Daniel Browning Smith explores the world of everyday folk who are not your average human being. He encounters a man with seemingly magnetic powers, an Ice Man, and a man who can shoot lightning from his finger tips.

Catch a ride on some of the world’s biggest and most powerful machines as they try to survive everything Alaska throws at them. We're targeting heavy-haul trucks that carry 90-ton loads, immense logging helicopters, massive tugs on the Bering Sea, and the largest non-nuclear ice-breaker in the world - capable of breaking through ice up to 15 feet thick.

The worst of the worst, the toughest of the tough: kidnappers, bank robbers, murderers, all called ‘The Rock’ home.  Watch the story of the incredible transformation from a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay to an overwhelming maximum-security prison with impenetrable walls.  A place with unbendable bars and surrounded by deadly, freezing currents.

A group of modern scientists engage in the first exploration of the scientific contents of the great manuscript archives of Timbuktu. The ancient papers are in grave danger of being destroyed by the ravages of time – the team race against the clock to unlock the mysteries of this incredible library before this valuable history is lost forever in the sands of the Sahara

The animal world is a vast untapped reservoir of engineering design and technology. Animal Inventors explores the design principles that the natural world has been built on and looks at the parallels in the human world, demonstrating that animals beat us to the patent office by several million years with solutions to many of the great engineering challenges.

For brief moments each year Antarctica opens up, summoning mankind to investigate its frozen secrets. We’ll join a team of South African scientists, researchers and explorers who have braved the inhospitable continent in the quest to learn its secrets, showcasing some of the groundbreaking research that could make the difference to our survival on this planet.

The world has hit an extraordinary turning point. For the first time in history old people outnumber the young. Does this ageing process threaten to bankrupt the world’s leading economies, unless we all change the way we live? In this urgent and powerful two-part series we explore the looming social, political, economic and human impact of a rapidly ageing society.

Why is the sea off the south coast of Japan so extraordinarily deadly? Why have so many ships, submarines and planes met their doom here? Could this stretch of water be the Bermuda Triangle of the Pacific? Unearthing human accounts of survival and doom, we investigate unexplained disasters, and attempt to separate fantasy from fact

This is the story of a giant winter swell in the North Pacific, from its birth to its death on California’s shores. Three big wave surfers and two elite forecasters share the passion, fear and obsession that these huge waves inspire.