On Dec. 11, 2008, Bernard L. Madoff confessed that his vaunted investment business was actually a Ponzi scheme so colossal in volume and scope that it cost investors $65 billion. Overnight, Madoff became a criminal icon and the new poster child for Wall Street gall, greed and corruption. Through exclusive filmed interviews with those closest to Madoff's operation, veteran FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith unearths the details of this worldwide deception that lasted longer, reached wider and cut deeper than any other business scandal in history.

They're odd-looking shapes you may never have heard of, but they're everywhere around you—the jagged repeating forms called fractals. If you know what to look for, you can find them in the clouds, in mountains, even inside the human body.

Understanding of humans' earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of ochre pigment, 70,000 years old, has raised some very interesting questions.

Eight-part documentary series chronicling the epic sweep of military history, from the Greeks who invented the western way of war, to the potential for a nuclear Armageddon.

Helicopters save lives every day. These unique machines pick up injured people off roads, save them from sinking ships, pluck them from burning buildings, and pull them out of raging floods. Rotorcraft, including helicopters and tiltrotors, perform widespread critical public-service operations including search and rescue, law enforcement, resource development, and priority transportation. Millions of people owe their lives to the special capabilities of these aircraft.