Catalog Search Results
Summary
It's a golden age for planet hunters: recently, they've discovered more than 750 planets orbiting stars beyond the sun. Some of them, like a planet called Kepler-22b, might even be able to harbor life. What would that life look like? Combining startling animation with input from expert astrobiologists, go on a journey of the imagination as viewers 'build' aliens from the ground up.
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Every day is a new challenge for Dr. Michelle Oakley, the only all-species vet for hundreds of miles in the Yukon. Whether wrestling bison, tracking ibex in the mountains, performing surgery on a bear or braving frozen landscapes to return lynx to the wild, Dr. Oakley will do whatever it takes to keep the animals in her care safe and healthy.
Summary
Amateur British bakers compete in a series of weekly baking challenges, with each episode introducing a new technical skill and a challenge in each of three categories: Sigature Bake, to test creative flair and basic baking ability; Technical Bake, in which contestants are given basic recipes consisting of an ingredients list and minimal instruction; and Showstopper Bake, designed to display baking virtuosity.
Summary
In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager missions as a way of exploring the solar system's outermost planets, capturing images of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their moons. "The farthest" documents Voyager's journey, including first-hand accounts of the men and women who built the ships and guided their missions. Bonus film "Second genesis" explores the scientific quest to find life, or evidence of it, beyond Earth.
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Ben and Erin Schroeder live and work among farmers in the heart of America. Here, blizzards, tornados and heat waves present a wide range of challenges, which only the most passionate vets are qualified to handle. They have the skill and heart required of homestead vets, which they're eager to pass to the next generation.
Summary
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of food journalist Pollan's thesis. Humans used to know how to eat well, he argues, but the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists. As a result, we face today a complex culinary landscape dense with bad advice and foods that are not "real."...
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In 1971, graduate student Penny Patterson began teaching sign language to a gorilla named Koko. What started out as a scientific experiment evolved into an intimate friendship, which for almost half a century has challenged the way we think about animals and changed the course of many lives. It is a unique window into this incredible relationship.
111) Tesla
Summary
Meet Nikola Tesla, the genius engineer and tireless inventor whose technology revolutionized the electrical age of the 20th century. Although eclipsed in fame by Edison and Marconi, it was Tesla₂s vision that paved the way for today₂s wireless world.
Summary
Spurred by a personal tragedy, America's foremost documentarian is tackling cancer. Ken Burns examines cancer with a cellular biologistb2ss precision, a historian's perspective, and a biographer's passion. The series artfully weaves three different films in one: a riveting historical documentary; an engrossing and intimate verite film; and a scientific and investigative report.
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Examines the life and legacy of African American poet, memoirist, and civil rights worker Maya Angelou, from her upbringing in the Depression-era South to her work with Malcolm X in Ghana to the recitation of her inaugural poem for President Bill Clinton. Includes Angelou's own words woven together with archival photographs and videos as well as interviews with Angelou's friends and family.
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Nova's Lord of the Ants profiles soft-spoken Southerner E.O. Wilson, renowned for his scientific study of ants that led to his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, where he put forth the notion that evolutionary principles could explain social behavior throughout the animal kingdom, including in humans. Though sociobiology was a controversial new discipline at the time, today experimental science shows that genes do play a role in aspects of...
115) Leave it to beavers
Summary
A growing number of scientists, conservationists and grass-roots environmentalists have come to regard beavers as overlooked tools when it comes to reversing the disastrous effects of global warming and world-wide water shortages. Once valued for their fur or hunted as pests, these industrious rodents are seen in a new light through the eyes of beaver enthusiasts who reveal the ways in which the presence of beavers can transform and revive landscapes....
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Using a series of experiments, illusions, and demonstrations, host Jason Silva and guest experts unlock the science behind the mysteries of why we say, see, eat, feel, and act as we do. Hailed by critics as tremendous fun that makes science entertaining, it turns your mind's eye inward for a fascinating journey into the 3 1/2 pounds of tissue.
Summary
From a castle in England to the New Jersey shore, host Jason Silva and renowned guest experts engage volunteers in experiments, games and exercises that reveal fascinating truths about the workings of the human brain. This season explores topics like the brain's amazing, if sometimes inconvenient, selective memory function, and whether or not people are literally born to be bad.
119) Extreme rescues
Summary
Watch the telling of dramatic real-life stories from across the globe, using footage captured by the rescuers themselves; this series puts viewers in the center of the action for every heart-stopping twist and turn as they witness life-saving feats in real time.
120) The vote
Summary
One hundred years after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, it tells the dramatic culmination story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote, a transformative cultural and political movement that resulted in the largest expansion of voting rights in US history.