Why Do Birds Sing?

Season 2 - Episode 1

NOVA travels to forests and marshes to discover why birds sing and finds surprising parallels with the acquisition of speech in humans.

How Much Do You Smell?

Season 2 - Episode 2

Many insects and some mammals use smell as a primary means of communication. NOVA explains how, for example, the entire economy of an ant's ...

The Hunting Of The Quark

Season 2 - Episode 3

Smashing matter into ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find its fundamental building blocks has produced a confused nightmare of particle...

The Secrets Of Sleep

Season 2 - Episode 4

Most of us spend one-third of our lives in a state of which we understand remarkably little—some people sleep for only a few minutes a night...

Inside the Golden Gate

Season 2 - Episode 5

NOVA joins a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists on a mission to find out just how San Francisco Bay works: its physics, its chemistry...

The Men Who Painted Caves

Season 2 - Episode 6

Just why did Cro-Magnon man living in France's Dordogne Valley some 15,000 years ago take time out from the desperate business of survival t...

Red Sea Coral

Season 2 - Episode 7

NOVA joins a group of English biologists living literally on a platform in the middle of the Red Sea, who for several years have been studyi...

War From the Air

Season 2 - Episode 8

What Time is Your Body?

Season 2 - Episode 9

Have you ever sensed that your body reacts differently at different times of the day? NOVA examines the best and worsetimes for work, good t...

The Rise And Fall Of DDT

Season 2 - Episode 10

Has the case against DDT been proven? A strange question, perhaps, to be asking one year after the US has banned the insecticide, but NOVA d...

Take the World From Another Point of View

Season 2 - Episode 11

NOVA profiles two very different scientists: Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, at the pinnacle of his career—a Nobel prizewinner; an...

The Lysenko Affair

Season 2 - Episode 12

NOVA explores T.D. Lynsenko's rise to power in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, and how it affected plant genetic research in the...

The Tuaregs

Season 2 - Episode 13

High in the Hoggar Mountains, in the exact center of the Sahara desert, lives Sidi Mohammed and his family: children, grandchildren, cousins...

The Plutonium Connection

Season 2 - Episode 14

How likely is it that a terrorist group will steal plutonium intended for nuclear reactor fuel and put together a blackmail weapon of unprec...

The Other Way

Season 2 - Episode 15

Since the Industrial Revolution, bigger has been better. NOVA profiles E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, who thinks that en...

The Lost World Of The Maya

Season 2 - Episode 16

For over a thousand years the Mayan civilization grew and flourished in the rain forests of Central America. Discovered and finally destroye...

Will The Fishing Have to Stop?

Season 2 - Episode 17

Fish is an excellent source of protein; it could help ease the growing international food shortage. But in 1972 the total world fish catch d...