catalogue
Superbat
Thanks to their ability to emit and analyze ultrasound, bats can detect objects as thin as a human hair. How they are able to fly and hunt the tiniest prey in total darkness using "echo-location" fascinates researchers. Superbat explores this sixth sense that bats had mastered over the eons, a...
Supermole
Able to swim the breaststroke in the earth, to feel through walls, to carry earth columns ten times heavier than its own weight, to build underground megalopolis thanks to its perfect mastery of aeration, mole dazzles scientists around the world with its "super powers"...
Supernatural Stories - On the Edge of Life
When it comes to "near death experience" (NDE), we think we all know about it: the tunnel, the white light... But what's next? Is it really possible to have an out-of-body existence? How can clinically dead people still perceive their surroundings? And remember them? In terms of traditional...
Surprise on our plates
Artificially added omega-3 fat acids in cooking oil, banana chips with E220 and bread with E200 – additives are found in food we buy every day. Rarely do we make the effort to decipher what’s in the food we eat. But, do we really know what we’re eating? X enius investigates today what’s in...
Surrounded by Waves
As wireless technology keeps expanding, the debate surrounding the health impacts of electromagnetic waves is growing more and more controversial. The international scientific community is called on to take sides and provide solid answers.
Surviving Progress
Ronald Wright’s bestseller "A Short History of Progress" inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual. Throughout human history, what seemed like progress often backfired. Some of the world's foremost thinkers, activists, bankers, and scientists challenge us to overcome progress traps,...
Sustainable development, the world challenge
This series approaches most important subjects of the millenium defined by the UNO about development. The series is realized in collaboration with the French Agency of Development ( AFD). The 10 episodes: Peace, the prevention of risks and conflict: Chad Water: Senegal Culture and...
Swarms. The Intelligence of the Masses
How does the collective outdo the individual, and what does this mean for science? It is a stunning sight: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of fish, birds or insects moving as fast as lightning and as if on command. Except that there is no command, no pilot, no mastermind pulling the...
Taboo Intersex: between the genders
One in 3,000 to 5,000 newborn children is neither male nor female. Officially, these "hermaphrodite", "androgynous" or "intersex" babies don't exist at all: the gender of a child has to be registered on its birth certificate in a matter of days, and there are only two boxes to check, male or...
Tales of the universe
The sky has a history of an exceptional wealth. It did not stop, in the course of the centuries, exercising an unlimited fascination on the human being, feeding the fears and the faiths of the big civilizations. It is the domain of the Gods, there where they decide on the future of the humanity....
The (ch)eaters
They are everywhere. Be it in your home, cafeteria or favorite restaurant, processed foods fill your plates. Faced with obesity, diabetes, heart disease and dulled taste buds through flavor enhancers straight out of Soylent Green, the public is left with no choice. Unless it goes on hunger...
The Adventurers of the Island Planete
Santo 2006 is the most ambitious scientific expedition never led on the biodiversity. Its mission: to draw up an inventory of fixtures of the flora and the fauna of the ground and marine circles of a paradisiac island of the South Pacific: Santo ( Espiritu Santo), in Vanuatu.
The Adventures of Tintin: destination moon
At the atomic center of Sbrodi in Syldavia, Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock join Professor Calculus working on an ambitious project aiming: the moon. Thanks to Ellipsanime and Moulinsart SA.
The Astroboy age
According to the Japanese research institute, Seed Planning, by 2015, 13 million robot assistants will be part of Japanese homes to cheer up, comfort and possibly take care of their owners. This documentary blends clips from Japanese cartoons, interviews with fiction writers, sociologists,...
The Boy who loves Numbers
Pierre-Jean Vazel is obsessed with numbers. Since he was born, they are for him a smell, a sound, a movement, a matter, a colour… like the vowels of Rimbaud had. Very young, he has been compulsively recording with emotion all the athletics figures worldwide. Later on, on the Internet, he has...
The cycle of life - How we eat
How does our body work? This documentary explores the scientific mechanisms of food. But beware, appetite can lead to obesity! An epidemic more dangerous than bird flu according to researchers at the University of Tübingen.
The Dali Dimension
All his life, Salvador Dali had a passion for science. Compulsive reader (psychoanalysis, nuclear physics, mathematics, genetics) he met with top researchers, who discovered behind the provocative image an unusually intelligence. The entire work of Dali reflects the great topics of science of the...
