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The last smallpox outbreak

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

• 9 mins

Freeing American prisoners from Iran

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

• 9 mins

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.

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Red Hollywood

Former actress Marsha Hunt remembers the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s.

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The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope

How NASA put an orbiting observatory into space in 1990.

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The Chinese cure for malaria

How scientists in the 1970s discovered an anti-malarial drug using a traditional remedy.

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Hong Kong's abandoned children

The Chinese babies left on the streets of 1960s Hong Kong in the hope they'd be adopted.

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Sequencing the 1918 influenza virus

Over 50 million people are thought to have died from influenza around the world in 1918

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The Saudi bombardment of Yemen

In March 2015 Saudi Arabia and its allies began an intense aerial bombardment of Yemen

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The Cheonan sinking

On March 26th 2010 a South Korean naval ship sank after an explosion - 48 sailors died

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The AIDS Memorial Quilt

In 1985 activists made a giant quilt to commemorate those killed by AIDS in the USA.

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Britain's first woman judge

Rose Heilbron was a trailblazer for women in the legal profession in Britain.

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The trembling giant

Could the biggest living organism on earth be a colony of quaking aspen trees?

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Avenging the Amritsar Massacre

A former British governor of Punjab was shot in 1940 as revenge for killings in Amritsar

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The Swedish warship restored after 300 years

A Swedish warship, Vasa, sank in the 17th century but was raised from the seabed in 1961

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Being a Chinese Muslim

It has never been easy to practice a religious faith in communist China

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The Homebrew computer club

A group of Californian computer enthusiasts first began meeting to share ideas in 1975.

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The Trojan Room coffee pot

The world's first webcam went online in 1993. Its camera was focused on a coffee pot.

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The first iPhone

The touchscreen smartphone changed mobile technology for ever.

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