NOVA: Season 2

Season 2 overview

The season opens with the hidden languages of birdsong and smell, revealing how animal communication mirrors human speech and organizes insect societies. It then moves into the subatomic searches of particle physics and the unexplained territory of sleep and dreaming.

Key story beats

  1. Why Do Birds Sing? — NOVA explores why birds sing and reveals surprising parallels between birdsong and the acquisition of speech in humans.
  2. How Much Do You Smell? — The program shows how smell organizes the economy of an ant nest and how moths use scent signals for population control.
  3. The Hunting of the Quark — NOVA follows the costly on-again, off-again search for the quark, recounting how smashing matter produced a confused nightmare of new particles.
  4. The Secrets of Sleep — The episode questions conventional ideas about how much sleep people need, examines sleeping pill effects, and confronts the puzzle of dreaming.
  5. Inside the Golden Gate — A U.S. Geological Survey team studies how San Francisco Bay works through its physics, chemistry, and biology.
  6. The Men Who Painted Caves — French and American archaeologists reconstruct the lives of Cro-Magnon hunters and try to interpret why they painted hidden cave chambers 15,000 years ago.
  7. Red Sea Coral — English biologists living on a Red Sea platform study the crown-of-thorns starfish and its devastating effects on coral reefs in the Pacific and Australia.
  8. What Time Is Your Body? — NOVA investigates how the body performs differently at different times of day, from ideal work periods and sex drive to sensitivity to alcohol.
  9. The Rise and Fall of DDT — Tracing DDT from its discovery to its U.S. ban, NOVA asks whether America overreacted by completely prohibiting the once-acclaimed wonder chemical.
  10. Take the World From Another Point of View — The season profiles two contrasting scientific thinkers: Nobel-winning theoretical physicist Richard Feynman and Harvard population geneticist Richard Lewontin.
  11. The Lysenko Affair — NOVA recounts T.D. Lysenko's rise to power in the Soviet Union and how his influence reshaped and damaged plant genetic research.
  12. The Tuaregs — NOVA examines the changing lifestyle of Sidi Mohammed's extended family as they survive in one of the most ungenerous environments on Earth.
  13. The Plutonium Connection — Inspired by Theodore Taylor's book, NOVA investigates how easily terrorists could steal plutonium and assemble a homemade atomic blackmail weapon using only unclassified information.
  14. The Other Way — E.F. Schumacher argues in Small is Beautiful that technology should return to a human scale so that creative ability is restored from machines to people.
  15. The Lost World of the Maya — Archaeologist Eric Thompson, with his 45-year connection to the Maya, leads a pilgrimage through the great ruined Maya cities rediscovered after the Conquistadors.

Seasons

Interactive Features

Episode Guide

Content sources

Plot analysis generated from content on Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Related entry on Wikidata (Q3071768), public domain (CC0).