NOVA Season 19, Episode 5: Can You Believe TV Ratings?

1

Hell Fighters of Kuwait

NOVA covers the fight to put out Saddam Hussein's bonfire of oil wells in Kuwait, which has created the worst manmade pollution event in history. Fire fighting teams from Houston and elsewhere are faced with a Texas-size job.

55 min

2

Submarine!

NOVA takes a voyage on the newest of America's doomsday machines—the ballistic missle submarine USS Michigan. The Cold War may be won, but these submerged super arsenals continue to prowl the deep.

55 min

3

Saddam's War on Wildlife

Few people give any thought to wildlife in the midst of a war. During the Gulf War, environmentalist John Walsh did his best to save animals from oil spills, bullets and other dangers.

55 min

4

What Smells?

The nose knows. How much is the subject of NOVA's investigation of the mysterious aromas and hidden messages picked up by our sense of smell. David Suzuki hosts.

55 min

5

Can You Believe TV Ratings?

Rating the audience for TV shows is a classic problem in statistical analysis. NOVA finds that ratings are getting more accurate but still are far from scientific.

55 min

6

Making a Dishonest Buck

Criminals still make money the old-fashioned way—by counterfeiting. NOVA looks at why US currency is so easy to fake and what the government is doing about it.

55 min

7

Rescuing Baby Whales

NOVA examines the mysterious whale strandings along the beaches of Cape Cod Bay, as the puzzling behavior becomes more common.

55 min

8

An Astronaut's View of the Earth

NOVA goes behind the scenes to watch the filming of a big-screen Imax/Omnimax space spectacle. Astronauts operate the cameras on location aboard the Space Shuttle.

55 min

9

Eclipse of the Century

The spectacular eclipse of 1991 passed over major observatories on the island of Hawaii. NOVA was there for 6 1/2 minutes of frenetic research that revealed new secrets about our sun.

55 min

10

Animal Olympians II

In a 90-minute special presentation, NOVA reveals the ancient secrets of how the pyramids were built by actually building one. A noted Egyptologist, Mark Lehner, and a professional stonemason, Roger Hopkins (This Old House), join forces in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza to put clever and sometimes bizarre pyramid construction theories to the test.

55 min

11

The Genius Behind the Bomb

Physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard reenact the signing of the 1939 letter that alerted President Franklin Roosevelt to the feasibility of atomic weapons. Szilard drafted and Einstein signed the famous warning, which led to the building of the first atomic bomb.

55 min

12

Mind of a Serial Killer

NOVA goes behind the scenes to give the real story behind the FBI unit popularized in the Academy Award-winning film, The Silence of the Lambs. Using a detailed psychological profile, the unit helped the Rochester, New York police department catch a notorious serial killer who targeted prostitutes. Actor Patrick Stewart narrates.

55 min

13

Search for the First Americans

NOVA follows the trail of America's first inhabitants. Did they migrate across a Bering Sea land bridge at the end of the last Ice Age, as we all learned in school? Or did they arrive thousands of years earlier, possibly by some different route, as new archaeological evidence increasingly hints?

55 min

14

Rafting Through the Grand Canyon

NOVA explores Earth's greatest natural wonder by rafting down the river that created it, repeating the spectacular first canyon voyage of the 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell. The Grand Canyon tells the story of nearly 2 billion years of earth history plus the changes caused by three decades of human intervention.

55 min

15

This Old Pyramid

In a 90-minute special presentation, NOVA reveals the ancient secrets of how the pyramids were built by actually building one. A noted Egyptologist, Mark Lehner, and a professional stonemason, Roger Hopkins (This Old House), join forces in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza to put clever and sometimes bizarre pyramid construction theories to the test.

55 min

16

Iceman

Five thousand years ago, a man perished in a mountain storm. In 1991, his frozen body was found along with artifacts of his vanished way of life. NOVA covers the international effort to unlock the secrets of this astonishing discovery.

55 min

17

Private Lives of Dolphins

NOVA delves into the deep sea drama of life among the dolphins at research stations in Florida and Australia. Like humans and chimpanzees, dolphins have evolved a sophisticated social system that provides clues about the origins and purpose of big brains and intelligence.

55 min

18

Brain Transplant

Two paralyzed drug addicts travel to Sweden to receive a revolutionary treatment for brain disease that is largely unavailable in the US due to the ban on fetal tissue research. "Brain Transplant" continues the remarkable story of a mysterious malady linked to a bad batch of synthetic heroin that NOVA first covered in the 1986 award-winning film, "The Case of the Frozen Addict."

55 min

19

Can You Stop People From Drinking?

NOVA looks at how Russia and the United States are attacking the intractable problem of alcohol abuse with old and new weapons—including prohibition, hypnotism, imprisonment, surveillance, deception, aversion therapy and group therapy as practiced by Alcoholics Anonymous.

55 min

20

Sex and the Single Rhino

NOVA examines the high-tech efforts to preserve the world's animal diversity. Noah needed only an ark—but today's conservationists need all the tools that biology, ecology, diplomacy and politics can muster if endangered species are to survive beyond the next century.

55 min