Dr. George McGavin and Dr. Zoe Laughlin (How to Make...) explore one of the U.K.’s biggest sewage works, a hidden world one might rarely choose to see. Processing one billion liters of waste water that 1.7 million people flush each day means there is a lot of sewage to be treated.
When the colossal Ever Given container ship crashed in the Suez Canal in March 2021, international supply chains ground to a halt. How did it happen? Follow the investigation into one of the most expensive shipping disasters ever.
Quantum entanglement is poised to revolutionize technology from networks to code breaking–but first we need to know it’s real. Join physicists as they capture light from across the universe in a bid to prove Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance.”
Join scientists as they use NASA’s brand new James Webb Space Telescope to peer deep in time to hunt for the first stars and galaxies in our universe, and try to detect the fingerprints of life in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets.
“Homo Techno” features stories—including that of a paralyzed former gang member who received brain implants allowing him to move a robotic arm by pure thought—that prompt Lightman to think about how advances in science and technology are causing us to evolve into a new species, Homo Techno, part human and part machine. What essential qualities will we want to preserve? Curiosity? Anger? Love?
“The Big & The Small” dramatizes the fact that humans are almost exactly the same distance—in terms of powers of ten—between an atom and a star. But where do we fit in the moral universe? Alan Lightman speaks with an advanced android and then a rabbi, a bio-ethicist, and the Dalai Lama about whether such a being could achieve consciousness and whether we could unplug her without asking permission.
“The Stars & The Osprey” begins with Lightman's late-night experience alone on the ocean when he felt connected to the stars and ends with a memorable eye-to-eye encounter with a wild creature. Alan attempts to reconcile these transcendent experiences with the material world of atoms and molecules. Can science explain such experiences in terms of the brain? Are we humans nothing but matter?
This film marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb and is a journey of exploration for Egyptian co-hosts Yasmin El Shazly and Mahmoud Rashad into the mysteries and unanswered questions about the boy king's life, his infamous father’s religious revolution, and those advising him as he takes the throne in one of the most tumultuous periods of Egyptian history.
NOVA: Zero to Infinity takes a look at how the mathematical concepts of zero and infinity have been invented and re-invented by different cultures over thousands of years.
NOVA presents the dramatic story of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and the quest to peer deeper back in time than ever before in the hope of answering some of astronomy’s biggest questions.