mark Miodownik zooms into the microscopic world beneath our fingertips, where strange forces dominate the world and common sense goes out of the window. He reveals how this world can make objects behave like magic and discovers the secrets of the extraordinary metals that make jet engines possible. Mark reveals why chocolate is one of the most sophisticated and highly engineered materials on the planet, using special crystals designed to melt in the mouth, and he looks forward to new era of self-healing materials.

Why Mountains are So Small
Why is the tallest building on earth less than half a mile high? Why don't we have mountains as tall as those on Mars? Dr Mark Miodownik investigates the world of the very big and very tall. He reveals that, at this scale, everything is governed by a battle with one of the strangest forces in the universe - gravity. With help from acrobats, levitation devices, spiders and sticky goo, Mark discovers how gravity can make solid rock behave like a liquid and investigates whether it might be possible to build a structure from Earth into space.

* Faster Than the Speed of Light (2011)

In September 2011, an international group of scientists has made an astonishing claim - they have detected particles that seemed to travel faster than the speed of light. It was a claim that contradicted more than a hundred years of scientific orthodoxy. Suddenly there was talk of all kinds of bizarre concepts, from time travel to parallel universes. So what is going on? Has Einstein's famous theory of relativity finally met its match? Will we one day be able to travel into the past or even into another universe? In this film, Professor Marcus du Sautoy explores one of the most dramatic scientific announcements for a generation. In clear, simple language he tells the story of the science we thought we knew, how it is being challenged, and why it matters.

Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey (Complete) (2014)

More than three decades after the debut of “Cosmos,” Carl Sagan’s stunning and iconic exploration of the universe as revealed by science, FOX sets off on a voyage for the stars with “Cosmos: A Space Time Odyssey”. Seth MacFarlane has teamed up with Sagan’s original creative collaborators – writer/producer Ann Druyan and astrophysicist Steven Soter – to conceive a 13-part “docu-series” that will serve as a successor to the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning original series.

* Duck Quacks Don't Echo (Series)

Duck Quacks Don’t Echo is a one-hour program where our three hosts - Tom Papa, Michael Ian Black and Seth Herzog - present weird, unusual and incredible facts – and then get to test the validity of their ‘facts’ though in-studio or pre-produced experiments. Simply put, Duck Quacks Don’t Echo presents over-the-top hypothesis and then goes about proving them. It is all presented in a funny, breezy way. Like three good friends meeting up once a week to test each other’s knowledge of obscure and wonderful data, Duck Quacks Don’t Echo is a celebration of science.

* A Brief History Of Time (1992)

Documentarian Errol Morris has a knack for finding the fascinating quirks of his subjects, and this brings Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time to sparkling life. Through interviews with family and colleagues of the brilliant theoretical physicist, as well as Hawking's own synthesized readings and reminiscences, we learn of his early life, his struggle with the degenerative disease ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and his wide-ranging contributions to our knowledge of time, black holes, and the origin of the universe. The science is never downplayed; between Hawking's prose and Morris's visual wizardry, important concepts such as entropy and singularities jump from the screen in memorable vignettes. (Hawking believes a truly universal theory of physics will be understood by "scientists, philosophers, and just ordinary people.") Philip Glass's music, subdued and minimal, balances the alternately somber and hilarious moods of the film.

* After Life: The Strange Science of Decay (2011)

If you have ever wondered what would happen in your own home if you were taken away and everything inside was left to rot, the answer is revealed in this programme which explores the strange and surprising science of decay. For two months, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old. Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by, but as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

* Absolute Zero (2007)

This two-part scientific detective tale tells the story of a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme: absolute zero, a place so cold that the physical world as we know it doesn't exist, electricity flows without resistance, fluids defy gravity and the speed of light can be reduced to 38 miles per hour.

Each film features a strange cast of eccentric characters, including: Clarence Birds Eye; Frederic 'Ice King' Tudor, who founded an empire harvesting ice; and James Dewar, who almost drove himself crazy by trying to liquefy hydrogen.

Absolute zero became the Holy Grail of temperature physicists and is considered the gateway to many new technologies, such as nano-construction, neurological networks and quantum computing. The possibilities, it seems, are limitless.

Episode 1: Conquest of Cold
Chronicles the major discoveries leading towards the mastery of cold, beginning with King James I's court magician, Cornelius Drebbel, who managed to air condition the largest interior space in the British Isles in 1620. Other stories will include the first "natural philosopher," Robert Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society in Great Britain; the Grand Duke Ferdinand II de Medici's involvement in the creation of the first thermometer; the establishment of the laws of thermodynamics by three young scientists, Sadi Carnot, James Joule and William Thomson; and Michael Faraday's critical achievement in liquefying several other gases which set the stage for the commercial application of cold to refrigeration and air conditioning.

Episode 2: Race for Absolute Zero


Focuses on the fierce rivalry that took place in the laboratories in Britain, Holland, France and Poland as they sought the ultimate extreme of cold. The program will follow the extraordinary discoveries of superconductivity and superfluidity and the attempt to produce a new form of matter that Albert Einstein predicted would exist within a few billionths of degrees above absolute zero.

* Atom (2007)

In this three-part documentary series, Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries ever: that the material world is made up of atoms.
The book that accompanies the Atom series is published by Icon Books.

The Clash of Titans
Author and nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili looks at what led to the discovery that everything is made of atoms. The programme looks at how the discovery affected the scientific world including the atomic energy theories of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg and quantum mechanics

The Key to the Cosmos
Professor Jim Al-Khalili continues his investigation of the atom by looking at radioactivity, the Atom Bomb and the Big Bang, and even why we are here and how we were made. He shows that, in the quest to understand the atom, the mystery of how the entire universe was created became revealed

The Illusion of Reality
In the last in the series Professor Jim Al-Khalili explores how studying the atom forced us to rethink the nature of reality itself.
He discovers that there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist, finds out that empty space isn't empty at all, and investigates the differences in our perception of the world in the universe and the reality.