Nova (2008)
Science documentaries.
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Episode 1 - Vaccines - Calling the Shots
Release Date: 10 Sep. 2014The science of vaccination, and the personal medical consequences when too many people decline to cooperate in the public health measure.
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Episode 2 - Rise of the Hackers
Release Date: 24 Sep. 2014From PBS and NOVA - Our lives are going digital. We shop, bank and even date online. Computers hold our treasured photographs, private emails, and all of our personal information. This data is precious -- and cybercriminals want it. Now, NOVA goes behind the scenes of the fast-paced world of cryptography to meet the scientists battling to keep our data safe. They are experts in extreme physics, math and a new field called "ultra-paranoid computing," all working to forge unbreakable codes and build ultra-fast computers. From the two men who uncovered the world's most ...
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Episode 3 - Why Planes Vanish
Release Date: 8 Oct. 2014An examination of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and how airplane tracking systems could be improved to prevent a similar occurrence.
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Episode 4 - Surviving Ebola
Release Date: 8 Oct. 2014A recounting of the 2013-15 West African Ebola epidemic and the efforts to contain it.
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Episode 5 - Ben Franklin's Balloons
Release Date: 8 Oct. 2014From PBS and NOVA - The epic first stage in the adventure of human flight didn't begin with the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk but with daring inventors and aeronauts in 18th century Paris. In a period of just 19 months, humanity not only left the ground for the first time, but a handful of brilliant and colorful pioneers developed all the essential features of today's hot air and gas balloons. Their exploits fascinated Benjamin Franklin, who was serving in Paris as the American ambassador, and created a sensation in the city. To explore this extraordinary burst of ...
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Episode 6 - First Air War
Release Date: 22 Oct. 2014An exploration of the development of aerial warfare in World War One.
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Episode 7 - Bigger Than T. Rex
Release Date: 5 Nov. 2014A team of palaeontologists led by Nizar Ibrahim go in search of Spinosaurus, a giant meat eater believed to be even larger than Tyrannosaurus rex.
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Episode 8 - Emperor's Ghost Army
Release Date: 12 Nov. 2014Nova's examination or how thousands to terra cotta soldiers in Qin dynasty's terra cotta army were created digresses into reviews of Qin history and technology.
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Episode 9 - Killer Landslides
Release Date: 19 Nov. 2014Just before 11 a.m. on March 22, 2014, an ominous rumble startled the residents of the community of Oso, Washington. It was the terrifying sound of what would become the United States' deadliest landslide in decades. The equivalent of one million dump truck loads of earth came plummeting down the valley. In a little over two minutes, a pile of debris up to 75 feet deep slammed into the neighborhood of close to 50 homes. While a massive search and rescue effort continues at the site, geologists are tracing the geological history of Oso to explain why the site was so ...
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Episode 10 - First Man on the Moon
Release Date: 3 Dec. 2014A look inside the life of Neill Armstrong, the first man on the moon.
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Episode 11 - Big Bang Machine
Release Date: 14 Jan. 2015On July 4, 2012, scientists at the giant atom smashing facility at CERN announced the discovery of a subatomic particle that seems like a tantalizingly close match to the elusive Higgs Boson, thought to be responsible for giving all the stuff in the universe its mass. Since it was first proposed nearly 50 years ago, the Higgs has been the holy grail of particle physicists: finding it completes the "standard model" that underlies all of modern particle physics. Now CERN's scientists are preparing for the Large Hadron Collider's second act, when they restart the ...
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Episode 12 - Sunken Ship Rescue
Release Date: 21 Jan. 2015NOVA follows the epic operation to secure, raise and salvage the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which ran aground and capsized off the coast of Italy on January 13, 2012, killing 32 people. The wreck stretches the length of three football fields, weighs 45,000 tons and lies half submerged on the site of a protected reef, with a 160-foot-long hole in its hull. Moving it from its precarious perch on the edge of an underwater cliff will be a huge technical and logistical challenge. Now, NOVA joins a team of more than 500 divers and engineers working around the clock as ...
