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Private Notes
If you thought that women's liberation had ended the arguments, forget it. Ever since anyone can remember, men and women have been at each other's throats. But are the sexes basically the same underneath; or are there really fundamental differences between us?
With the men led by Stuart Hall and the women under Faith Brown's guidance,
Q.E.D. decided to find out - by making the sexes fight it out in a series of special games, designed to test all kinds of abilities. The psychologists reckon they know who will win what; but will they be proved right? If you want to find out if yours is the superior sex - join the fun and the heat of the battle; and see how comfortably you can accept the revealing results.
At the Cleveland
Metropolitan Hospital, Dr Robert White is the popular genius whose brain surgery saves countless lives. But to the anti-vivisectionists who bombard him with obscene letters and phone calls, he is the infamous research scientist who once transplanted one monkey's body on to another monkey's head. The hybrid creature survived for over a week.
Dr White now believes that the next 50 years will see the first human body transplants. David Filkin went to
America to find out more about Dr White and his extraordinary ideas.
Forget the turbochargers; leave the normally aspirated cars at home. For this race, you couldn't even use petrol. To get from Darwin to
Adelaide, across the sun-baked interior of Australia, the rules said you had to rely on whatever energy was freely available.
The hippies from Hawaii expected wind as well as sun, while the most sophisticated car had an armadillo's coat of gallium arsenide. The competition was fierce but friendly, the journey full of unexpected trials and tribulations. But everyone enjoyed racing with the sun.
First of two programmes A Completely Bad Luck Situation
Desperately sick babies are given a last chance to live by the doctors and nurses at London's Brompton Hospital. When newborn Dale Bruin was rushed into their care last summer, his parents learned that the baby's only hope was a new and risky operation which might fail. This extraordinary film follows their story as the Brompton fought for the life of baby Dale.
An Everyday Miracle 2: Back to the Menders
After their newborn baby's open heart surgery, Mandy and Jeff Bruin watch anxiously as the specialist nurses of Brompton Hospital s Paediatric intensive care unit work around the clock to Preserve the tiny life swinging in the balance. In these critical hours, no one knows what the outcome will be.
Why do we feel better after a good weep? What makes us cry for joy, or grief, or triumph? What use are tears? If we knew why we cry, perhaps we could find new ways to treat dry-eye disease or handle stress.
Dr Bill Frey is looking for the causes of crying at his
Dry Eye and Tear Research Centre in Minnesota. But before he starts work, he faces a major problem - how can he get people to weep when he wants?
John Davidson, calls his mother a slut, he swears at policemen, and he spits habitually. When 16-year-old John walks down the high street of his home town,
Galashiels, local people turn away or cross the road to avoid him. John has Tourette syndrome, a rare nervous disorder whose symptoms are what 'normal' people regard as abusive and antisocial behaviour.
As John turns from boy to man, how will he cope with a disease that isolates him so distinctively from the rest of society? This intimate portrait follows John and his family through their daily struggle with an illness that makes everyday social contact a battleground.
Is the riddle of the Turin Shroud solved at last?
Scientific dating says its cloth was made after AD1250. The Shroud is a medieval fake. The mystery is over. Or is it? Where was the Shroud made? How? Why has it many details that ought to have been unknown to a forger 600 years ago?
Are there clues to be gained from a present-day parallel to the Shroud - the imprint ot a dead man's body which appeared in a Merseyside hospice eight years ago.'
Weightlifter David Morgan , Commonwealth Champion and record holder, was as keen as anyone for his brother Tony to try to follow in his footsteps; not just for the fame and glory, but because he had a hunch it might help cure a problem.
Tony suffered from epilepsy.
Weightlifting has changed Tony's life. His athletic career took off and he became the youngest British champion ever. And at the same time the number of epileptic fits decreased steadily. Tony has now not had any since 1985.
Q.E.D. sought specialist help to try to discover whether weightlifting could really be responsible for keeping his epilepsy under control.
Q.E.D.'s latest look at the life of a Falklands soldier.
Simon Weston 's war was over when the Argentinian bombs struck the Sir Galahad. He had been burnt over 46 per cent of his body. He was terribly scarred but his own personal war against his injuries had only just begun. Simon's initial struggle was charted in two award-winning Q.E.D. films, Simon's War and Simon 's Peace.
Now, filmed over the last three years, Simon's Triumph marks the emergence of a very different character, who no longer looks back. 'I am no war hero,' he says. 'I'm just
Simon Weston , scars and all.'
You can pick a good astronaut, they say, by knowing 'the right stuff when you see it. But can you pick a top executive just as surely by merely studying his writing?
More and more British firms are using graphology secretly to help them select their managers; yet many scientists would say that this art of interpreting handwriting is about as sensible as reading tea leaves. Q.E.D. ran a special series of tests to find out the truth. Should your future career depend on how you dot the 'i's and cross the 't's?
'You can imagine you're an underwater explorer wandering through reefs of red seaweed.' But you're not - you're an orthopaedic surgeon repairing a torn cartilage. Surgery has changed direction. With the help of the magical telescope, x-rays and ultrasound,
'keyhole surgery' are no longer dirty words but a highly desirable goal.
Is it possible for a person to burst into flames and be reduced to ashes without sign of struggle or panic and without damaging any of the surrounding materials? Could there be some chemical or electrical imbalance in the body which leads to a kind of spontaneous combustion?
But if the fire does not start inside the body, how can traditional science explain away the development of a blaze hot enough to reduce bone to ash without damaging a house?
Q.E.D. meets firemen and police officers who have discovered the bizarre remains after these puzzling deaths; and scientists who attempt to set up experiments that might explain the phenomenon.
