Since the dawn of history the miraculous annual floodwaters have risen to transform the desert into a fertile paradise where the great civilisation of Ancient Egypt grew, but their existence was on a knife-edge held hostage by the river and the Pharaoh maintained the balance by appeasing the gods to ensure the gifts of the river.

The annual flooding of the Nile brought the water and fertile volcanic soil that made the Ancient Egyptian civilisation possible, but impassable rapids made it impossible for them to discover the source of this bounty they attributed to the gods.

The documentary series about the solar system examines how our understanding of the evolution of life on earth has changed, and explores the evidence for life on other planets. In 1976, two robotic probes suggested that the surface of Mars was dead. But the latest research reveals that this may not be the case and that it is possible that life on earth may have evolved from Mars.

In this landmark film Professor Hawking, alongside engineer and radio astronomy expert Professor Danielle George and a former student, Christophe Galfard, join forces to find out if, and how, humans can reach for the stars and relocate to different planets.

For many years our place in the universe was the subject of theologians and philosophers, not scientists, but in 1960 one man changed all that.

Chaos theory has a bad name, conjuring up images of unpredictable weather, economic crashes and science gone wrong. But there is a fascinating and hidden side to Chaos, one that scientists are only now beginning to understand.

Professor of physics Jim Al-Khalili investigates the most accurate and yet perplexing scientific theory ever - quantum physics.

Jim Al-Khalili investigates whether quantum physics might solve mysteries in biology.

Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.

Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.

Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path.

Blue Peter gardener Chris Collins celebrates the humble and sometimes hated plants we call weeds. He discovers that there is no such thing as a weed, botanically speaking, and that in fact what we call a weed has changed again and again over the last three hundred years.

Of all the wonders of the human body, there's one more mysterious than any other. Blood: five precious litres that keep us alive. Yet how much do we really know about this sticky red substance and its mysterious, life-giving force?

Louie Psihoyos' Oscar-winning documentary shows in chilling detail the illicit slaughter of dolphins at Taijia, a rural Japanese cove.

The film hints at the global consequences of CCD continuing unchecked: the possibility that the crops, fruit and flowers that humanity rely will not be pollinated and will die out.

Series looking at three of the world's most iconic wild places and how they have been shaped over time by man.

More than anywhere, the Serengeti is synonymous with wilderness and has even come to represent Africa. But the story of the Serengeti is just as much about humans as it is about wildlife.

As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife.

The Amazon rainforest is the epitome of a last great wilderness under threat from modern man. It has become an international cause celebre for environmentalists as powerful agricultural and industrial interests bent on felling trees encroach ever deeper into virgin forest. But the latest evidence suggests that the Amazon is not what it seems.

Usain Bolt is the fastest man on the planet and a sportsman like no other. But what makes him so much faster than any other man in the history of the human race?

About 20 million years before the appearance of the first dinosaurs, the biggest extinction the world had ever known had occurred. Towards the end of the Triassic, 220 million years ago, there was another extinction, which wiped out many of the non-dinosaurs including the dicynodonts such as Placerias and primitive archosaurs such as Postosuchus. It was after this that dinosaurs really started to radiate and diversify.

The earliest dinosaurs were pretty small. Eoraptor was only about 1 m long. However the plant-eating prosauropod, Plateosaurus, that appeared at the end of the Triassic period, was a harbinger of things to come.

While dinosaurs were ruling on land, the sea was the dominion of an entirely different group of animals: the marine reptiles. The programme concentrates on these amazing creatures that were every bit as awesome as their counterparts on land.

This episode is set in the early Cretaceous, a time when the world’s continents were breaking apart. It follows an enormous journey made by a giant pterosaur and many different geographical regions are covered in the programme.

Documentary which tells the story of evolution theory since Darwin postulated it in 1859 in 'On the Origin of Species'.

Bees are dying in their millions. It is an ecological crisis that threatens to bring global agriculture to a standstill. Introduced by Martha Kearney, this documentary explores the reasons behind the decline of bee colonies across the globe, investigating what

China is a vast country with an astonishingly diverse landscape. Through unprecedented access, this six-part series reveals the little-known natural treasures and secret wildlife havens of China's wildest regions.

Ancient, dramatic and full of bizarre animals, Australia is like no other place on earth. Wild Down Under explores the extraordinary landscapes and breathtaking array of strange and often dangerous wildlife that lives around this beautiful continent.

The universe is almost entirely devoid of life. Earth, the planet we call home, seems to defy the laws of physics. It is teeming with life in all colours, shapes and sizes. No-one knows for sure how many different species are alive right now, our best guess is close to 8.7 million

What are we and where do we come from? Professor Brian Cox finds out.