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Horizon : Season 41
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Horizon tells amazing science stories, unravels mysteries and reveals worlds you've never seen before.
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List of Episodes (18)
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Horizon (1974)
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1. The Demonic Ape
08 Jan '04In a film that is in turns charming, disturbing and poignant, Horizon explores the relationship between science and the chimpanzee. It began with a magical story. A young girl ventured alone into the jungle and befriended a group of chimpanzees. What she saw became the stuff of scientific legend. But then, last year came a terrible tragedy. Frodo, one of the chimpanzees she had helped make famous, killed a human baby. That shocking act brought into focus a huge debate about the relationship
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Horizon (1974)
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2. The Moscow Theatre Siege
15 Jan '04With the help of doctors and scientists in America, Germany and Britain, Horizon unpicks the mystery of the Moscow theatre siege. In October 2002, Chechen terrorists took a thousand people hostage in a Moscow theatre and threatened to kill them. The problem was how to get them out alive. A bloodbath seemed inevitable. Three days later Russian special forces stormed the theatre using a secret gas to knock everybody out. 129 hostages died - apparently killed by the very gas that was meant to
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Horizon (1974)
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3. The Atkins Diet
22 Jan '04This is the truth about the world's most famous, most glamorous and most controversial diet. The Atkins diet says that eating fat can make you thin. It says you don't need to bother watching the calories. Rene Zellweger, Geri Halliwell and a host of other celebrities swear by it. But many scientists think it is scientific nonsense. Some even believe it is dangerous. Horizon cuts through the confusion and provide the answers. When Dr Atkins first launched his diet, he was accused of breaking one
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Horizon (1974)
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4. Secrets of the Star Disc
29 Jan '04This is the extraordinary story of how a small metal disc is rewriting the epic saga of how civilisation first came to Europe, 3600 years ago. When grave robbers ransacked a Bronze Age tomb in Germany, they had no idea that they had unearthed the find of a lifetime. But they knew that it was worth selling. It was a small bronze disc of exquisite design. So they contacted the archaeologist Harald Meller, offering to sell it to him for €300,000. Meller went deep into the criminal underworld
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Horizon (1974)
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5. The Dark Secret of Hendrik Schön
05 Feb '04Imagine a world where disease could be eradicated by an injection of tiny robots the size of molecules. That is the hope offered by nanotechnology - the science of microscopically small machines. But others fear nanotechnology could lead to a non-biological cancer - where swarms of tiny nanobots come together and literally devour human flesh. Sounds like science fiction? It certainly did until a brilliant young scientist called Hendrik Schön seemed to bring it a step closer. Schön's great
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Horizon (1974)
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6. Thalidomide - A Second Chance?
12 Feb '04Thalidomide was one of the biggest medical tragedies of modern times. The images of children born with shrunken limbs still haunt anyone who sees them. And the tragedy is not over. Those children are adults today, still coping with their disability. For many, thalidomide is a drug that should be consigned to the dustbin of history - an awful cautionary tale of the errors that science can make. But now it is making a comeback - as a radical treatment for incurable blood cancers. But can it
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Horizon (1974)
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7. Diamond Labs
04 Mar '04Top quality diamonds at knock down prices? The only catch is: these rocks don't come out of the ground, but are made in a lab. This is the promise offered by a series of recent scientific breakthroughs. For most of us, it seems we may soon be able to bejewel ourselves like movie stars. But for De Beers, the world's largest diamond trader, could this, one day, be a serious threat? Following a dodgy meeting in Moscow, retired US Army General Carter Clarke acquired some experimental diamond
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Horizon (1974)
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8. T-Rex - Warrior or Wimp?
11 Mar '04Tyrannosaurus rex - it's the scariest, meanest, most bewitching dinosaur of them all. Children are captivated by the sheer savagery of the teeth. Experts marvelled at the force of its bite - ten times more powerful than anything we know today. Movie makers made millions out of the terror it inspired. But could our picture of this monster be completely wrong? Was T. rex in fact a slow lumbering creature, with hideously bad breath, that couldn't get anywhere close to catching a Triceratops. Was
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Horizon (1974)
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9. Project Poltergeist
18 Mar '04This is the story of two genuine scientific heroes. For forty years, John Bahcall and Ray Davis were engaged in a single extraordinary experiment - to find out why the Sun shines. In the end they would triumph. Davis would win the Nobel Prize and, thanks to their work, a whole new theory about how the universe is put together may have to be created. At the heart of this story is a tiny, utterly mysterious thing called a neutrino. Trillions of them pass through your body every second, touching
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Horizon (1974)
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10. The Truth of Troy
25 Mar '04It's one of the greatest stories ever told. The legend of Helen of Troy has enchanted audiences for the last three thousand years. In May this year a Hollywood film staring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom will be launched in Britain. But is there any reality to the myth? Horizon has unprecedented access to the scientist with the answers. Since 1988 Professor Manfred Korfmann has been excavating the site of Troy. He has never before spoken at this length. He has made amazing discoveries - how large
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Horizon (1974)
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11. The Truth About Vitamins
16 Sep '04Every year we spend £300 million on vitamin supplements, but do they actually do us any good? Some believe they offer the promise of preventing or even curing some of the world's biggest killers, such as heart disease and cancer. Others claim that taking large doses of some vitamins may in certain cases be harmful. So what are the facts? Nearly 40 years ago, one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century and double Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, revolutionised the way people thought
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Horizon (1974)
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12. King Solomon's Tablet of Stone
23 Sep '04
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Horizon (1974)
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13. Derek Tastes of Earwax
30 Sep '04Is Wednesday red? Take part in our experiment to test whether your senses overlap. Do melodies have a colour? Take part in our experiment to test whether you hear colours. Imagine if every time you saw someone called Derek you got a strong taste of earwax in your mouth. It happens to James Wannerton, who runs a pub. Derek is one of his regulars. Another regular's name gives him the taste of wet nappies. For some puzzling reason, James's sense of sound and taste are intermingled. Dorothy
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Horizon (1974)
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14. What Really Killed the Dinosaurs?
07 Oct '04Until recently most scientists thought they knew what killed off the dinosaurs. A 10km-wide meteorite had smashed into the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, causing worldwide forest fires, tsunamis several kilometres high, and an 'impact winter' - in which dust blocked out the sun for months or years. It was thought that the dinosaurs were blasted, roasted and frozen to death, in that order. But now a small but vociferous group of scientists believes there is increasing evidence that this 'impact'
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Horizon (1974)
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15. Making Millions the Easy Way
14 Oct '04In the mid-1990s, a team of American science students took on the might of the Las Vegas casinos, and came home with millions of dollars. Hard working engineering students during the week, they became high-rolling gamblers by the weekend and proved that, in one game at least, the house doesn't always win. The game was blackjack, and the students were from the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their audacious winnings marked the climax of an arms race between casino and
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Horizon (1974)
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16. Saturn - Lord of the Rings
21 Oct '04In 1610, Galileo used a new invention -- a simple telescope -- to look at Saturn. When he viewed the planet for the first time, he saw something strange. He thought he saw three stars together, a big one in the middle of two little stars. He knew they weren't really stars, but what were they?
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Horizon (1974)
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17. The Hunt for the Supertwister
28 Oct '04
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Horizon (1974)
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18. Dr Money and the Boy with No Penis
04 Nov '04
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