Witnessing the birth of a new language

In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language

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The Native American casino boom in the US

How a small Californian tribe won the right for Indian communities to host gambling.

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The release of Nelson Mandela

The day that South Africa's anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was freed

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Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

The collected thoughts of China's communist leader that became an unexpected best-seller

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The man who first published Harry Potter

The man who spotted the potential of the boy wizard books in 1996

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Diary of life in a favela

A shocking account of the realities of the slums of São Paulo

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The best-seller Fear of Flying

Erica Jong's best-selling book about sex, creativity and love, published in 1973

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The Rules: A dating handbook

The best-selling dating handbook was published on Valentine's Day 1995

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The Pale Blue Dot

How the Voyager space probe captured a famous image of Earth as it left the Solar System.

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How meditation changes your brain

In 2002, a landmark study on Buddhist monks showed that meditation can alter the brain.

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Fighting oil pollution with art in Nigeria

"Battle Bus" was a sculpture in memory of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro Wiwa

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Saddam Hussein's 'Supergun'

Building the largest gun in the world for Saddam Hussein's Iraq

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Saving Antarctica

A 1980s campaign to preserve Antarctica for science.

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An Antarctic mystery

Human remains were found on a remote island in Antarctica in 1985 but whose were they?

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The first mobile phone call

The American inventor who made the first mobile phone and the first mobile phone call

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The rebel nuns who left their convent behind

A group of Californian nuns left their convent and set up their own community in 1970

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The last smallpox outbreak

Thousands of people died in the world's last major smallpox epidemic in India in 1974.

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Freeing American prisoners from Iran

The diplomacy behind the release of three US citizens who unknowingly hiked into Iran.

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Womenomics in Japan

Japan faces a demographic time-bomb. Could the answer be Womenomics?

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The petrol that was poisoning children

The EU finally banned lead in petrol in 2000 - decades after the US, Canada and Japan.

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Strikers in saris

How South Asian women workers won the support of the British trade unionist movement

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Battling Soviet psychiatric punishment

One man's stand against the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the Soviet Union

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The Major and the VW Beetle

How a British army officer saved Hitler's Volkswagen Beetle at the end of World War Two

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The 'Spanish' flu

In 1918 an extremely deadly form of influenza killed millions around the world

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The Ebola virus

The first documented outbreak of the deadly disease occurred in the 1970s in Zaire

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The polio vaccine

Scientists in the US led by Dr Jonas Salk develop an effective vaccine against polio

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The SARS epidemic

How the world battled a deadly respiratory disease in 2003.

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Marburg virus

A deadly new disease infected laboratory workers in a small town in West Germany in 1967.

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The 'I Love You' computer virus

How a virus created by a Filipino college dropout sparked global panic in May 2000

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The fight to make sexual harassment a crime

The story of a landmark ruling for women's rights in the United States.

• 9 mins