Where is airing: PBS
For what age: 8+
How many episodes in 38 season: 17 episodes
How did medieval builders reach such spectacular heights using only hand tools to create the great cathedrals? The filmmakers behind NOVA's award-winning documentary Secrets of the Parthenon take viewers on a dazzling new architectural journey, inside those majestic marvels and jewels of Gothic architecture. Carved from a 100 million pounds of stone and sometimes more than 100 years in the making, some now teeter on the brink of catastrophic collapse. To save them, an international team of engineers, architects, art historians, and computer scientists searches the naves, bays, and bell-towers for clues to how the dream of these temples of human achievement and artistry became a reality. NOVA teams perform hands-on experiments to learn the architectural secrets that the cathedral builders used to erect their towering, glass-filled walls and reveal the hidden formulas, drawn from the Bible, that drove medieval builders ever upward.
This one-hour film chronicles the fate of the 33 miners trapped in a collapsed Chilean gold and copper mine in August 2010 and investigates the many challenges faced by both the miners and those working around the clock to bring them safely to the surface. NOVA was on-site at the San José mine in Chile by early September. Conferred special access, NOVA's film crew interviewed engineers, NASA experts, medical personnel, and key figures from the companies that provided drills and crucial rescue equipment to give a more detailed scientific account of the unfolding events. The resulting film, using footage from the scene as well as advanced animation, showcases the extraordinary feats of engineering as well as the biological and geological factors inherent in the rescue. "Emergency Mine Rescue" also examines the psychological and physiological impact of this kind of prolonged ordeal on the miners and those involved in the rescue efforts.
How do elevators work? Are they safe? Why are so many people afraid of them? Across North America, elevators move 325 million passengers every day, and most of the time, people don't give them a second thought. In Trapped in an Elevator, NOVA reveals the secret life of these ubiquitous machines and investigates personal stories of those who have been caught inside when they do fail. NOVA cameras ride the world's fastest elevator to the top of the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building, and test whether the Burj's elevator system is ready for the task of moving people to unprecedented heights. On the other side of the world, NOVA follows one of the thousands of elevator maintenance crews in Manhattan that keep New Yorkers moving up and down every day. Then, at the Otis Test Tower-a 28-story high-rise that's the most over-elevatored building in the world-viewers experience a few heart-pumping moments as a test elevator is sent into free fall. Once brawny but simple machines, elevators are getting a brainy makeover. Computer controls, like those in the elevators at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, are getting passengers to their destinations faster and more safely than ever before. But will the elevator-wary be comfortable handing over the reins to computers?
Dogs have been domesticated for longer than any other animal on the planet, and humans have developed a unique relationship with these furry friends. We treat our pets like a part of the family, and we feel that they can understand us in a way other animals cannot. Now, new research is revealing what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. What is surprising, however, is new research showing that humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently? It's all in the genes. Dogs Decoded investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs-with revealing implications for the evolution of human culture as well. NOVA also travels to Siberia, where the mystery of dogs' domestication is being repeated-in foxes. A 50-year-old breeding program is creating an entirely new kind of creature, a tame fox with some surprising similarities to man's best friend. Dogs Decoded reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and spurs new questions about what this could mean for our relationships with other animal species.
Dated to the late Stone Age, Stonehenge may be the best-known and most mysterious relic of prehistory. Every year, a million visitors are drawn to England to gaze upon the famous circle of stones, but the monument's meaning has continued to elude us. Now investigations inside and around Stonehenge have kicked off a dramatic new era of discovery and debate over who built Stonehenge and for what purpose. How did prehistoric people quarry, transport, sculpt, and erect these giant stones? Granted exclusive access to the dig site at Bluestonehenge, a prehistoric stone circle monument recently discovered about a mile from Stonehenge, NOVA cameras join a new generation of researchers finding important clues to this enduring mystery.
Countless treasure-seekers have set off in search of King Solomon's mines, trekking through burning deserts and scaling the forbidding mountains of Africa and the Levant, inspired by the Bible's account of splendid temples and palaces adorned in glittering gold and copper. Yet to date, the evidence that has claimed to support the existence of Solomon and other early kings in the Bible has been highly controversial. In fact, so little physical evidence of the kings who ruled Israel and Edom has been found that many contend that they are no more real than King Arthur. In the summer of 2010, NOVA and National Geographic embarked on two cutting-edge field investigations that illuminate the legend of Solomon and reveal the source of the great wealth that powered the first mighty biblical kingdoms. These groundbreaking expeditions expose important new clues buried in the pockmarked desert of Jordan, including ancient remnants of an industrial-scale copper mine and a 3,000-year-old message with the words "slave", "king", and "judge".
