Why do we Dream – Dreams have fascinated philosophers for thousands of years, but only recently have dreams been subjected to empirical research and concentrated scientific study. Why do we dream? What purpose do dreams serve? While many have been proposed, no single consensus has emerged.
What the film reveals is that much of what we thought we knew no longer stands true. Dreams are not simply wild imaginings but play a significant part in all our lives as they have an impact on our memories, the ability to learn, and our mental health. Most surprisingly, we find nightmares, too, are beneficial and may even explain the survival of our species.
It tells a story of a scientific team’s investigative efforts to uncover the source behind mysterious underwater recordings of an unidentified marine body.
Two former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration scientists, after investigating mass stranding of whales, claim to have recorded mysterious underwater noises coming from an unknown source. This sound resembled a sound previously recorded in 1997, called the bloop. They recovered 30% of the remains of an unknown creature from inside a great white shark which was said to possess attributes of the human body. The show uses the aquatic ape hypothesis as evidence that mermaids exist, along with a digitally manufactured video
Clemens Wirth is moving on from Macro Kingdom and we pass through the portal of a microscope to venture into the Micro Empire. Stranger than fiction, molecular conflict and mitochondrial warfare. A heartstopping, subcellular epic and microcinematic experience…
As an enthusiast for little things, I wanted to go deeper than the macro universe, so I found myself hanging on the eyepiece of a microscope. The real challenge was definitely the small depth of field in microscopy. It’s really fascinating how detailed this tiny world is, and unbelievable how much is going on in only one little water drop.
Deep in Siberia’s Taiga forest is Vissarion, a cult leader who looks like Jesus and claims to be the voice of God. He’s known as “the Teacher” to his 4,000 followers, who initially seem surprisingly normal. Over time, however, their unflinching belief in UFOs and the Earth’s imminent demise made this group start to look more and more like some sort of strange cult.
We follow photographer Donald Weber to the buffer zone at Fukushima, Japan, where the eerie silence mirrors that at Chernobyl, and follow him as he attempts to document the unfolding nuclear crisis.
There are an estimated 1.4 million sex slaves in the world today; most of them are women, although there are some men and many thousands of children. These women do not voluntarily enter prostitution, but have been forced under the threat of violence to have sex with men who pay their “owners”.
“They didn’t listen. They kept bringing me clients and telling me that I had a huge debt towards them. For the fact they paid for my visa, passport and tickets.”
Dorina, a former sex slave from Moldova
Sex slavery is present in every country of the world. In some cases, categorised as “domestic”, women are sold into brothels within their own country. But international sex trafficking of women and children is on the rise.
Rageh Omaar investigates the enslavement and trafficking of women from Moldova, the poorest country in Europe, to wealthier European countries, in particular to the red light district of Amsterdam, one of Europe’s most profitable sex markets and a major international tourist attraction.
Using undercover filming, this powerful investigation exposes a booming child sex trade. In the hub of Madagascar, one of the world’s poorest countries, prostitution is seen as an unavoidable means of survival.
“My daughter was at school, I had no money and no job so she decided to become a prostitute. I finally decided not to stop her,” says one mother, who like many others are now forced into prostituting their own children. With daily flights from Europe bringing sex tourists to Madagascar’s chaotic capital, some as young as eleven are selling their bodies. Authorities claim to be tackling the problem but it’s the local residents – mainly children themselves – who are trying to find solutions to this adult scourge. “If it happens, we warn the police that we have seen foreigners with underage girls and they then alert local tourism officials.” Jeannoda Randimbiarison, a social worker for UNICEF, says the authorities lack the will to do what is necessary. “If the law is not enforced in Madagascar it will all continue. It is like we are conducting a genocide of Malagasy children.
In the summer of 2010 Rohan Pais, an amateur long-distance cyclist, was training for a charity ride. His bike collided with a car and he was thrown into a cornfield. His injuries were so severe, that the emergency room doctors told his wife he wasn’t going to make it.
“They said ok Paula…. he’s going to be in a vegetative state, he’s not going to recover, he will never know you, he will never look at you, he will never talk to you, and he’s never going to eat. All the ‘nevers’ came out that day,” she says.
But Paula never gave up Rohan, even when doctors were telling her he could never hope for any kind of life.
“The intensivist was telling me ‘if it was my husband, I would have ended his life’ but I said ‘he is not your husband, he is mine. And I can’t,” she says.
In the months following his accident she decided to get a clearer picture of his prospects from a team of doctors specializing in the damaged brain.
