Science & Nature

This film investigates the parallel stories of collapsing Pacific salmon populations and how biologists and engineers engage in audacious experiments to shore up their numbers. Each of our efforts to save salmon has involved replacing their natural cycle of reproduction and death with a radically manipulated life history. Our once great runs of salmon are now conceived in laboratories, raised in tanks, driven in trucks and farmed in pens. The program goes beyond the ongoing debate over how to save an endangered species.

 Central Idaho’s Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness is the largest contiguous wilderness area in the lower 48 states.

The bushfires that tore through the Australian state of Victoria in February 2009 incinerated over a million acres of land, including key mountain ash forest ecosystems. Fires are a natural force of nature which spur regeneration, but the immediate aftermath of this giant firestorm was devastation.

The Himalayan mountain system is the planet’s highest and home to the world’s largest peaks. NATURE explores the diversity of wildlife and habitats of this mountain chain, starring the mysterious snow leopard.

Acclaimed physicist and host Brian Greene lets NOVA viewers in on a secret: We’ve all been deceived. Our perceptions of time and space have led us astray. Much of what we thought we knew about our universe—that the past has already happened and the future is yet to be, that space is just an empty void, that our universe is the only universe that exists—just might be wrong.

He’s been dead for more than 5,000 years — and been poked, prodded and probed by scientists for the last 20. Yet today, Otzi the Iceman, the famous mummified corpse pulled from a glacier in the Italian Alps nearly two decades ago, continues to keep many secrets. Now, through an autopsy like none other, scientists will attempt to unravel more mysteries from this ancient mummy, revealing not only the details of Otzi’s death, but an entire way of life. How did people live during Otzi’s time, the Copper Age? What did they eat? What diseases did they cope with?

It is the last great wilderness of its kind, a rare and precious haven for some of Earth’s most indestructible creatures. Covering more than half-a-million square miles of Chile and Argentina, this wild place known as Patagonia is under pressure from human encroachment despite its remote location. This National Geographic Special shines the spotlight on this extraordinary place and the innovative conservation models that will help preserve the pristine wilderness, ensuring that it lives on — intact — for future generations.

How is it that dinosaurs managed to survive and even thrive in the gloom of the dark and frigid polar regions? This is one of today's most intriguing, little-known enigmas in paleontology. Now, a unique field expedition, covered exclusively by NOVA, will set out for Alaska's North Slope to defrost a jackpot of new fossil clues. With the help of stunning CGI (computer generated imaging), NOVA will breathe life into the polar dinosaurs' lives and environment in vivid detail.