
NOVA (1974)
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Neil Ross as Narrator
Episodes 17
Lost Roman Treasure
Experts rescue pricess mosaics from an ancient city that is about to disapear beneath a resivoir.
Read MoreWright Brothers' Flying Machine
Relive the engineering challenges that two bicycle makers overcame to become the first in flight.
Read MoreMARS Dead or Alive
Go inside NASA's risky field trip to the red planet in this tense and dramatic behind-the-scenes chronicle of the $820 million Mars Exploration Rover (MER) project.
Read MoreWelcome to Mars
NOVA follows a team of scientists as the monitor the Martian rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Spirit runs into some problems, but Opportunity takes a photograph that may confirm the existence of water on Mars.
Read MoreSinking the Supership
The search for the wreck of the Yamato, the largest and mightiest battleship ever floated and the pride of the Japanese Imperial Fleet. Constructed in absolute secrecy and sunk by American planes toward the end of World War II, her rapid demise had been a mystery, rather like a military Titanic.
Read MoreVolcano Under the City
A restless mountain threatens a bustling metropolis perched on its flanks.
Read MoreHitler's Sunken Secret
One of the most daring clandestine operations of World War II was the 1944 sinking of the Norwegian ferry Hydro with its cargo of "heavy water" destined for the Nazis' secret atomic bomb project. Although the mission was declared a success, no one ever established if the special shipment was actually on board. In this program, NOVA descends 1,300 feet beneath a remote Norwegian lake to find the answer.
Read MoreStorm That Drowned a City
In less than 12 hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana coast, leading to more than a thousand deaths and transforming a city of over one million into an uninhabitable swamp. NOVA investigates the science of Hurricane Katrina, combining a penetrating analysis of what went wrong with a dramatic, minute-by-minute unfolding of events told through eyewitness testimony. What made this storm so deadly? Will powerful hurricanes like Katrina strike more often? How accurately did scientists predict its impact, and why did the levees protecting New Orleans fail?
Read MoreDeadly Ascent
Doctors, rescuers and mountaineers try to determine why people die attempting to climb Mount McKinley.
Read MoreThe Perfect Corpse
Forensic investigators tease secrets from the well preserved bodies of people buried long ago under peat bogs.
Read MoreArctic Passage
NOVA recreates the expeditions of Sir John Franklin and Roald Amundsen, two Arctic explorers who set out to find the legendary Arctic sea route known as the Northwest Passage.
Read MoreVoyage to the Mystery Moon
A mission to Saturn and its enigmatic sattelite, Titan, looks for clues to the origins of life.
Read MoreSputnik Declassified
On October 4, 1957, the Space Age dawned with the red hue of the Communist flag when the Soviet Union launched the first artificial satellite. Sputnik I stunned the world and spurred a surge in science education and innovation that changed our world forever. But was Sputnik I really a shock to America's leaders, and how close was the U.S. to getting into space first? NOVA draws on previously classified documents to tell the real story behind the opening chapter in the space race.
Read MoreMaster of the Killer Ants
The Mofu people of northern Cameroon have a close relationship with insects, in particular, the red driver ants which they use to combat termites.
Read MoreAbsolute Zero: The Conquest of Cold
Our mastery of cold is something we take for granted, whether it s air conditioning and frozen food or the liquefied gases and superconductivity at the heart of cutting-edge technology. But what is cold? How do you achieve it, and how cold can it get? This two-part NOVA special brings the history of this frosty fascination to life with brilliant dramatic recreations of high moments in low-temperature research and the quest for ever-lower notches on the thermometer.
The first hour, The Conquest of Cold, opens in the 1600s when the nature of cold and heat was a complete mystery. Were they different aspects of the same phenomenon? The experiments that settled these questions helped stoke the Industrial Revolution.
Read MoreAbsolute Zero: The Race for Absolute Zero
Our mastery of cold is something we take for granted, whether it s air conditioning and frozen food or the liquefied gases and superconductivity at the heart of cutting-edge technology. But what is cold? How do you achieve it, and how cold can it get? This two-part NOVA special brings the history of this frosty fascination to life with brilliant dramatic recreations of high moments in low-temperature research and the quest for ever-lower notches on the thermometer.
In the second hour, The Race For Absolute Zero dramatizes the titanic rivalry between Scottish researcher James Dewar and Dutch physicist Heike Onnes, who plunged cold science to the forbidding realm at which oxygen and then nitrogen turn into liquids. The race continues today as scientists pioneer super-fast computing near absolute zero the ultimate chill of -459.67° F where atoms slow to a virtual standstill.
Read MoreHunting The Hidden Dimension
Fractals are more than just pretty pictures. These simple but sophisticated equations describe the world we live in, from forest growth patterns to the beating of a human heart, and they are inspiring new investigation in myriad fields of science and technology.
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