Supermassive black holes are the engines that power our universe and one of the major players in the evolution of galaxies. They're in fact the driving force at the heart of nearly every galaxy in the cosmos. Now, a new mystery has emerged about the oldest supermassive black holes. We see supermassive black holes in the very early universe. And we don't understand how they grew so large so quickly. We have clues about their formation but, can we solve the mystery of this supermassive growth spurt?

The Earth was formed by a series of cosmic cataclysms including the most powerful blast in the Universe. Yet amid the turmoil our world was born. Could the same chain of events have created other earths elsewhere, inhabited by creatures like us?

And epic film by Adam Curtis that explains why the big stories that politicians tell us have become so simplified that we can’t really see the world any longer. The narrative goes all over the world, America, Britain, Russia and Saudi Arabia, but the country at the heart of it is Afghanistan. Because Afghanistan is the place that has confronted our politicians with the terrible truth, that they cannot understand what is going on any longer". The coumentary reveals the forces that over the past thirty years rose up and undermined the confidence of politics to understand the world. And it shows the strange, dark role that Saudi Arabia has played in this. But Bitter Lake is also experimental. Curtis has taken the unedited rushes of everything that the BBC has ever shot in Afghanistan - and used them in new and radical ways. He has tried to build a different and more emotional way of depicting what really happened in Afghanistan. A counterpoint to the thin, narrow and increasingly destructive stories told by those in power today.

The story of Tilikum, a captive killer whale that has taken the lives of several people , including a top killer whale trainer, underscores the consequences of keeping these powerful animals in captivity, the problems within the sea-park industry, the man's relationship to nature, and how little has been learned about these highly intelligent and sentient mammals.
Tilikum was captured in the northern Atlantic Ocean in 1983 and taken to Sealand of the Pacific, a now-shuttered park near Victoria, British Columbia. Former Sealand trainers interviewed in 'Blackfish' say the park’s female killer whales would aggressively gang up on Tilikum, particularly when they were confined in a 20-foot-by- 30-foot pool overnight.

Black holes are the most enigmatic and exotic objects in the universe. They’re also the most powerful; with gravity so strong it can trap light. And they’re destructive, swallowing entire planets, even giant stars. Anything that falls into them vanishes... gone forever. Now, astrophysicists are realizing that black holes may be essential to how our universe evolved—their influence possibly leading to life on Earth and, ultimately, us.
In this series, astrophysicist and author Janna Levin takes viewers on a journey to the frontiers of black hole science. Along the way, we meet leading astronomers and physicists on the verge of finding new answers to provocative questions about these shadowy monsters: Where do they come from? What’s inside? What happens if you fall into one? And what can they tell us about the nature of space, time, and gravity?

Of all the objects in the cosmos, planets, stars, galaxies, none are as strange, mysterious, or powerful as black holes. Black holes are the most mind-blowing things in the universe. They can swallow a star completely intact. Black holes have these powerful jets that just spew matter out.
First discovered on paper, on the back of an envelope, some squiggles of the pen. The bizarre solution to a seemingly unsolvable equation, a mathematical enigma. Einstein himself could not accept black holes as real. People didn't even believe for many years that they existed. Nature doesn't work that way. Yet slowly, as scientists investigate black holes by observing the effect they have on their surroundings, evidence begins to mount.