Two months after an explosion on BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 people, Panorama’s Hilary Andersson tells the story of America’s ‘greatest environmental disaster.’
Dubbed an environmental ‘9/11′ by President Obama, the leak caused by the explosion is still releasing thousands of barrels of crude oil a day into the waters of the Gulf – livelihoods and ecosystems are threatened, fishermen are unable to work and billions have been wiped off the value of BP shares.
Panorama examines the full consequences of the disaster amid a mounting war of words between the Obama adminstration and an embattled BP, asking what went wrong and who is really to blame.
Australian documentary from 2002 exploring the prominent hacker community, centered in Melbourne, Australia in the late 80s to early 1990. The storyline centres around the Australian teenagers going by the pseudonyms “Electron” and “Phoenix”, who were members of an elite computer hacking group called The Realm, and hacked into some of the most secure computer networks in the world, including those of the US Naval Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a government lab charged with the security of the US nuclear stockpile, and NASA.
History books tell us that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, but that’s not the whole story. This drama uncovers the forgotten team involved in the development and manufacture of the drug that transformed medicine.
The Codebreakers was aired on BBC World TV during May 2006. It investigates how poor countries are using FOSS applications for development, and includes stories and interviews from around the world.
Invention is rarely the isolated product of a lone scientist or engineer. Instead, every significant technology in the modern world is the product of a long history of numerous people and events. One of our most modern inventions, the Internet, is itself the result of decades of work and innovation by thousands of people who may have never dreamed of the possibility or potential of a global network.
One interesting and influential ancestor in the history of the Internet is radar. Hundreds of the best scientists and engineers in Britain and the U.S. worked during World War Two to develop radar systems to help them to defeat the Axis powers. Electronics technology was pushed to new heights to make the signals stronger, and early computing machines were developed to process the complex radar messages.
In the 1980’s, personal computers became a common fixture in homes and offices. Supplying business with computers and software grew into one of the biggest industries in less than a decade. Soon, networking became a profitable business for engineers previously restricted to networking mainframes.
Some of the engineers trained on the ARPAnet went out on their own to found some of the fastest growing high-tech companies in history. Bob Metcalfe, one of the pioneers of ARPAnet, developed a better way of networking personal computers together and founded 3Com.
The rise of the personal computer by Apple and IBM introduced the rest of the world to computing. At first, computers were the tools of technically inclined nerds, but new applications drew other people to the keyboard. With an affordable modem, people could connect with other computer enthusiasts and commercial online services. People were using the computer as Bush and Licklider had prophesized, as a medium to interact with other people.
A venerable institution of international collaboration was the setting for the major development in the history of the Internet. It began when Tim Berners-Lee, a computer programmer at CERN in Switzerland, got to play on a new NeXT workstation. The object-oriented operating system was an inspiration for a problem he was working on – how to distribute information across a diverse network of different computers and operating systems. He started working on a protocol very similar the “docuverse” described by Ted Nelson, but reduced it down to a minimal, working model.
A loggerhead turtle journeys across the Pacific, meeting dolphins and whales, sharks and giant squids, and typhoons and fishermen along the way. She swims over deep canyons, and uses underwater mountain tops like motorway service stations.
Blue whales thunder by like juggernauts, and sharks dance a beautiful midnight ballet around her. Pacific means peaceful, but it is clearly not. One minute she is under fire from marlin, the next swimming over a coral reef, with crocodiles as well as sharks.
NASA’s New Horizon’s mission to Pluto was set to launch on January 17, 2006. Passport to Pluto goes behind the scenes to show the development and testing of the spacecraft, and the hard work of the scientists, engineers and support staff who worked for decades to make the mission possible.
New Horizons will be the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth, on board America’s most powerful rocket, and will be traveling the farthest distance to begin its primary mission of any NASA spacecraft. If all goes well it will reach Pluto and its giant moon, Charon — some 3 billion miles from Earth — as early as 2015, and then travel on out into the Kuiper Belt, a previously unexplored region of the solar system, populated by “ice dwarf” worlds completely unlike the terrestrial and gas giant planets known through previous missions.
Richard Hammond journeys to discover the startling engineering connections behind the Troll A gas platform, the largest object ever moved by man across the surface of the Earth.
Where did our solar system come from? The advent of space flight and space-based telescopes gave us unexpected clues to how our solar system began.
The Machine That Changed the World is the longest, most comprehensive documentary about the history of computing ever produced, but since its release in 1992, it’s become virtually extinct. Out of print and never released online, the only remaining copies are VHS tapes floating around school libraries or in the homes of fans who dubbed the original shows when they aired.
Jointly produced by WGBH Boston and the BBC, it originally aired in the UK as The Dream Machine before its U.S. premiere in January 1992. Its broadcast was accompanied by a book co-written by the documentary’s producer Jon Palfreman.