Almost three miles of ice buries most of Antarctica, cloaking a continent one-and-a-half times the size of the United States. If all that ice melted, seas around the world would rise high enough to flood 12-story skyscrapers in places like New York City. Even a ten percent loss of Antarctica's ice would cause catastrophic flooding of coastal cities unlike any seen before in human history. Secrets Beneath the Ice explores whether Antarctica's climate past can offer clues to what may happen to our warming planet. Antarctica's has a surprising climate history. In its distant past, it was ice-free, but around 14 million years ago, ice began overtaking the continent as it began plunging into a deep freeze. So when a massive ice shelf the size of Manhattan collapsed in less than one month in 2002, it shocked scientists and raised the alarming possibility that we may be heading toward an Antarctic meltdown. To gather crucial evidence, NOVA follows an ambitious Antarctic investigation - a state-of-the-art drilling probe known as ANDRILL. Drilling deep beneath the Antarctic ice, down through the sea, and three-fourths of a mile into the seafloor, ANDRILL recovers rock cores that reveal intimate details of climate and fauna from a time in the distant past when the Earth was just a few degrees warmer than it is today. As researchers grapple with the harshest conditions on the planet, they discover astonishing new clues - not only about Antarctica's past, but also Earth's future. These breakthrough discoveries carry ominous implications for coastal cities around the globe.
In 2010, epic earthquakes all over the planet delivered one of the worst annual passing tolls ever recorded. The deadliest strike was in Haiti, where a quake just southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, huged more than 200,000, reducing homes, hospitals, schools and the presidential palace to rubble. In exclusive coverage, a NOVA camera crew follows a team of U.S. geologists as they first enter Haiti in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. It is a race against time as they hunt for crucial evidence that will help them determine exactly what happened deep underground and what the risks are of a new hugger quake. Barely a month after the Haiti quake, Chile was struck by a quake 100 times more powerful, unleashing a tsunami that put the entire Pacific coast on high alert. In a coastal town devastated by the rushing wave, NOVA follows a team of geologists as they battle aftershocks to measure Earthquake. Could their work, and the work of geologists at earthquake hot-spots around the U.S., lead to a breakthrough in predicting quakes before they happen? NOVA investigates intriguing new leads in its gripping investigation of a deadly scientific conundrum.
What is the strongest material in the world? Is it iron? Are Kevlar and carbon nanotubes the way of the future, or will the powerful properties discovered in natural spider silk one day replace steel? NOVA begins the ambitious four-hour program with a quest for the world's strongest stuff. Host David Pogue helps viewers understand what defines strength, examining everything from mollusks to a toucan's beak and testing the world's strongest materials. Pogue travels from the deck of a U.S. naval aircraft carrier to a demolition derby to the country's top research labs to check in with the experts who are re-engineering what nature has given us to create the next generation of strong "stuff".
How small can we go? Could we one day have robots taking "fantastic voyages" in our bodies to hug rogue cells? The triumphs of tiny are seen all around us in the Information Age: transistors, microchips, laptops, cell phones. Now, David Pogue takes NOVA viewers to an even smaller world in Making Stuff Smaller, examining the latest in high-powered nano-circuits and micro-robots that may one day hold the key to saving lives and creating materials from the ground up, atom by atom. Pogue explores the star materials of small applications, including silicon, the stuff of computer chips, and carbon, the element now being manipulated at the atomic level to produce future technology. "Smaller" and more portable stuff has already revolutionized the way we live. The nanotechnology to come could change the face of medicine, with intelligent iPills that know what medicine to release into the body and treat patients from the "inside" based on changing needs; robots that repair damaged body parts; and more.
Most modern materials are dangerous to the environment, but what about cleaning up our world? Batteries grown from viruses, tires made from orange peel oil, plastics made of sugar, and solar cells that cook up hydrogen-these are just a few glimpses of a new generation of clean materials that could power devices of the future. In Making Stuff Cleaner, David Pogue explores the rapidly developing science and business of clean energy and examines alternative ways to generate it, store it, and distribute it. Is hydrogen the way to go? One scientist is even using America's abundance of chicken feathers to create a cheap way to make hydrogen cars safer. What about lithium batteries? Does this solve an energy problem or create a new dependency-in this case, on South America for a different kind of limited resource than oil? Can scientists instead develop a process in which batteries run on molten salts found in cheap abundance in the U.S. or on genetically engineered viruses? Pogue investigates the latest developments in bio-based fuels and in harnessing solar energy for our cars, homes, and industry in a fascinating hour full of the "stuff" of a sustainable future.
