The Best Episodes of NOVA Season 33

The story of Peter Robbins, an engineer who---at a cost of $1.5 million---built his own submarine (named Alicia) in order to explore sunken German U-boats. Included: the Alicia's maiden voyage.

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Could a mummy found in Niagara Falls be the remains of a long-lost Pharaoh?

Director: Gail Willumsen

Writer: Gail Willumsen

David Attenborough probes the mystery of ancient life-forms perfectly preserved in amber.

Director: John Aitchison

Writer: N/A

A mission to Saturn and its enigmatic sattelite, Titan, looks for clues to the origins of life.

Director: Paul Olding

Writer: Paul Olding, William Hicklin

Everyone has heard of global warming, but a lesser-known man-made phenomenon has been nearly as powerful at affecting Earth's climate. A look at global dimming, created by soot and pollution reflecting the sun's rays and surprisingly helping to offset global warming's catastrophic advance.

Director: Duncan Copp

Writer: N/A

In less than 12 hours on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Louisiana coast, leading to more than a thousand deaths and transforming a city of over one million into an uninhabitable swamp. NOVA investigates the science of Hurricane Katrina, combining a penetrating analysis of what went wrong with a dramatic, minute-by-minute unfolding of events told through eyewitness testimony. What made this storm so deadly? Will powerful hurricanes like Katrina strike more often? How accurately did scientists predict its impact, and why did the levees protecting New Orleans fail?

Director: Peter Chinn, Caroline Penry-Davey

Writer: Peter Chinn, Caroline Penry-Davey

One of the most daring clandestine operations of World War II was the 1944 sinking of the Norwegian ferry Hydro with its cargo of "heavy water" destined for the Nazis' secret atomic bomb project. Although the mission was declared a success, no one ever established if the special shipment was actually on board. In this program, NOVA descends 1,300 feet beneath a remote Norwegian lake to find the answer.

Director: Duncan Copp

Writer: N/A

He was the greatest scientist of his day, perhaps of all time. But while Isaac Newton was busy discovering the universal law of gravitation, he was also searching out hidden meanings in the Bible and pursuing the covert art of alchemy. In this program, NOVA explores the strange and complex mind of Isaac Newton. Using docudrama scenes starring Scott Handy (Masterpiece Theatre's Henry VIII) as Newton, this film recreates the unique climate of late 17th-century England, where a newfound fascination with science and mathematics coexisted with extreme views on religious doctrine. Newton shared both obsessions.

Director: Chris Oxley

Writer: Joseph McMaster

A restless mountain threatens a bustling metropolis perched on its flanks.

Director: Antoine de Maximy

Writer: N/A

It was the greatest flood of the past two million years, and it posed a giant scientific riddle. A maverick geologist became convinced that thousand-foot-deep floodwaters had scoured out vast areas of the American northwest near the end of the last ice age. Mainstream scientists scorned his theory while he searched patiently for answers to what could have triggered such an inconceivably violent event. Finally, an ingenious solution silenced the skeptics: traces of an enormous ice dam half a mile high, which had blocked a valley in present-day Montana and created an enormous lake behind it. With the help of stunningly realistic animation, NOVA takes viewers back to the Ice Age to reveal what happened when the dam broke, unleashing a titanic flood that swept herds of woolly mammoth and everything else into oblivion.

Director: Ben Fox

Writer: N/A

Doctors, rescuers and mountaineers try to determine why people die attempting to climb Mount McKinley.

Director: Liesl Clark

Writer: Liesl Clark

NOVA recreates the expeditions of Sir John Franklin and Roald Amundsen, two Arctic explorers who set out to find the legendary Arctic sea route known as the Northwest Passage.

Director: Louise Osmond

Writer: Chris Schmidt

Exactly 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary Special Theory of Relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. Among Einstein's ideas, E = mc2 is by far the most famous. Yet how many people know what it really means? In a thought-provoking and engrossing documentary, Einstein's Big Idea illuminates this deceptively simple formula by unrevealing the story of how it came to be.

Director: Gary Johnstone

Writer: Gary Johnstone

Nova reviews the contribution of Alberto Santos Dumont in the early days of aircraft development and his uncanny ability to abandon one line of endeavor for a technology with better long term potential.

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Forensic investigators tease secrets from the well preserved bodies of people buried long ago under peat bogs.

Director: John Hayes Fisher

Writer: N/A

Driverless vehicles compete in a 130-mile race across the Majove Desert.

Director: Joseph Seamans

Writer: Joseph Seamans

This episode focuses on a scientific debate about five siblings in a Turkish family who walk on all fours. When, in 2005, scientist Uner Tan labeled them "genetic throwbacks," they became part of the dialogue about a possible missing link to an era when humans walked on all fours. Included: comments from geneticist Sean Carroll and anthropologist Brian Richmond, who disagree with Tan; and interviews with and footage of the family.

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A 40-year hunt for solar neutrinos leads to a new understanding of matter itself.

Director: David Sington

Writer: David Sington

The search for the wreck of the Yamato, the largest and mightiest battleship ever floated and the pride of the Japanese Imperial Fleet. Constructed in absolute secrecy and sunk by American planes toward the end of World War II, her rapid demise had been a mystery, rather like a military Titanic.

Director: David Axelrod

Writer: David Axelrod

The "Nova scienceNOW" magazine delves into a case of mass extinction some 250 million years ago; investigates the 1918 influenza outbreak, which killed as many as 50 million people; details the work of MIT roboticist Cynthia Breazeal's efforts to create "sociable robots"; and examines attempts to decipher 2000-year-old papyrus scrolls. Neil deGrasse Tyson hosts.

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