Boring Stories To Fall Asleep

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 rather chilling prospect.

And yet the forces at work in this great upheaval could well explain the very existence of life on Earth. And they are only just beginning to be deciphered.

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.

The most famous conference of the Second World War was held in Yalta in February 1945. The aim was to decide how to organise the post-war world, the one in which we still live today. But what really happened at that time was the result of a long personal relationship between three leaders, forced by the hazards of war into a chaotic and unnatural alliance. Against all odds, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin tirelessly pursued two objectives: firstly, to win the war together and secondly, to impose their - different, even antagonistic - views on the world to be rebuilt.

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 repeats itself when the differences outweigh the similarities. But can we learn anything from history?

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 the woolly mammoth?

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 eggs. Some plants even take advantage of these extreme climatic phenomena to reproduce.

On Kangaroo Island in southern Australia, for example, the giant fires of 2019 and 2020 helped to disperse the seeds of certain plants by bursting the pods that contained them.

A surprising and inspiring episodeabout the resilience of nature.

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