Broadcast 19 January 1995, the next instalment is devoted to the ways in which plants reproduce. Pollen and a stigma are the two components needed for fertilisation. Most plants carry both these within their flowers and rely on animals to transport the pollen from one to the stigma of another. To do this, they attract their couriers with colour, scent and nectar. It isn’t just birds that help poll
Broadcast 26 January 1995, this episode examines how plants either share environments harmoniously or compete for dominance within them. Attenborough highlights the 1987 hurricane and the devastation it caused. However, for some species, it was that opportunity for which they had lain dormant for many years. The space left by uprooted trees is soon filled by others who move relatively swiftly towa
Wiring the WorldNerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (1998) is a three-hour documentary film written and hosted by Mark Stephens under the pseudonym Robert X. Cringely and produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting for PBS.A sequel to Triumph of the Nerds, Nerds 2.0.1 documents the development of ARPANET, the Internet, the World Wide Web and the dot-com bubble of the mid and late 1990s
Few if any men have changed the course of history like Martin Luther. In less than ten years, this fevered German monk plunged a knife into the heart of an empire that had ruled for a thousand years, and set in motion a train of revolution, war and conflict that would reshape Western civilization, and lift it out of the Dark Ages. Luther’s is a drama that still resonates half a millennium on. It’s
Millions remember the countdowns, launchings, splashdowns, and parades as the U.S. raced the USSR to the moon in the 1960s. But few know that both countries also ran parallel space programs, whose covert goal was to launch military astronauts on spying missions. In this program, NOVA delves into the untold story of this top-secret space race, which might easily have turned into a shooting war in o
The great PBS science series Nova scores another hit with Mars: Dead or Alive, capturing all the excitement surrounding the Mars rover landings of early 2004.Originally broadcast just as the first of the twin rovers (“Spirit” and “Opportunity”) was experiencing temporary communication problems with Earth-bound mission controllers, this riveting hour-long episode chronicles the risky $820 million
Can technology help us tame nature’s most violent tornadoes? Little on this earth can withstand the violent fury of an F5 tornado. A churning vortex with winds over 300 miles an hour, these tornadoes create immense swaths of death and destruction in a matter of seconds. But today, experts are exploring the supertwister’s complex inner workings in bold new ways in the hopes of one day being able to
We’ve all heard of the witch, but do witches have a real existence? Yes, they have existed since the dawn of history, and most likely for millenia before. In the Bible, Saul, afraid of the might of the Philistine army, took himself off to be counseled by the Witch of Endor.In Classical literature we have Homer’s Circe who bewitched men and turned them into swine. Ovid tells us of the Strigae;
A hot summer afternoon in the northeast. Residents of New York and Toronto look forward to the weekend. No one could predict what is about to happen.In a matter of seconds, 50 million people simply fall off the grid. Phone lines and water systems fail, and thousands of people are trapped in elevators and subways. It is August 14th 2003, and the largest blackout in North American history causes