Professor Alice Roberts is making a new human being - she is pregnant with her second child. But before he is born, she wants to find out what makes a human, human? What is that separates us from our closest living relatives - the chimpanzees?

Particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player Dr Brian Cox wants to know why the Universe is built the way it is. He believes the answers lie in the force of gravity

What is wrong with nudity? Why are people embarrassed about their bodies? How and why did they get the way they are?

Danny Wallace really wants a robot. He wants it to walk like him and talk like him. It's what scientists have been promising us for generations but it's a promise so far unfulfilled. Danny circumnavigates the globe searching for robot nirvana and trying to uncover how far away his dream is.

Black holes are one of the most destructive forces in the universe, capable of tearing a planet apart and swallowing an entire star. Yet scientists now believe they could hold the key to answering the ultimate question - what was there before the Big Bang?

New planets are now being discovered outside our Solar System on a regular basis, and these strange new worlds are forcing scientists to rewrite the history of our own Solar System. Far from a simple story of stable orbits, the creation of our Solar System is a tale of hellfire, chaos and planetary pinball. It’s a miracle our Earth is here at all.

Professor Robert Winston presents his top ten scientific breakthroughs of the past 50 years. Tracing these momentous and wide-ranging discoveries, he meets a real-life bionic woman, one of the first couples to test the male contraceptive pill, and even some of his early IVF patients. He explores the origins of the universe, probes the inner workings of the human mind and sees the most powerful laser in the world.

As Boeing\'s new 787 Dreamliner makes its inaugural flight, Rolls-Royce engineers celebrate the performance of its revolutionary Trent 1000 jet engines.

A team of roboticists are creating the first ever complete bionic man. Where could this technology lead?

Britain's engineering companies reveal how they build the world's most amazing machines

In this series Professor Iain Stewart tells a stunning new story about our planet. He reveals how the greatest changes to the Earth have been driven, above all, by plants.

In the second episode, Iain discovers how flowers have transformed our planet. He journeys to the remote islands of the South Pacific to track down the earliest flowers.

In the third episode, Iain discovers the remarkable impact of just one plant: grass. On the savannah of South Africa he sees how grass unleashed a firestorm to fight its greatest enemy, the forests.

Documentary following researchers as they try to take the first-ever picture of a black hole. They must travel the globe to build a revolutionary telescope that spans planet Earth.

From the ultra clean environment of a microchip factory to the railway engineer who lifted a city to install sewers, innovation expert Steven Johnson traces the surprising journey from dirty to clean in our lives. He discovers the unsung heroes of this transformation, like the doctor who secretly experimented with a deadly chemical to treat the water supply, and the storekeeper who revolutionised cleanliness in the home.

For at least 100,000 years, humans have known how to make fire. But the skill to make cold is a very modern technique. Innovation expert Steven Johnson traces the unsung heroes of cold, like the doctor who was desperate to beat fever and created a refrigerator, the rookie heating engineer who discovered how to cool our homes and set off a mass migration to the desert, and the young man who cut ice from a lake and transported it thousands of miles.

It was only a few centuries ago that the best source of light came from burning oil scooped out of a whale's head. Innovation expert Steven Johnson discovers the unsung heroes of invention in the surprising journey from the candle to the neon lights of Las Vegas and the world of lasers.

The ability to transport our voices over long distances has been one of the greatest transformations in how we live our lives.

From submariners who live on an 18-hour day to the railway clerk who fought to standardise time zones, and the cobbler who invented the first cheap watch, innovation expert Steven Johnson discovers the surprising journey of time in our lives. He locates the unsung heroes whose ideas transformed our world of time from the sundial to clocks accurate to billionths of a second.

A five-part series presented by best-selling author Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From, Everything Bad Is Good for You), investigating the little-known stories of revolutionary innovations.

Human Planet, a cinematic experience, bringing you the most amazing human stories in the world today. Humans and wildlife surviving in the most extreme environments on Earth.

The Arctic is the harshest environment on Earth: little food grows, it\'s dark for months on end, and temperatures stay well below freezing for much of the year. Yet four million people manage to survive here.

A total of 10 stories from across the Human Planet series, closely linked to the KS2 Geography curriculum, look at how humans have learnt to live with extremes, and explore how people across the globe live with extreme cold; live in desert environments without water; and how they live in mountain regions facing daily hazards.

A look at the one environment that\'s been made by us for us - the city. Over half of the world\'s population now lives in the urban jungle. The city is built to keep untamed nature out - but nature can\'t be pushed away. From bed bugs sucking our blood at night to rats in our restaurants, many animals have adapted to a life with us.

We can survive for weeks without food, but only days without water: it is the essential element of life. Yet many millions of us live in parched deserts around the world. In the second episode of Human Planet, we discover how the eternal quest for water brings huge challenges - and ingenious solutions - in the driest places on Earth.

Grasslands feed the world. Over thousands of years, we humans have learned to grow grains on the grasslands and domesticate the creatures that live there. Our success has propelled our population to almost seven billion people.

The rainforest is home to more species of plants and animals than any other habitat on the planet. But for humans, life there is not as easy as it looks. Life in the trees requires great skill, ingenuity and sheer bravery.

From lush cloud forests to bare summits that take your breath away, the higher you climb the tougher life gets on a mountain. Human Planet explores the extraordinary ways in which people survive at extreme altitudes where nature becomes utterly unforgiving.

As an air-breathing animal, the human is not built to survive in water. But people have found ways to live an almost aquatic life so they can exploit the sea\'s riches.

Rivers provide the essentials of life: fresh food and water. They often provide natural highways and enable us to live in just about every environment on Earth. But rivers can also flood, freeze or disappear altogether!