In Photos: Wonders of Life Episode Guide

Find out more about each episode of Wonders of Life with Professor Brian Cox with this photo gallery guide.

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What Is Life?

EPISODE 1

Professor Brian Cox poses that most enduring of questions: what is life?

Most answers would elicit a response about the supernatural, but perhaps there is an alternative? Could life be bound up in the flow of energy throughout the universe?

Brian shows how the first life-form on Earth could have arisen, in pools of hot nutrient-rich water, and is now sustained by energy from the Sun. While this flow of energy can explain life it doesn't show how it endured. Brian meets an orang-utan, revealing that 97% of our DNA is shared with our ape ancestors. DNA is a historical record of the evolution of all life on Earth and connects us to everything that has ever lived.

Life is a chemical process and the way of tapping into the Universe's flow of energy is passed down the generations encoded in our DNA.
Expanding Universe

EPISODE 2

From single-celled organisms right up to the more complex animals, life on Earth interprets its physical environment with a varying suite of senses.

Single-celled organisms have their own ways of interpreting their environment as Professor Brian Cox finds out with paramecium in a Kentucky cave. They seem to be able to sense things by touch, turning round when they hit a barrier.

In the murky depths of the Mississippi river Brian discovers how enormous catfish can build a three-dimensional picture of their surroundings by tasting the water with their skin.

We more conventionally associate three-dimensional visualisation of environments with sight. The mantis shrimp off the coast of California sees through eyes made of 10,000 lenses and double the visual pigments of most animals while the remarkable eyes of octopuses may provide the cue as to why humans evolved large brains, paving the way for our intelligence.

Perhaps it is our senses, and the methods we use understand our environment that has enabled us to begin to understand our place in the Universe.
Endless Forms Most Beautiful

EPISODE 3

With an estimated 8.7 million forms of life on Earth, our planet is an anomaly within the Universe, and Professor Brian Cox spends this episode wondering why this is.

By using a lion as a basis for his question on the diversity of life here on Earth, Brian uses the Southern African Large Telescope to witness the ancient formation of stars. The principle element boils down to carbon, the building block for life, and Brian follows this as it passes through the food chain, from plants to lions. One molecule that relies on carbon is DNA; life's blueprint.

Madagascar is an isolated oasis, separated for millions of years it has developed its own unique animal population and is an analogue to the diversity we see on our own isolated planet. Having taken a species census earlier in the episode, Brian returns to take a closer look at the lemurs. Madagascar's famous primate comes in a wide variety of forms, and Brian uses the weirdest to show off Earth's diversity, and the aye-aye is weird.
Size Matters

EPISODE 4

Professor Brian Cox travels to Australia to investigate size and its implications.

A close encounter with a great white shark and the marsupial red kangaroo demonstrate the adaptations needed to sustain a large size, with the laws of nature determining the pressures upon their forms.

At the smaller end of the scale, Queensland's insects appear to defy physics, with the effect of gravity proving negligible on successively smaller forms and electrostatic force allowing them to climb vertical surfaces.

Going even smaller, the almost unfathomably tiny trichogramma wasp has to fight against the relatively viscous air - something more akin to us swimming in water. Even smaller still, thrombolites of Lake Clifton are colonies of bacteria and the tiniest free-living forms of life. Ultimately, the smaller you go, the more the size of atoms and fundamental particles begin to come in to play.

Size also affects your life and the speed in which you live it. Smaller animals have a much faster metabolism, with a faster heart rate and larger relative food consumption. Brian visits Christmas Island and its crab population to explore this, with its larger 1 metre, terrestrial robber crabs living much longer, but relatively slower-paced, lives.
Home

EPISODE 5

Our home, the planet Earth, is as far as we know the only place in the Universe to hold life. What are the planetary ingredients for life?

Professor Brian Cox uses this instalment of Wonders of Life to tap into the network of astronomers who are searching for planets that fit similar key attributes that seem to make our planet so hospitable to life.

Brian travels aboard the Copper Canyon Railway, measuring the Sun's impact on our planet and the adaptations life on our planet has had to make to combat its potentially lethal glare. Arriving in Mexico's mountain region we then investigate the process of photosynthesis, a key method for tapping in to the Sun as an energy source and provider of the planet's atmospheric oxygen.

Monarch butterflies are a staple for natural history documentaries. Their remarkable migration of 4,000 km over three life stages provides an intriguing answer as to why our planet is so perfect for life.

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What Is Life?

Expanding Universe

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

Size Matters

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