The Diaper Dilemma
Every child gets through some 6000 diapers before he’s toilet trained. Every diaper takes hundreds of years to decompose in landfill. Worn for just a few hours, then chucked away to rot forever in the garbage, diapers are a symbol of our modern aspirations and our consumerist society. But...
The Disappearance
Franck Bertrand left Paris one day of August, 1974, when he was 18 year-old. He left the keys of his room at the janitor, he came back to his parent’s house. He left his agenda and some personal stuff, and then, disappeared. Nobody had any news of him since that day. What happened? Where is he?...
The Emperor's Lost Harbour
In the heart of modern Istanbul, while digging a tunnel through the city’s historic quarter, engineers make a remarkable discovery - the remains of 37 shipwrecks dating from between the 5th and 10th centuries, all almost incredibly intact. They had stumbled across Constantinople’s ancient...
The empire of sounds
Before the industrial revolution, people would regulate their daily activities according to the sounds in the natural world around them. When the church bell rang the midday angelus, lunchtime had arrived. And then, throughout the centuries, the auditory environment changed, diversified and...
The Fabulous Story of poop
80% of the world population live in the middle of excrement, and 0,00001% in the middle of roses. In France alone, half a million people work directly or indirectly in the recycling, evacuation or the treatment of human or animal excrement. However in our ‘so called’ civilized society, the...
The face of evil
Berlin, 1943: Bruno Lüdke, a young man of the suburbs, is accused of 81 murders. His whole body is an accusation, starting from his face: the “bad guy’s face”, one of a true brutish lout. For the Police of the time there’s no doubt he is guilty. And his name is still associated today to...
The fake fish case
Having discovered a mysterious abyssale creation, a famous explorer and his assistant, James Fischer, lead the investigation in the borders of the imagination and the human brain.
The floating hospital in the mountains
On Lake Titicaca, the world's highest navigable lake, an hospital boat tours between Peru and Bolivia.
The future at what price?
If we want to avoid the climate catastrophe that awaits us, then we need to urgently cut planetary CO2 emissions by half. This is the absolute minimum. Unfortunately the experts are predicting that global energy consumption will double between now and the year 2050. And so we need to square the...
The great Invasion
We eat them, we breathe them, we touch them everyday. Without our knowing, thousands of invisible chemicals are part of our daily lives, embedded in our food and water, an integral part of our detergents, plastics, and fabrics. Brominated flame retardants, alkylphenols, permethrine, bisphenol-A,...
The Iceberg Project
Humans depend on water to stay alive. From desalination of seawater to rationing, every effort is being made to offset a worldwide shortage. Yet, one huge resource has been left behind: icebergs, 12,000-year-old pure freshwater. Icebergs break free from the poles' glaciers, then drift and...
The Iceberg that sunk the Titanic
On 14 April 1912, two giants collided in the North Atlantic. A colossus which nature had made 15 000 years to shape a luxury liner and whose very name symbolizes the courage and confidence at the time: the Titanic. Here is the story of the most famous iceberg of all time!
The Kingdom of the Nabateans, from Hegra to Medain Saleh
The Nabatean civilization is largely associated with the famous city of Petra in Jordan. But their culture extended way beyond these borders into Syria and Saudi Arabia. Now, for the first time ever, a French archaeological mission has been allowed to dig at the Median Saleh site in Saudi Arabia....
The last cabbage of Kerguelen
When man puts foot for the first time on the virgin lands of Kerguelen, only two centuries ago, it announces the end of an absolute tranquility and the beginning of an irreparable transformation.
The Lotus, from Spirituality to Hypertechnology
An ancestral symbol of spirituality, the lotus is nowadays an emblem of the technological revolution. From the shores of the Ganges to French research laboratories, from the summit of Mount Fuji to the Institute for Bionics in Berlin, we discover the "lotus effect" and its surprising hydrophobic...
The Man From Kennewick
July 1996. Two students stumbled across a skull in the Columbia river (Washington State, USA). The skull was later dated to 9,300 years BC and bears features of a precursor that have since being replaced. Kennewick Man's story questions the history of early Americans.
The Man who felt no pain
The Man who felt no pain shows the encounter between two men: a doctor for whom pain is his main subject of research, and a man who no longer feels any pain. How and why do we become indifferent to pain? What is its place in our bodies and our lives?