Canadian Neuroscientist Dr. John Connolly was one of those doctors. By using sophisticated scanners, neuroscientists like Dr. Connolly can see the brain “talking” in the form of electrical signals, rather than words. When Rohan was scanned, he showed strong and promising brain activity.
“He came out looking very good, in fact. In all of those tests,” says Dr. Connolly. “He showed very clear brain responses to his own name.”
Another researcher, Dr. Adrian Owen of Western University in London, Ontario, estimates that one in five patients are wrongly diagnosed as vegetative.
Sixteen years ago, Dr. Owen was a researcher at a hospital in Cambridge, England. He had access to an expensive new brain-imaging machine called a PET Scan and he was looking for the ideal experimental subject.
That subject,was a schoolteacher named Kate Bainbridge, her brain severely injured by a flu-like illness.
“It really all does go back to Kate Bainbridge,” says Dr. Owen. “She was patient number one. We put her into the scanner and we showed Kate pictures – faces of her friends and family. And the part that we know now that is responsible for recognizing faces, it lit up just as it would in your eye.”
Dr. Owen says this is only the beginning. He hopes that eventually, perhaps in as little as five years, scientists will have found a way to allow brain-damaged patients to communicate with their loved ones.
“I think morally and ethically we have to do everything we can for every patient that we find in this situation,” he says.
Dr. Owen doesn’t blame emergency room doctors for misdiagnosing patients with serious brain injuries.
“It’s impossible to tell if the patient is conscious. Because they make absolutely no responses,” says Dr. Owen. “Without these research tools that we have, there really is no way for correctly diagnosing them.”
But he believes that if more doctors using sophisticated scanners to detect brain activity, they might put more patients on the road to at least partial recovery.
Today, Rohan is speaking and learning to walk again. If it weren’t for neuroscientists like Owen and Connolly, Rohan might still be lying unresponsive in a bed.
Step-by-step guides to self-improvement that introduce the methods of the highly regarded cognitive behavioral therapy technique to help readers conquer a broad range of disabling conditions-from worry to body image problems to obsessive compulsive disorder and more.
The accessible, straightforward, and practical books in the ‘Overcoming’ series treat disorders by changing unhelpful patterns of behavior and thought. Even when our situation does not change, if we change the self-defeating ways we think, we can make ourselves feel better. This positive, pragmatic approach is popular with therapists and patients alike.
In this video three people talk of their experiences with social phobia and teach the techniques that they have used to help overcome it. These techniques are taught in plain language by these three people and by Professor Ron Rapee, Professor of Psychology, Macquarie University, and Dr Lisa Lampe, a consultant psychiatrist specialising in the treatment of social phobia. This video is a complement to Ron Rapee’s book Overcoming Shyness and Social Phobia
It has been called the ‘fifth dimension of warfare’. Along with land, sea, air and space – the cyberworld is increasingly becoming a new frontline. Innovations in technology are changing the tactics of modern-day conflict. There are new tools in today’s arsenal of weapons. Helped by advances in electro-magnetics and modern information and communications technology, a new form of electronic warfare has been created. It is called cyberwar and is increasingly recognised by governments and the military as posing a potentially grave threat.
If you have a few smart people and a good computer, then you can do a lot. You don’t need an aircraft, you don’t need tanks, you don’t need an army. You can penetrate another country, create huge damage without even leaving your armchair.
Alon Ben David, military analyst for Israel’s Channel 10
And it is not just cyberwar that is a growing phenomenon. The internet has empowered cyberactivism, allowing people to share information and mobilise support to take direct action – both online and on the streets. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been at the forefront of this new wave of cyberactivism, helping to galvanise the protests that have recently spread across the Arab world.
The so-called Arab Spring has been described as an electronic revolution. Protesters were turned into citizen journalists – taking frontline images on their mobile phones and uploading them via their computers for the world to see. The regimes may have jammed the signals of satellite news channels and banned international reporters from entering their country, but they were unable to prevent citizens from becoming reporters in their own right.
Using the internet as a platform for political action is one thing. But infiltrating and disrupting computer networks and databases takes cyberwar to another level. American security experts have warned that a cyber-attack could cripple key governmental and financial systems and it is a threat the US is taking seriously.
A key battlefield in this war has been the case of Google. The US internet company partially withdrew from China in 2010 after a tussle with the government over censorship and government-backed hacking. China accuses the US of using Google to spy on the country, while Google accuses China of hacking into the email accounts of some of its members.
Many analysts are amazed at how internet users voluntarily hand over vast amounts of personal data to social media sites. And planting software into a person’s phone or computer to steal data has become a new tactic of warfare in the fifth dimension.
The Highlanders 