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It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking’s theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage.

Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet… as life changes and evolves from second to second.

And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average … way up from just 20 in the Stone Age.

Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives… indeed the life span of the human species… is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.

It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time…

And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time.

Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe… or a human invention.

What’s certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks… from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams… to chart and measure a changing universe… to understand how it works and what drives it.
Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day… the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it’s actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds… approximately… if you’re judging by the stars, not the sun.
Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it.
But it’s gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon’s gravity.
That’s why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days… and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months.
In a few hundred million years, we’ll gain a whole hour.
The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry.
The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called “circadian rhythms” in motion.

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“No Justice!” “No Peace!” This rising chant from the streets escalated in answer to the seemingly endless incidents of police brutality throughout this great nation. Following the shooting of Amadou Diallo by 4 members of the NY City Police Department these chants rose from the streets by heartbroken and enraged voices. However, there are two sides to every story and the truth is often found where you least expect it. “If I Die Tonight” reflects on the lives and stories of those who survive on both sides of an impenetrable divide.

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Leading scientists use cutting-edge CGI to trace the extraordinary evolutionary path of the turkey, starting with one of the first dinosaurs.

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Professor Brian Cox visits Geneva to take a look around Cern’s Large Hadron Collider before this vast, 27km long machine is sealed off and a simulation experiment begins to try and create the conditions that existed just a billionth of a second after the Big Bang.

Cox joins the scientists who hope that the LHC will change our understanding of the early universe and solve some of its mysteries.

News: Not to be thwarted by a few annoying speed bumps on the road to discovery, CERN scientists have successfully slammed accelerated protons together inside the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in order to re-create conditions within the universe just moments after the Big Bang.

With two streams of particles travelling at close to the speed of light and moving around the giant ring-shaped accelerator in opposite directions, attending scientists at the CERN facility just outside Geneva created the very first collision at a little after 1100 GMT – causing widespread celebration amongst those who witnessed it.

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Adolf Hitler’s 12 years as ruler of Germany, which led to the deaths of millions in World War II, have made him one of history’s most hated villains. A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party in 1919, later renaming it the National Socialist German Workers Party (which was shortened to the Nazi Party). By 1921 he was the leader of the group, and in 1923 led an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the ruling German Weimar Republic. Hitler was sent to prison, where he wrote his manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and he emerged from jail less than a year later as a populist spokesman for poor and nationalistic Germans. Made chancellor in 1933, he suspended the constitution, forcibly suppressed all political opposition and brought the Nazis to power. He enforced his new rules with a brutal secret police (the Gestapo) and formed concentration camps for the organized murder of Jews, Gypsies and political opponents. Hitler’s bullying, aggressive foreign policy led to the start of World War II in 1939. Although Hitler had remarkable early success in the war, by 1942 the tide had turned, and by 1945 Allied troops had crossed into Germany and were headed for Berlin. Hitler committed suicide in his command bunker in Berlin in 1945, ending both Nazi rule and the war.

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Investigate the fascinating truths behind Dan Brown’s (The Da Vinci Code) first novel. From centuries-old secret societies to real-world cryptography, from the high-stakes intrigue surrounding the installation of a new Pope to the sometimes uneasy relationship between the Vatican and leading scientists, this special…

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This documentary puts philosophy on the streets. We meet some of today’s most influential thinkers: Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

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* The human body is made up of around 100 trillion cells.
* The human brain contains 100 billion neurons (nerve cells) — about as many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy — and it can generate enough electricity to power a lightbulb for 24 hours.
* The heart pumps 100,000 times per day, sending 8 to 10 pints of blood through about 60,000 miles (96,560 kilometers) of blood vessels.
* A newborn baby’s skeleton has 300 parts. Gradually, these fuse together during childhood to form the 206 bones of an adult. By the time you are 25, this process is complete.
* We change our skin about every 4 weeks. Every minute, we shed as many as 30,000 dead skin cells.
* The human head has around 100,000 hairs. We lose 40 to 100 every day. Each follicle grows around 20 times in a lifetime.
* The combined growth of hair on your head and body totals 100 inches (254 centimeters) a day, making an incredible 7 miles (11 kilometers) of hair a year.
* We breathe an average of 700 million breaths over the course of an average lifetime of 70 years.

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