The medical imaging revolution
Medicine wouldn’t be what it is today without the contribution of imagery technology. Seeing something clearly means greater understanding and better treatment. Medical imaging enables doctors to diagnose diseases at much earlier stages. Our attention focuses on the use of imaging to detect...
The Mistery of Sleep
Why are we distracted, tired or lazy at different times during the day? Why do we fall ill? Medicine has always sought the replies to these questions in our waking state. On the contrary, sleep research looks for them in an, as of yet, poorly understood state: sleep. The Mistery of Sleep...
The Murderous Heatwave
August 2003: 14.802 people die from the un-precedent heat wave which strikes France. An unexpected medical catastrophe in a developed country which today questions its inability to face such a disaster. What did we learn from it? Doctors, politicians, Weather forecasters and first hand accounts...
The Original Whale Riders
What can the whale lices tell us? "In order to know more about the infinitesimally large, let’s study the infinitesimally small”. Laurent Soulier is a parasitologist specialized in marine mammals. He thinks he can save entire populations of whales by studying their lice! His mission is now...
The Outer Adventure - From Baby to Kiss
When a mother looks in wonder at her newborn child, little does she imagine that fifteen years later her tiny one will have turned into a rebellious teenager, defending his or her ideas with conviction, listening to loud music, often hiding in his or her messed-up bedroom, and perhaps experiencing...
The People of the Ring
7,000 years ago in Brittany, a man was buried with a mysterious ring of jade. Where did this object made of such a rare stone come from ? What did it mean to the Neolithic Men ? The archeologist Yvan Pailler investigates the origins and symbols of the jade ring. From Brittany to Mali, through...
The polar minute
Series of short programs about the problem of the poles and the global warming with the complicity of Jean-Louis Etienne. The objective of this series: better understand the North Pole and the South Pole and the environmental stakes which are bound to it. Jean-Loup Etienne, big specialist of the...
The School of Medicine
How does one become a doctor? These students are between 17 and 30 years old and are our future doctors. Every day, they climb a step further towards the objective they have set for themselves, but the journey is long and full of roadblocks. Cramming, learning medical reasoning and the requirements...
The Secret of Bipedalism
The film tells the story of an unusual tracing. Step by step the different aspects make a convincing picture: the human beeing is a "Shore animal" with all its consequences. Until today we suffer of varicose veins with pains that vanish while staying in water. We depend on precious Omeag 3 fatty...
The secrets of Karakoum
For the past four years, in the back sand desert of Karakoum, close to Merv in Turkmenistan, a team of Italian and Turkmen archaeologists has been excavating and exploring the largest necropolis of the Bronze Age in Central Asia. 1500 well preserved tombs revealed their precious treasures,...
The six billion dollars experiment
November 26 2007 promises to be an important day in the history of science. In a labyrinth of tunnels beneath the France/Swiss border, the most complex scientific instrument ever built will be put to use in one of the most ambitious experiments ever undertaken. The instrument is the Large Hadron...
The Substance : Albert Hofmann's LSD
In 1943, the year in which the first A-bomb was built, Albert Hofmann discovered LSD – a substance that was to become an A-bomb of the mind. It is the story of a drug – its discovery in the Basle chemistry lab, the first experiments by Albert Hofmann on himself, the 1950s experiments of the...
The Sustainable City
As the urbanization of the planet intensify and our natural resources dwindle, our way of thinking the city and to build our buildings is questioned. Town planners, architects, engineers, political decision-makers propose new solutions today to build "durably". Through the interviews of big...
The Whale Mystery
The island of Madre de Dios is one of the largest of the 5,000 islands in Chilean Patagonia. Lashed by Pacific storms in the howling fifties, the island is uninhabited, uninhabitable and almost unexplored. It is an exceptional and wild environment only made more unusual by the marble glaciers: the...
The Wild West Uncovered
The American Wild West of legend is a sprawling desert fraught with promise and danger… A land of characters larger than life, whose exploits were celebrated - and undoubtedly embroidered - by the then-young travel writer Mark Twain. Today, an archaeological dig in the heart of gold rush country...
The Wings of the Condor
Angelo d'Arrigo, French-Italian champion of hang-gliding and used to extreme challenges, dedicated several years of his life to a dream: fly with birds, be inspired of their technique of flight and protect them. His last project is dedicated to the most majestic of all the birds, a bird of prey...