Queer Planet

Travel from freezing poles to tropical rainforests to meet nature’s most captivating giants, who prove being big comes with enormous challenges.

Comets have fascinated, even terrified us for thousands of years. This year, a particularly massive chunk of ice and rock is hurtling our way, an object that will fascinate billions and should create the space show of the century.

Discover the most complex and ambitious space mission ever undertaken, which aimed to understand the origin and evolution of our Solar System. On November the 12th, millions of miles from Earth, a spacecraft will make history by attempting to land on an icy rock nearly three-miles across, hurtling through space at 41,000 mi/hr. An international team of scientists will work around the clock to make sure the orbiter Rosetta, and lander Philae, will survive the journey to accomplish their mission. If successful, Rosetta and Philae could help peer into our past and unlock secrets from our very origins. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Just outside Paris, France, inside a high-tech vault, requiring three independently controlled keys, rests a small metallic cylinder about the diameter of a golf ball. Encased within three vacuum-sealed bell jars it may not look like much, but it is one of the most important objects on the planet. It affects nearly every aspect of our lives from the moment we are born, to the food we eat, the cars we drive, and even the medicines we take. The Last Artifact follows the high-stakes race to redefine the weight of the world reveals the untold story of one of the most important objects on the planet. The kilogram, the base unit of mass in the International System of Units, helped send humans to the moon and satellites into space. This small hunk of metal is the object against which all others are measured. Yet over time, its mass mysteriously eroded by the weight of an eyelash. A change that, unbeknownst to most, unleashed a crisis with potentially dire consequences.

Doctors Chris and Xand van Tulleken put competing health theories to the test with the help of 30 other pairs of identical twins.