What can nature teach us in building smarter materials? Can we create materials that sense and respond? "When describing ?smart materials', one analogy scientists give is the evolution from the first Terminator robot, a machine made of metal and circuitry, to the shape-shifting ?liquid guy' in Terminator 2", said Making Stuff producer Chris Schmidt. Smarter looks into the growing number of materials that can shape themselves-reacting, changing, and even learning. An Army tanker trunk that heals its own bullet wounds. An airplane wing that changes shape as it flies. Clothing that can monitor its wearer's heart rate, health, and mood. For inspirations and ideas, scientists are turning to nature and biology and producing some innovative new developments in materials science. The sticky feet of geckos have yielded an adhesive-less tape. Studying the properties of skin has led to the development of self-healing protective foam. And Pogue literally goes swimming with sharks to understand a different kind of skin that is intriguing scientists. Scientists are modeling a material after sharkskin to develop an antibacterial film that, when sprayed in hospitals, could eliminate MRSA and other anti-biotic resistant bacteria from clinging to surfaces. Pogue also visits a scientist who has created a material that can render objects invisible. "Smarter" concludes with a vision of the future, the ultimate in "life-like" stuff: programmable matter that could create a duplicate of a human being.
Augmenting human intelligence is a lot tougher than it looks, and the promise of "Hal" from 2001: A Space Odyssey is still just a fantasy. But scientists are edging closer with machines like "Watson", an IBM computing system that is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge: taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Given the complexity of human language, could any computer truly understand it? It remains to be seen if this amalgam of circuits and silicon can really take us closer to the dream of a fully developed artificial intelligence, a truly "conscious" machine. Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent".
On June 1, 2009, Flight AF447, an Air France Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, taking with it all 228 lives on board. How could a state-of-the-art airliner with elaborate electronic safety and navigation features and a faultless safety record simply vanish without a trace? NOVA assembles a team of seasoned pilots, engineers and safety experts to examine the evidence that emerged in the weeks following this disaster. What led Flight 447's crew to fly straight into a towering thunderstorm? Using expert testimony, messages transmitted by the doomed plane's computer system and multi-layered CGI weather reconstructions, NOVA pieces together the events leading up to the catastrophe. With a veteran pilot at the controls of an Airbus simulator, NOVA reconstructs the final moments in the cockpit as the crisis overwhelmed Flight 447's crew. The program provides a forensic view of crucial events seen from all angles to reveal what really happened on Flight 447.
Venom scientists are in a race against time. Inside the bodies of many creatures, evolution has produced extremely toxic cocktails, all designed for one reason: to hug. It took millions of years to perfect these ultimate brews of proteins and peptides, and we have only just begun to discover their potential. Now, the race is on to collect and study them before the animals that produce them disappear. But how does venom do its deadly work? NOVA reveals how venom causes the body to shut down, arteries to bleed uncontrollably and limbs to go black and die. But nature's most destructive and extreme poisons could contain the building blocks for a new generation of advanced drugs that could treat heart attack, stroke, diabetes, obesity and cancer. "Venom" follows two scientists on their expeditions to track down and capture the planet's most deadly creatures, risking life and limb just to tease out milligrams of venom and get it back to the lab. Find out how nature's deadliest cocktails could be medicine's brightest new hope.
In its worst crisis since World War II, Japan faces disaster on an epic scale: a rising passing toll in the tens of thousands, massive destruction of homes and businesses, shortages of water and power, and the specter of nuclear-reactor meltdowns. The facts and figures are astonishing. The March 11th earthquake was the world's fourth-largest earthquake since record keeping began in 1900 and the worst ever to shake Japan. The seismic shock wave released more than 4,000 times the energy of the largest nuclear test ever conducted; it shifted the earth's axis by six inches and shortened the day by a few millionths of a second. The tsunami slammed Japan's coast with 30-feet-high waves that traveled six miles inland, obliterating entire towns in a matter of minutes. "Japan's huger Quake" combines authoritative on-the-spot reporting, personal stories of tragedy and survival, compelling eyewitness videos, explanatory graphics and exclusive helicopter footage for a unique look at the science behind the catastrophe.
Can emerging technology defeat global warming? With more than billion earmarked for "green energy", President Obama's stimulus package marks the first serious step by a U.S. administration to tackle the threat of global warming. But as the pace of innovation slackens in the crumbling economy and the public worries more about jobs than the future of the planet, is it all a case of too little, too late? NOVA focuses on the latest and greatest innovations that include everything from artificial trees to cleaner coal, nuclear energy and wildly ambitious - and risky - schemes to re-engineer the entire climate system. Can our technology, which helped create this problem, now solve it?
