Program Category: Science

A series of visually spectacular shorts show the frontline discoveries in all fields of science and the people who have helped make them happen.

In the remote Norwegian town of Longyearbyen, just 1000 kilometres from the North Pole, politicians from around the world came to celebrate the opening of the world’s first global seed bank. After years of difficult negotiations and searching for the right spot, this was deemed to be the safest place on earth. Eventually, 4,5 million seed samples will be stored in this “Doomsday Vault” and ensure the continued existence of biodiversity.

Our planet is heating up and one of the first casualties will be the crops that supply our food. Scientists are working overtime to find solutions including going back to the ancestral origins of our staple foods.

SEED HUNTER will take you on a remarkable journey from the drought ravaged farms of Australia, to the heart of the Middle East, to the mountains of Tajikistan where charismatic Australian scientist Dr Ken Street – a real life version of Indiana Jones – and his team of ‘gene detectives’ hunt for plant genes that will help our food withstand the impact of 21st century global warming.

Along the way we meet farmers around the world who are struggling to grow crops in a climate that’s gone haywire, as well as scientists working at the front line of gene technology to save tomorrow’s food. At journey’s end, deep in the Arctic Circle, Ken deposits his bounty of seed in the newly constructed seed bank known as the ‘doomsday vault.’

Discovered in 2001 by a team of amateur paleontologists exploring Malta, Montana. Leonardo – named for graffiti found near his burial site – is the first dinosaur mummy ever found with intact digestive tract contents. Follow the exciting journey of this once-in-a-lifetime finding, providing scientists with more than just bones to fully reconstruct how dinosaurs looked and lived.

Professor Rodney Brooks has had one enduring ambition his entire life: to build machines that can truly think. He’s been doing so since he was eight years of age, tinkering obsessively in the backyard garage. It’s a dream which attracts constant criticism; people tell him that machines will never really think. Former head of one of the world’s great architectural and research icons, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelli- gence Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy (MIT), Brooks has been challenging the skeptics. At the forefront of a stunning period in robotic history, today Professor Brooks and his dedicated team of scientists are certain they’re about to make a technological breakthrough as they race to customize the world’s first truly socially interactive humanoid robot.

For most, science is about discoveries by PhDs in lab coats. But do we ever think or imagine that to get to where we are today, science sometimes has taken very quirky directions? This is a series that explores just exactly where science went awry and led to new discoveries and inventions.

The longest bridge in Southeast Asia. Malaysia’s Second Penang Bridge connects Penang Island and the Malaysia Peninsula. It is the largest civil engineering project in the past 20 years in the region. The Penang Second Bridge Project documents the construction of this 16.9km long marine structure and the challenges to the two construction giants faced with this task. Will the competition between them spur-on or delay the construction progress?

Imagine a ride on the first observation wheel constructed using third generation engineering technology.

Imagine no more. In a dramatic, character-driven fashion, “Megawheel” follows an international team of specialists, engineers and designers as they face incredible engineering challenges and a race against time to design, construct and erect the gargantuan wheel smack in the middle of Singapore’s busy central business district.

Make Me A Super is an exciting, fun and ballsy science series that attempts to deconstruct the super powers of super heroes and re-construct them using science. Helmed by an eccentric and whacky scientist-host, Doc K, and her intelligent tween sidekick, Nash, Make Me a Super is a science demonstration series that uses the idea of ‘super powers’ to introduce kids to scientific concepts.