Boring Stories To Fall Asleep

The tumultuous history of the Paris museum and its fabulous collections, reflecting the destiny of France and Europe, through close-ups of iconic works. How did the Louvre become the world's largest and most visited universal museum? Frédéric Wilner (Léonard de Vinci - Le chef-d'oeuvre redécouvert), with the help of specialists - historians, curators, and also Jean-Luc Martinez, Laurence des Cars'...

For thirty years, it soared over the Atlantic at the speed of a speeding bullet. The only supersonic civil transport success story in history, Concorde was a true technical miracle. This is the fascinating story of the elegant supersonic airliner's tragic fate. Landing in New York earlier than they had left London or Paris (due to the time difference), Concorde passengers had the illusion of f...

Accusations rain down on the fashion world: ecocide, overproduction, waste, racism... How can we reinvent a particularly amoral system?

From one generation to the next, our relationship with work has changed profoundly in Europe. Although we are working longer throughout our lives, the length of the working week has fallen considerably. Several countries, such as Germany, are experimenting with a 4-day week. But what impact does this have on productivity? And what are the differences between European countries?

Climate disasters, global inequalities, the threat of a third world war... Wouldn't it be reassuring if a central international government were to tackle all these problems? That was the idea behind the creation of the United Nations. In its current form, however, the UN is incapable of responding effectively to the major challenges of the 21st century. Is humanity ready for world government? If s...

A huge planetary upheaval is taking place before our very eyes: the continents are continually moving, albeit very slowly, a sign that the Earth is constantly evolving over the long term. Over the last few decades, scientists have gained a better understanding of what is at stake in this incessant tectonic cycle, which should lead to the current continents forming a supercontinent, Amasia. A rathe...

A major centre of Zen and meditation, Japan is also the cradle of an art of gardening that is respected the world over. We will discuss about Zen garden master Shunmyo Masuno, who set up his landscape architecture company in an annex of the Buddhist temple where he is a monk, in Yokohama. He designs spaces that express the idea of perfection, reflecting his spiritual quest.

Michael Bommer is a 61-year-old businessman suffering from terminal cancer. Wanting to allow his family to interact with him after his death, he trains an artificial intelligence to immortalise his personality. But can a virtual avatar really preserve the memory of a departed loved one?

Our genes determine many of our characteristics: our build, our height, the colour of our eyes or our predisposition to music. Could it be possible to control the mechanisms that activate and inhibit our genes, as epigenetics seeks to do? Could this science soon free us from our determinisms and make us more intelligent or more musically gifted?

In February 1945, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in the Crimean seaside resort of Yalta. A few months before the capitulation of Nazi Germany, the three great Allied leaders negotiated the fate of Europe, imposing their conditions as best they could. This conference, which lasted just a few days, was the fruit of long years of tumultuous diplomatic and personal relations between the three men...

Wars, pandemics, economic crises... so many times we look in the rear-view mirror and wonder if history is repeating itself. But what is really going on? In fact, certain geographical or psychological patterns favour the occurrence of similar events. But the stories we tell ourselves are no strangers to similar events either. Not to mention the tendency we sometimes have to believe that history re...

In the age of rockets in space, what about the ground beneath our feet? The deeper we go into the bowels of the Earth, the less scientists know about what's there. How deep can we dig? And what do the depths hide? This episode plunges deep into the mysteries of science to find out almost everything.

Every year, thousands of animal species disappear. A mass extinction due to the destruction of their habitat or their extermination. What can science do about this dramatic phenomenon? Even if we protected certain animals more, we could not save all the threatened species. Not to mention those that have already disappeared! What if it were possible to resurrect the passenger pigeon, the dodo or th...

Faced with more frequent and violent natural disasters caused by climate change, flora and fauna are trying to adapt. Some species, such as sharks, which can sense the change in atmospheric pressure heralding the arrival of a hurricane, are moving away from the danger. Others learn to live with it, like curlews, which use the hot ash from erupting volcanoes in Papua New Guinea to incubate their eg...

A ton of your devices use Bluetooth to communicate wirelessly. But how does Bluetooth work?

Born in Corsica to a family of minor Italian nobility, he studied in France, where he became an officer in the artillery and then a general during the French Revolution. Having gained prestige and esteem thanks to his victories during the first Italian campaign, after the coup d'état of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799) he assumed power in France: He was First Consul from November of that year unt...

From the first underground steam railways in London to modern electrical systems, this episode traces the technological progress and the challenges faced. It examines how cities such as New York, Paris and Tokyo have dealt with overcrowding and the need for innovations such as escalators and efficient maps.

Albert Einstein's perspectives on God, religion and the universe, tracing the evolution of his thought from early family influences to his conception of a ‘cosmic spirituality.’

In physics,  string theory  is a theoretical framework in which the point-like particles of particle physics are replaced by one-dimensional objects called strings. String theory describes how these strings propagate through space and interact with each other. On distance scales larger than the string scale, a string acts like a particle, with its mass, charge, and other properties determined by t...

The  Space Shuttle  is a retired, partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from the 1969 plan led by U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew for a system of reusable spacecraft where it was the...

One of the possible ends of the universe is the ‘Big freeze’, namely a continuous expansion coupled with a slow cooling during which all matter would end up disintegrating. But other scenarios are also conceivable, such as that of a great collapse, the ‘Big crunch’. Or that of a universe expanding so rapidly that it ends up tearing itself apart under the effect of increasingly violent forces: the...

For the past thirty years or so, the brain has been all the rage. We could explain everything by brain mechanisms. Not only how we see and how we speak, but also how we think and how we make mistakes, and even why people eat fat, are lazy, fail at school or vote left. Knowledge of the brain could lead to progress not only in medicine, but also in education, public policy, management and self-impro...

I sometimes wonder what I would do if I were an income-only earner. If I had money coming in every month, no matter what. Would I still work, if only for the need for social recognition? Or would I take the opportunity to do something completely different? Travelling, reading, drinking coffee on a terrace. It's hard to know... It's quite dizzying to imagine a world where we would be free f...

What did man's ancestors eat? How did they prepare their food? How did their food contribute to their evolution and their anatomical and cognitive development?

Our universe is made up of two worlds: the one we can see, and the microscopic world of quanta made up of the very smallest particles. In this world, particles can be in two places at once and teleportation is possible.