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The Worst Episodes of NOVA

Every episode of NOVA ranked from worst to best. Explore the Worst Episodes of NOVA!

PBS' premier science series helps viewers of all ages explore the science behind the headlines. Along the way, NOVA demystifies science and technology, and highlights...
Genre:Documentary
Network:PBS

Worst Episodes Summary

"The Search For Life" is the worst rated episode of "NOVA". It scored N/A/10 based on 0 votes. Directed by N/A and written by N/A, it aired on 3/24/1974. This episode scored NaN points lower than the second lowest rated, "Last of the Cuiva".

  • The Search For Life
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    #1 - The Search For Life

    Season 1 Episode 4 - Aired 3/24/1974

    Does life exist outside this planet? The Viking lander will set down on Mars in July 1976 to try to find out just that. NOVA explores how life started on Earth and examines the Viking Lander being built in its germ-free room before starting its long journey.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Last of the Cuiva
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    #2 - Last of the Cuiva

    Season 1 Episode 5 - Aired 3/31/1974

    How does a primitive nomadic tribe of the Amazon basin cope with the encroachment of Western settlers? NOVA looks at both sides of the story, revealing the misunderstandings between the two cultures.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Bird Brain: The Mystery of Bird Navigation
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    #3 - Bird Brain: The Mystery of Bird Navigation

    Season 1 Episode 8 - Aired 4/21/1974

    Birds migrate in search of perpetual summer, sometimes traveling as much as 20,000 miles every year. NOVA uses radar to track and identify migrating birds that travel at night, focusing on how they coose routes tat avoid bad weather and make the best of prevailing winds—information that can aid meteorologists.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Are You Doing This for Me, Doctor?
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    #4 - Are You Doing This for Me, Doctor?

    Season 1 Episode 9 - Aired 4/28/1974

    The advance of medicine depends inevitably on the testing of experimental procedures on human volunteers from either the healthy or the sick. Yet such procedures are often dangerous, and may not be of direct benefit to the subject. NOVA examines how individuals' interests are safeguarded, and asks, under what circumstances experiments should be conducted on children.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Case of the Midwife Toad
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    #5 - The Case of the Midwife Toad

    Season 1 Episode 11 - Aired 5/12/1974

    When Paul Kammerer committed suicide in 1926, it was taken by most of his fellow biologists as a tacit admission of guilt that he had faked his experiments purporting to show the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Arthur Koestler joins NOVA in an in-depth examination of Kammerer's infamous experiment.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Fusion: The Energy of Promise
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    #6 - Fusion: The Energy of Promise

    Season 1 Episode 12 - Aired 5/19/1974

    Nuclear fusion offers the promises of an unlimited, clean source of energy. But achieving fusion has proved one of the most difficult and elusive goals of the physicist. NOVA tells the story of the twists and turns and the international competition along the road toward the achievement of fusion; and details the recent breakthroughs which seem at last to have brought it within reach.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Why Do Birds Sing?
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    #7 - Why Do Birds Sing?

    Season 2 Episode 1 - Aired 11/3/1974

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

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • How Much Do You Smell?
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    #8 - How Much Do You Smell?

    Season 2 Episode 2 - Aired 11/10/1974

    Many insects and some mammals use smell as a primary means of communication. 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 is now beginning to understand.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Hunting Of The Quark
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    #9 - The Hunting Of The Quark

    Season 2 Episode 3 - Aired 11/17/1974

    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—one of sciences's most mysterious—and, one of the most expensive, involving some of the biggest machines in the world.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Secrets Of Sleep
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    #10 - The Secrets Of Sleep

    Season 2 Episode 4 - Aired 11/24/1974

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Inside the Golden Gate
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    #11 - Inside the Golden Gate

    Season 2 Episode 5 - Aired 12/1/1974

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Men Who Painted Caves
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    #12 - The Men Who Painted Caves

    Season 2 Episode 6 - Aired 12/8/1974

    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? 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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Red Sea Coral
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    #13 - Red Sea Coral

    Season 2 Episode 7 - Aired 12/15/1974

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • What Time is Your Body?
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    #14 - What Time is Your Body?

    Season 2 Episode 9 - Aired 1/12/1975

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Rise And Fall Of DDT
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    #15 - The Rise And Fall Of DDT

    Season 2 Episode 10 - Aired 1/19/1975

    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, NOVA asks whether America overreacted with its total ban of this once acclaimed "wonder" chemical.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Lysenko Affair
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    #16 - The Lysenko Affair

    Season 2 Episode 12 - Aired 2/9/1975

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Tuaregs
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    #17 - The Tuaregs

    Season 2 Episode 13 - Aired 2/16/1975

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Plutonium Connection
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    #18 - The Plutonium Connection

    Season 2 Episode 14 - Aired 3/9/1975

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • The Other Way
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    #19 - The Other Way

    Season 2 Episode 15 - Aired 3/16/1975

    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, where the ability to create is returned from the machine to people.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Will The Fishing Have to Stop?
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    #20 - Will The Fishing Have to Stop?

    Season 2 Episode 17 - Aired 4/6/1975

    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.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Predictable Disaster
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    #21 - Predictable Disaster

    Season 3 Episode 1 - Aired 1/4/1976

    It is now possible to predict earthquakes. At least two successful predictions have already been made in the United States; and the NOVA crew was present and filming while a third prediction was being formulated. NOVA looks at why earthquakes occur, how predictions are made, the threat they pose to cities at risk, and examines the advantages and disadvantages of making an earthquake a predictable disaster.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Joey
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    #22 - Joey

    Season 3 Episode 2 - Aired 1/11/1976

    NOVA takes viewers into the world of Joey Deacon, 54 years old and a spastic since birth. Joey has lived most of his life in institutions, unable to communicate with anyone until he met Ernie Roberts. The docudrama recreates Joey's story, with remarkable performances by two spastic actors portraying him as a boy and as a young man. Joey and Ernie themselves appear in the final sequences.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • Meditation and the Mind
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    #23 - Meditation and the Mind

    Season 3 Episode 3 - Aired 1/18/1976

    What do singer Peggy Lee, New York Jets Quarterback Joe Namath and Congressman Richard Nolas have in common? They all practice a ritual called TM—Transcendental Meditation. NOVA examines the recent phenomenal success of the TM movement in America.

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • A Desert Place
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    #24 - A Desert Place

    Season 3 Episode 5 - Aired 2/1/1976

    NOVA explores the mysterious ecosystem of the desert: a snowstorm; a lashing summer monsoon; and the emergence—in a pool created only minutes before—of a pair of adult spadefoot toads. Toads who had been waiting beneath the sand for a year for this brief and fortuitous moment to procreate the next generation...

    Director: N/A

    Writer: N/A

  • A Small Imperfection
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    #25 - A Small Imperfection

    Season 3 Episode 6 - Aired 2/8/1976

    Every year, some 5,000 babies are born in the US with spina bifida, a congenital abnormality of the central nervous system. NOVA explores the mystery of what causes spina bifida and raises the issues of whether heroic measures should be taken to preserve the life of severely malformed babies.

    Director: N/A

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