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Nova Season 2 Episodes

17 Episodes 1974 - 1975

Episode 1

Why Do Birds Sing?

Sun, Nov 3, 1974

NOVA travels to forests and marshes to discover why birds sing and finds surprising parallels with the acquisition of speech in humans.

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Episode 2

How Much Do You Smell?

Sun, Nov 10, 1974

NOVA explains how, for example, the entire economy of an ant's nest is organized by smell, and how some moths use smell for population control - an ability we are now beginning to understand.

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Episode 3

The Hunting of the Quark

Sun, Nov 17, 1974

Smashing matter into ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find its fundamental building blocks has produced a confused nightmare of particles. NOVA looks at this on-again, off-again story.

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Episode 4

The Secrets of Sleep

Sun, Nov 24, 1974

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.

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Episode 5

Inside the Golden Gate

Sun, Dec 1, 1974

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.

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Episode 6

The Men Who Painted Caves

Sun, Dec 8, 1974

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?

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Episode 7

Red Sea Coral

Sun, Dec 15, 1974

NOVA joins a group of English biologists living on a platform in the middle of the Red Sea, who for several years have been studying the crown-of-thorns starfish, notorious for devastating the coral reefs of Australia and the Pacific.

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Episode 8

War from the Air

Sun, Jan 5, 1975

NOVA explores how science and technology play a major role in the design of weapons of war and the development of strategies for their use.

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Episode 9

What Time Is Your Body?

Sun, Jan 12, 1975

Have you ever sensed that your body reacts differently at different times of the day? NOVA examines the best and worse times for work, good times for sex drives and your body's most reactive time of day for alcohol consumption.

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Episode 10

The Rise and Fall of DDT

Sun, Jan 19, 1975

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.

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Episode 11

Take the World from Another Point of View

Sun, Feb 2, 1975

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.

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Episode 12

The Lysenko Affair

Sun, Feb 9, 1975

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.

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Episode 13

The Tuaregs

Sun, Feb 16, 1975

High in the Hoggar Mountains of the Sahara desert, lives Sidi Mohammed and his family. Their environment, one of the most ungenerous on earth, provides them with almost nothing. NOVA examines the changing lifestyle of Sidi Mohammed.

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Episode 14

The Plutonium Connection

Sun, Mar 9, 1975

How likely is it that a terrorist group will steal plutonium intended for nuclear reactor fuel and put together a homemade atom bomb? NOVA investigates just how easy it would be to design a bomb using unclassified information.

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Episode 15

The Other Way

Sun, Mar 16, 1975

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.

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Episode 16

The Lost World of the Maya

Sun, Mar 30, 1975

For over a thousand years the Mayan civilization 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.

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Episode 17

Will the Fishing Have to Stop?

Sun, Apr 6, 1975

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.

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