Season 2

episodes

1. 1. Why Do Birds Sing? 1974-11-03 55 min NOVA travels to forests and marshes to discover why birds sing and finds surprising parallels with the acquisition of speech in humans.
2. 2. How Much Do You Smell? 1974-11-10 55 min 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 nest is organized by smell, and how some moths use smell for...
3. 3. The Hunting Of The Quark 1974-11-17 55 min Smashing matter into ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find its fundamental building blocks has produced a confused nightmare of particles. NOVA looks at this on-again, off-again story—one of scien...
4. 4. The Secrets Of Sleep 1974-11-24 55 min 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, and function perfectly well, while others declare that eig...
5. 5. Inside the Golden Gate 1974-12-01 55 min 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 and its biology.
6. 6. The Men Who Painted Caves 1974-12-08 55 min 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 to paint pictures in inaccessible corners of his cave dwellin...
7. 7. Red Sea Coral 1974-12-15 55 min 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 studying the crown-of-thorns starfish, notorious for the devastati...
8. 8. War From the Air 1975-01-05 55 min
9. 9. What Time is Your Body? 1975-01-12 55 min Have you ever sensed that your body reacts differently at different times of the day? NOVA examines the best and worsetimes for work, good times for sex drives and your body's most reactive time of da...
10. 10. The Rise And Fall Of DDT 1975-01-19 55 min 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 dares to ask. Tracing the history of DDT from its discovery t...
11. 11. Take the World From Another Point of View 1975-02-02 55 min NOVA profiles two very different scientists: Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, at the pinnacle of his career—a Nobel prizewinner; and Richard Lewontin, a biologist and highly regarded populati...
12. 12. The Lysenko Affair 1975-02-09 55 min 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 USSR.
13. 13. The Tuaregs 1975-02-16 55 min High in the Hoggar Mountains, in the exact center of the Sahara desert, lives Sidi Mohammed and his family: children, grandchildren, cousins and a few former slave women. Their environment, one of the...
14. 14. The Plutonium Connection 1975-03-09 55 min How likely is it that a terrorist group will steal plutonium intended for nuclear reactor fuel and put together a blackmail weapon of unprecedented power in the shape of a homemade atom bomb? That que...
15. 15. The Other Way 1975-03-16 55 min Since the Industrial Revolution, bigger has been better. NOVA profiles E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, who thinks that enough is enough; that the time has come for technology to ret...
16. 16. The Lost World Of The Maya 1975-03-30 55 min For over a thousand years the Mayan civilization grew and flourished in the rain forests of Central America. Discovered and finally destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors, it was lost again until expl...
17. 17. Will The Fishing Have to Stop? 1975-04-06 55 min Fish is an excellent source of protein; it could help ease the growing international food shortage. But in 1972 the total world fish catch dropped. NOVA explores the possible reasons for this decline.