Season 2

Episode 4

The Secrets Of Sleep

November 24, 197455m0.0

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 eight hours isn't enough. NOVA explores traditional notions about how much sleep we need; looks at effects of the sleeping pill, and, perhaps the most baffling of all aspects of sleep—dreaming.

Episode 5

Inside the Golden Gate

December 1, 197455m0.0

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.

Episode 6

The Men Who Painted Caves

December 8, 197455m0.0

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 dwellings? NOVA joins French and American archeologists as they piece together the lifestyle of these hunters of the last great Ice Age, and try to interpret the meaning of their cave art.

Episode 7

Red Sea Coral

December 15, 197455m0.0

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 devastation it has wrought on the coral reefs of Australia and the Pacific.

Episode 8

War From the Air

January 5, 197555m0.0

Episode 9

What Time is Your Body?

January 12, 197555m0.0

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 day for alcohol consumption.

Episode 10

The Rise And Fall Of DDT

January 19, 197555m0.0

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 through its banning in the States, NOVA asks whether America overreacted with its total ban of this once acclaimed "wonder" chemical.

Episode 11

Take the World From Another Point of View

February 2, 197555m0.0

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 population geneticist from Harvard University.

Episode 12

The Lysenko Affair

February 9, 197555m0.0

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.

Episode 13

The Tuaregs

February 16, 197555m0.0

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 most ungenerous on earth, provides them with almost nothing. NOVA examines the changing lifestyle of Sidi Mohammed.

Episode 14

The Plutonium Connection

March 9, 197555m0.0

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 question is posed by Theodore Taylor, former A and H bomb designer at Los Alamos, in a recent book, The Curve of Binding Energy. NOVA investigates just how easy it would be to design a bomb using unclassified information.

Episode 15

The Other Way

March 16, 197555m0.0

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 return to a human scale, where the ability to create is returned from the machine to people.

Episode 16

The Lost World Of The Maya

March 30, 197555m0.0

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 explorers brought it to light in the 19th century. Eric Thompson, an archaeologist who has had a 45 year love affair with the Maya, takes NOVA on a pilgrimage through the Mayan world, visiting, on the way, all the great ruined cities he has known for half a century.

Episode 17

Will The Fishing Have to Stop?

April 6, 197555m0.0

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.