Prof Richard Klein believes art is a landmark in human evolution. Unquestionable art that’s widespread and common suggests you’re dealing with people just like us. No other animals, after all, are able to define a painting as anything other than a collection of colours and shapes. This ability is unique to humans.

Other scientists agree. They believe art defines humans as behaviourally modern, and its beginning must coincide with the ability to speak and use language. If someone has the imagination to devise a shared way to describe their environment using art then it seems inconceivable that they could not possess language and speech. The search for the moment our ancestors became behaviourally just like us is also the hunt for the first evidence of art.

The idea that life on Earth came from another planet has been around as a modern scientific theory since the 1960s when it was proposed by Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. At the time they were ridiculed for their idea – known as panspermia. But now, with growing evidence, it’s back in vogue and even being studied by NASA.

Particle physicist 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. But Newton thought gravity was powered by God, and even Einstein failed to completely solve it.

Heading out with a film crew on a road trip across the USA, Brian fires lasers at the moon in Texas, goes mad in the desert in Arizona, encounters the bending of space and time at a maximum security military base, tries to detect ripples in our reality in the swamps of Louisiana and searches for hidden dimensions just outside Chicago.

In the first part of this three part series, we see how artificial intelligence will revolutionize homes, workplaces and lifestyles, and how virtual worlds will become so realistic, they will rival the physical world. Robots with human-level intelligence may soon become a reality, and in the ultimate stage of mastery, we’ll even be able to merge our minds with machine intelligence.

In the final part of the series, Jim Al-Khalili uncovers tales of success and heartache in the story of chemists’ battle to control and combine the elements, and build our modern world.

He reveals the dramatic breakthroughs which harnessed their might to release almost unimaginable power, and journeys to the centre of modern day alchemy, where scientists are attempting to command the extreme forces of nature and create brand new elements.

In part two of the series, Professor Al-Khalili looks at the 19th century chemists who struggled to impose an order on the apparently random world of the elements. From working out how many there were to discovering their unique relationships with each other, the early scientists’ bid to decode the hidden order of the elements was driven by false starts and bitter disputes. But ultimately the quest would lead to one of chemistry’s most beautiful intellectual creations – the periodic table.

Just 92 elements made up the world, but the belief there were only four – earth, fire, air and water – persisted until the 19th Century. Professor Jim Al-Khalili retraces the footsteps of the alchemists who first began to question the notion of the elements in their search for the secret of everlasting life.

He reveals the red herrings and rivalries which dogged scientific progress, and explores how new approaches to splitting matter brought us both remarkable elements and the new science of chemistry.

The final part of the series explores how studying the atom made us rethink the nature of reality itself, discovers how there might be parallel universes in which different versions of us exist and finds out that ‘empty’ space isn’t empty at all.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili shows how the world we think we know turns out to be a tiny sliver of an infinitely weirder universe than we could ever have conceived.

The second episode in this series shows how, in our quest to understand the atom, we unravelled the mystery of how the universe was created – a story with dramatic twists and turns, taking in world-changing discoveries like radioactivity, the atom bomb and the Big Bang. The greatest brains of the 20th century competed to answer the biggest questions of all – why are we here and how were we made?

The discovery that everything is made from atoms has been referred to as the greatest scientific breakthrough in history. As scientists delved deep into the atom, they unravelled nature’s most shocking secrets and abandoned traditional beliefs, leading to a whole new science which still underpins modern physics, chemistry and biology, and maybe even life itself. Nuclear physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of this discovery and the brilliant minds behind the breakthrough.

As Einstein lay on his deathbed, he asked only for his glasses, his writing implements and his latest equations. He knew he was dying, yet continued his work. In those final hours of his life, while fading in and out of consciousness, he was working on what he hoped would be his greatest work of all, a project of monumental complexity and which he hoped would unlock the mind of God.

Time seems to drive every moment. It’s the most inescapable force we feel. But do we experience it from within our minds and bodies or from the outside?

In the first episode of the series, string theory pioneer Michio Kaku witnesses one of the most extraordinary feats of timing in nature on a remote Californian beach, and meets a French caver who spent months in complete isolation to see what would happen to his sense of time, discovering we have an internal clock that drives our natural rhythm.

Michio self-experiments by being monitored over 24 hours to see how this clock shapes his whole body chemistry, and the programme also tests a family with a rare disease to uncover the inner workings of the body clock itself.