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Episode 13 - Sinkholes-Buried Alive
Release Date: 28 Jan. 2015In Tampa, Florida, in February 2013, a giant hole opened up under the bedroom floor of Jeffrey Bush, swallowing the 36-year-old as he slept. His body was never found. Bush was a victim of a sinkhole -- a growing worldwide hazard that lurks wherever limestone and other water-soluble rocks underpin the soil. When carbon dioxide in the air dissolves in rainwater, it forms a weak acid that attacks the soft rocks, riddling them with holes like Swiss cheese. Sinkholes can occur gradually when the surface subsides into bowl-shaped depressions or suddenly, when the ground ...
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Episode 14 - Colosseum: Roman Death Trap
Release Date: 11 Feb. 2015The Colosseum is a monument to Roman imperial power and cruelty. Its graceful lines and harmonious proportions concealed a highly efficient design and advanced construction methods that made hundreds of arches out of 100,000 tons of stone. In its elliptical arena, tens of thousands of gladiators, slaves, prisoners and wild animals met their deaths. Ancient texts report lions and elephants emerging from beneath the floor, as if by magic, to ravage gladiators and people condemned to death. Then, just as quickly, the Colosseum could be flooded with so much water that ...
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Episode 15 - Petra: Lost City of Stone
Release Date: 18 Feb. 2015Add a Plot
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Episode 16 - Hagia Sophia: Istanbul's Mystery
Release Date: 25 Feb. 2015Istanbul's magnificent Hagia Sophia has survived on one of the world's most active seismic faults, which has inflicted a dozen devastating earthquakes since Hagia Sophia was built in 537 AD. As Istanbul braces for the next big quake, a team of architects and engineers is investigating Hagia Sophia's seismic secrets. NOVA follows the team's discoveries as they examine the building's unique structure and other ingenious design strategies that have insured the dome's survival. The engineers build a massive eight-ton model of the building's core structure, place it on a ...
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Episode 17 - The Great Math Mystery
Release Date: 15 Apr. 2015NOVA leads viewers on a mathematical mystery tour -- a provocative exploration of math's astonishing power across the centuries. We discover math's signature in the swirl of a nautilus shell, the whirlpool of a galaxy and the spiral in the center of a sunflower. Math was essential to everything from the first wireless radio transmissions to the prediction and discovery of the Higgs boson and the successful landing of rovers on Mars. But where does math get its power? Astrophysicist and writer Mario Livio, along with a colorful cast of mathematicians, physicists and ...
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Episode 18 - Invisible Universe Revealed
Release Date: 22 Apr. 2015Twenty-five years ago, NASA launched one of the most ambitious experiments in the history of astronomy: the Hubble Space Telescope. In honor of Hubble's landmark anniversary, NOVA tells the remarkable story of the telescope that forever changed our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. But amazingly, when the telescope first sent images back to earth, it seemed that the entire project was a massive failure; a one-millimeter engineering blunder had turned the billion-dollar telescope into an object of ridicule. It fell to five heroic astronauts in a daring ...
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Episode 19 - Nazi Attack on America
Release Date: 6 May 2015Following the attack on Pearl Harbor German seizes the opportunity to attack cargo ships along the United State East coast while the United States is unprepared. This program describes the scope of the German assault as a backdrop to the efforts of a group of investigators to determine how the first sunken German submarine, U-166, met its fate to determine if disgraced Commander Herbert G. Claudius deserves credit to the kill.
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Episode 20 - Lethal Seas
Release Date: 13 May 2015A deadly recipe threatens the survival of countless creatures throughout Earth's oceans. We've known for years that oceans absorb about a quarter of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. With carbon emissions sharply rising, the silent killer is entering the seas at a staggering rate -- raising the oceans' acidity. As a result, the skeletons and shells of marine creatures that form the foundation of the web of life are dissolving. Follow scientists who are seeking solutions and making breakthrough discoveries, including a unique coral garden in Papua New Guinea that ...
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Episode 21 - Chasing Pluto
Release Date: 15 Jul. 2015NOVA captures New Horizons' historic flyby of Pluto, the culmination of the spacecraft's nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to reveal the first ever detailed images of this strange, icy world at the very edge of our solar system.
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Episode 22 - Nuclear Meltdown Disaster
Release Date: 29 Jul. 2015Four years after one of history's worst nuclear accidents, NOVA reveals the minute-by-minute story of the Fukushima nuclear crisis and its ongoing aftermath, told by the brave workers who stayed behind as an earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant.