Horizon : Season 38

On a winter night in 373 BC, the classical Greek city of Helike was destroyed by a massive earthquake and tidal wave. The entire city and all its inhabitants were lost beneath the sea. What has bewitched archaeologists about Helike is that it was engulfed just when ancient Greece was reaching its height; when the philosophy and art that inspired the western world for thousands of years were invented. Its destruction was one of the most appalling tragedies of the classical world and most probabl

It began with a ghastly tragedy. In 1985 the massive Colombian volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted, melting a glacier and sending a vast landslide of mud down on the people asleep in the town of Armero below. Twenty thousand died. In the aftermath science was set a challenge: to make sure such a catastrophe never happened again, by finding a way of accurately predicting when a volcano will erupt. Now, at last, it seems that one scientist may have met that challenge. Anyone can tell when a volcano

There is a new epidemic sweeping the world. It's been silently growing over the last few decades - only now is it reaching dramatic proportions. If current trends continue, more than one quarter of British adults will have this disease by the year 2010. This new epidemic is obesity. Scientists have recently made significant discoveries, which could lead to a drug treatment for obesity. In the meantime, until the drugs are developed, what should we do to keep off the pounds? One thing is certain.

The magnificent ancient city of pyramids at Caral in Peru hit the headlines in 2001. The site is a thousand years older than the earliest known civilisation in the Americas and, at 2,627 BC, is as old as the pyramids of Egypt. Many now believe it is the fabled missing link of archaeology - a 'mother city'. If so, then these extraordinary findings could finally answer one of the great questions of archaeology: why did humans become civilised? For over a century, archaeologists have been searchi

Everything you're about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Yet it's all true. Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe - in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less

This is the story of a book that could have changed the history of the World. To the untrained eye, it is nothing more than a small and unassuming Byzantine prayer book, yet it sold at Christies for over $2m. For faintly visible beneath the prayers on its pages are other, unique, writings - words that have been lost for nearly two thousand years. The text is the only record of work by one of the world's greatest minds - the ancient Greek, Archimedes - a mathematical genius centuries ahead of hi

When Mount Nyiragongo erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo in January 2002 it seemed like a disaster. Molten lava plunged down the hillside and poured into nearby Lake Kivu. Many died, and much of the city of Goma was destroyed. In fact, the local people were lucky. Had the eruption spread to one of the many volcanic faults under Lake Kivu, it could have unleashed one of the most terrifying of all natural phenomena - lake overturn. The phenomenon of lake overturn first struck in 1984 at

On 4 April 1962, James Hanratty was led from the condemned cell in Bedford Prison to the gallows. On the way he protested his innocence, as he had done every day since he had been convicted of murder. At 8am, the noose was fitted round Hanratty's neck and he was hanged, launching one of the longest and most bitter appeal campaigns in the history of British justice. Hanratty's supporters believe that he was wrongfully convicted, the victim of dubious police evidence. The police maintain Hanratty

The England football manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson, believes that modern soccer matches are not won on the pitch, but inside people's minds. This film examines not just how Eriksson got inside his players' brains, but how he is now starting nothing short of a revolution in English football thinking. Eriksson's plan, devised with sports psychologist Dr Willi Railo, has two critical elements. These are to banish the crippling effects of the fear of failure from the minds of the England players, an

The world's oceans claim on average one ship a week, often in mysterious circumstances. With little evidence to go on, investigators usually point at human error or poor maintenance but an alarming series of disappearances and near-sinkings, including world-class vessels with unblemished track records, has prompted the search for a more sinister cause and renewed belief in a maritime myth: the wall of water. Waves the height of an office block. Waves twice as large as any that ships are designed

Homoeopathy was pioneered over 200 years ago. Practitioners and patients are convinced it has the power to heal. Today, some of the most famous and influential people in the world, including pop stars, politicians, footballers and even Prince Charles, all use homoeopathic remedies. Yet according to traditional science, they are wasting their money. Sceptic James Randi is so convinced that homoeopathy will not work, that he has offered $1m to anyone who can provide convincing evidence of its eff

250 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the land and oceans teemed with life. This was the Permian, a golden era of biodiversity that was about to come to a crashing end. Within just a few thousand years, 95% of the lifeforms on the planet would be wiped out, in the biggest mass extinction Earth has ever known. What natural disaster could kill on such a massive scale? It is only in recent years that evidence has begun to emerge from rocks in Antarctica, Siberia and Greenla

In 1542, the Spanish Conquistador, Francisco de Orellana ventured along the Rio Negro, one of the Amazon Basin's great rivers. Hunting a hidden city of gold, his expedition found a network of farms, villages and even huge walled cities. At least that is what he told an eager audience on his return to Spain. The prospect of gold drew others to explore the region, but none could find the people of whom the first Conquistadors had spoken. The missionaries who followed a century later reported find