Invention of the MP3
Professor Karlheinz Brandenburg from Germany spent more than a decade developing MP3 technology, which was developed to convert audio into digital form.He had been working on it since 1982.It compress...
27 Jan 202310min
Albert Pierrepoint: Britain's executioner
Using archive recordings, Alex Last tells the story of Britain's most famous hangman. During the 1940s and 1950s, Albert Pierrepoint was responsible for the execution of some of Britain's most notorio...
26 Jan 20238min
Smolensk air disaster
In 2010, a plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, crashed near the Russian city of Smolensk, killing everyone on board. It was one of the most tragic moments in modern Polish history. Th...
25 Jan 20239min
Japanese death row guard
Yoshikuni Noguchi spent time as a guard in one of the prisons in Japan that would carry out the death penalty, and witnessed the hanging of a condemned prisoner in 1971, before going on to become a la...
24 Jan 20238min
When Britain tried to censor the Troubles in Northern Ireland
Frontman of punk-rock band The Undertones, Paul McLoone, recalls the “weird, slightly funny, slightly sad, slightly surreal” time he was the voice of IRA commander-turned-politician, Martin McGuinness...
23 Jan 20239min
Swine flu vaccine and narcolepsy
In 2009, hundreds of teenagers’ lives were changed forever, when a vaccine designed to protect them against swine flu appeared to trigger a sleep disorder. It affected people in various countries incl...
20 Jan 20239min
France's nuclear tests in Algeria
Between 1960 and 1966, France carried out 17 nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara. High levels of radioactivity, and a failure to safely dispose of nuclear waste, have left a dangerous legacy. Dan Har...
19 Jan 20238min
Kosovo’s house schools
In 1990s Kosovo, a generation of Albanians received their education crammed into thousands of private homes. When Slobodan Milosevic’s Serb nationalist regime forcibly evicted them from schools and un...
18 Jan 20239min
