A 1980s campaign to preserve Antarctica for science. Read more
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Saving Antarctica
A 1980s campaign to preserve Antarctica for science.
An Antarctic mystery
Human remains were found on a remote island in Antarctica in 1985 but whose were they?
The first mobile phone call
The American inventor who made the first mobile phone and the first mobile phone call
The rebel nuns who left their convent behind
A group of Californian nuns left their convent and set up their own community in 1970
The last smallpox outbreak
Thousands of people died in the world's last major smallpox epidemic in India in 1974.
Freeing American prisoners from Iran
The diplomacy behind the release of three US citizens who unknowingly hiked into Iran.
Womenomics in Japan
Japan faces a demographic time-bomb. Could the answer be Womenomics?
The petrol that was poisoning children
The EU finally banned lead in petrol in 2000 - decades after the US, Canada and Japan.
Strikers in saris
How South Asian women workers won the support of the British trade unionist movement
Battling Soviet psychiatric punishment
One man's stand against the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the Soviet Union
The Major and the VW Beetle
How a British army officer saved Hitler's Volkswagen Beetle at the end of World War Two
The 'Spanish' flu
In 1918 an extremely deadly form of influenza killed millions around the world
The Ebola virus
The first documented outbreak of the deadly disease occurred in the 1970s in Zaire
The polio vaccine
Scientists in the US led by Dr Jonas Salk develop an effective vaccine against polio
The SARS epidemic
How the world battled a deadly respiratory disease in 2003.
Marburg virus
A deadly new disease infected laboratory workers in a small town in West Germany in 1967.
The 'I Love You' computer virus
How a virus created by a Filipino college dropout sparked global panic in May 2000
The fight to make sexual harassment a crime
The story of a landmark ruling for women's rights in the United States.
Red Hollywood
Former actress Marsha Hunt remembers the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s.
The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope
How NASA put an orbiting observatory into space in 1990.
The Chinese cure for malaria
How scientists in the 1970s discovered an anti-malarial drug using a traditional remedy.
Hong Kong's abandoned children
The Chinese babies left on the streets of 1960s Hong Kong in the hope they'd be adopted.
Sequencing the 1918 influenza virus
Over 50 million people are thought to have died from influenza around the world in 1918
The Saudi bombardment of Yemen
In March 2015 Saudi Arabia and its allies began an intense aerial bombardment of Yemen
The Cheonan sinking
On March 26th 2010 a South Korean naval ship sank after an explosion - 48 sailors died
The AIDS Memorial Quilt
In 1985 activists made a giant quilt to commemorate those killed by AIDS in the USA.
Britain's first woman judge
Rose Heilbron was a trailblazer for women in the legal profession in Britain.
The trembling giant
Could the biggest living organism on earth be a colony of quaking aspen trees?
Avenging the Amritsar Massacre
A former British governor of Punjab was shot in 1940 as revenge for killings in Amritsar
The Swedish warship restored after 300 years
A Swedish warship, Vasa, sank in the 17th century but was raised from the seabed in 1961
Being a Chinese Muslim
It has never been easy to practice a religious faith in communist China
