As many regular Grey Matters readers already know, I'm a big fan of James Burke's documentaries, especially Connections and The Day The Universe Changed.

So, I was naturally thrilled to discover the recent updates on JamesBurkeWeb's YouTube channel!

JamesBurkeWeb has added new versions of Connections and The Day The Universe Changed, as well as some of his other series, that are a big improvement over the previously-posted versions.

The most noticeable improvement is that each episode is now available as a single video. For example, the first episode of Connections, “The Trigger Effect”, was originally posted as five 10-minute videos. The new version is just a single 49¹⁄₂-minute video. This makes each episode much easier to watch and embed.

There's another, more subtle change, as well. If you add up the segmented versions of the videos, you'll notice each episode runs a total of about 45 minutes. The single version videos, however, are roughly 49-50 minutes each!

This is because the segmented versions were taken from broadcasts on The Science Channel, who edited the episodes to allow for commercials. The newly-uploaded complete episodes seem to be from the original broadcasts, and have all the original footage.

As an example, below is a segment from part 1 of the “Trigger Effect” playlist, starting from 7 minutes into the episode, and playing for about 30 seconds:



From the newer version of the same episode, here's a segment starting and ending at roughly the same points as the earlier one. Note both that it starts almost a full minute later into the episode (7:58, as opposed to 7:00), and contains an entire missing segment not shown in the version above:



Even if you've watched the episodes available before, take the time to watch all the newer episodes. You may discover some new surprises, or, if you're old enough to remember the original airings, even re-discover some forgotten segments.