NOVA goes behind the scenes at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to offer a look at the construction and launch of two Martian exploratory rovers: "Spirit" and "Opportunity".
Tracking the wildlife in Ankarana northern Madagascar, where jagged, 1000-foot ridges wall off lush forests. The rulers of Ankarana: Nile crocodiles, sun lovers that nonetheless live in caves that honeycomb the ridges.
Nova explores ideas, many of them speculative, about how dogs became domesticated from wolves and how, under human influence, their great diversity of 600 breeds arose. Finally, the challenges many dogs face fitting into modern human society are examined.
A scientist scuba dives a flooded ice cave searching for a hidden lake under the Mount Blanc glacier. Such a lake burst its ice dam in 1892 causing a flash flood that killed hundreds.
"Disaster detectives" from Canada's Transportation Safety Board are followed as they piece together the reason why a Swissair flight from JFK to Geneva crashed off Nova Scotia in 1998, killing all 229 aboard.
Examining the "demographic divide" between developed and underdeveloped nations. Visits to India, Japan and Kenya explore problems caused by too many people in the underdeveloped world and too few in many industrialized nations.
Reviewing upsides and downsides of China's economic "binge" of the last quarter century. "The world has never seen a country get so rich so fast," says narrator Oliver Platt. One telling statistic: 200,000 cars in 1995; 30 million in 2004.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson measures Earth's 4.5 billion year history in terms of one 24-hour day. And covers the first hour, when, he says, the planet was "beaten, bombarded, mangled and melted" for several hundred million years.
Following the formation of the Earth, life didn't waste any time getting started. Scientists explore the evidence and conduct experiments to determine how life could form on the inhospitable early Earth then change to cover the entire Earth.
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explores whether life is unique to Earth. "The elements essential to life as we know it are widespread throughout the universe," Tyson says, but no extraterrestrial life has yet been found. Why?
Scientists discover and explore the the cosmic microwave background and with it, the big bang and understanding of the first stars and the formation of the elements.
Documents the emerging science of public health and the social, ethical, and legal dilemmas it posed at the turn of the 20th century concerning Mary Mallon, AKA: Typhoid Mary, who was identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever,
Who were the first Americans? Where did they come from? Archaeologists thought they were a culture of prehistoric big game hunters that came over a land bridge from Asia. But new clues are forcing scientists to rewrite an epic story.
"Great Escape" follows archaeologists---and original escapees---as they retrace the daring World War II POW escape dramatized in the 1963 Steve McQueen movie.
