The BEST episodes of NOVA

#1 - The Miracle of Life

Season 10 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/15/1983

A documentary that shows the actual conception and development of a baby. It looks inside the male and female reproductive organs to show the formation of sperm and the passage of a fertilized egg through the fallopian tube. Uses a microscope to observe DNA, chromosomes, and other minute body details building up to the moment of birth.

#2 - The Elegant Universe: Einstein's Dream (1)

Season 30 - Episode 12 - Aired 10/28/2003

An introduction to string theory and its unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

#3 - Galileo's Battle For The Heavens

Season 29 - Episode 12 - Aired 10/29/2002

In this two-hour special, NOVA celebrates the story of the father of modern science and his struggle to get Church authorities to accept the truth of his astonishing discoveries. The program is based on Dava Sobel's bestselling book, Galileo's Daughter, which reveals a new side to the famously stubborn scientist—that his closest confidante was his illegitimate daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun.

#4 - Surviving the Tsunami

Season 38 - Episode 12 - Aired 9/28/2011

The earthquake that hit the northern coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, was recorded at magnitude 9.0 the worst ever recorded in Japan. It generated an unprecedented tsunami, obliterating coastal villages and towns in a matter of minutes. In some areas, the tsunami climbed above 100 feet in height and traveled miles inland. Amazingly, amateur and professional photographers captured it all on video, including remarkable tales of human survival, as ordinary citizens became heroes in a drama they never could have imagined. As the waves rush in, a daughter struggles to help her elderly mother ascend their rooftop to safety; a man climbs onto an overpass just as the wave overtakes his car. These never-before-seen stories are captured in video and retold after the fact by the survivors who reveal what they were thinking as they made their life-saving decisions. Their stories provide lessons for how we should all act in the face of life-threatening disasters.

#5 - Whales, Dolphins, And Men

Season 1 - Episode 3 - Aired 3/17/1974

NOVA explores the impact of whaling and the goods it produces for the industry, verses the grace and beatury of this intelligent mammal of the sea.

#6 - The Big Energy Gamble

Season 36 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/20/2009

Can California's ambitious plan to cut greenhouse gases actually succeed?

#7 - The Crab Nebula

Season 1 - Episode 7 - Aired 4/14/1974

In 1054 AD, the Chinese recorded the explosion of a star so bright that it lit the sky for three weeks, even during the day. It was the explosion of a dying star that was bigger than our sun. NOVA explores this mysterious explosion that led to the discovery of Crab Nebula.

#8 - Absolute Zero: The Race For Absolute Zero (2)

Season 35 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/15/2008

#9 - Doctors' Diaries (1)

Season 36 - Episode 7 - Aired 4/7/2009

In 1987, NOVA's cameras began rolling to chronicle the lives of seven young, bright medical students embarking on the longest and most rigorous endeavor in higher education: the years-long journey to become a doctor. From their first days at Harvard Medical School to the present day, none of them could have predicted what it would take, personally and professionally. In "Doctors' Diaries," a two-hour special, NOVA returns to find out what sorts of doctors—and people—the seven young students have become. The program is the latest installment in the longest-running U.S. documentary of its kind.

#10 - The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time (2)

Season 38 - Episode 16 - Aired 11/9/2011

Ask physicists what time actually is, and the answer might shock you: they have no idea. The deep sense we have of time passing from present to past may be an illusion. How can our understanding of something so familiar be so wrong? In search of answers, Brian Greene takes us on the ultimate time-traveling adventure.

#11 - The Schoolboys Who Cracked the Soviet Secret

Season 16 - Episode 20 - Aired 12/12/1989

The Schoolboys Who Cracked the Soviet Secret recreates the story of a British schoolteacher and his students who discovered secrets of the Soviet space program. In the 1960s, Geoffrey Perry at the Kettering Grammar School gave his students used short wave radios for a science project, but the school project had international reach when the group connected with Soviet transmissions.

#12 - Cuttlefish: Kings of Camouflage

Season 34 - Episode 3 - Aired 4/3/2007

NOVA explores the lives of cuttlefish. Not actually fish, these cephalopods can change their shape and color, they can put on dazzling light shows, and they're surprisingly intelligent.

#13 - Ape Genius

Season 35 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/19/2008

As new research continues to reveal that apes are smarter than previously thought, NOVA explores just what separates humans from the great apes.

#14 - Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius

Season 34 - Episode 1 - Aired 2/6/2007

Against all odds, African-American chemist Percy Julian became one of the greatest scientists of the 20th-Century.

#15 - Smartest Machine on Earth

Season 38 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/9/2011

Augmenting human intelligence is a lot tougher than it looks, and the promise of "Hal" from 2001: A Space Odyssey is still just a fantasy. But scientists are edging closer with machines like "Watson," an IBM computing system that is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge: taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Given the complexity of human language, could any computer truly understand it? It remains to be seen if this amalgam of circuits and silicon can really take us closer to the dream of a fully developed artificial intelligence, a truly "conscious" machine. Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent."

#16 - Secrets of the Samurai Sword

Season 34 - Episode 9 - Aired 10/9/2007

NOVA follows the long and exacting centuries-old process of making a Japanese samurai sword, from smelting the ore to the finished katana.

#17 - Descent Into The Ice

Season 31 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/10/2004

A team of "glacionauts" verntures into a labyrinth of unexplored and hazardous glacier caves on France's Mt. Blanc.

#18 - Apollo’s Daring Mission

Season 45 - Episode 17 - Aired 12/26/2018

Apollo astronauts and engineers tell the inside story of Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon. The U.S. space program suffered a bitter setback when Apollo 1 ended in a deadly fire during a pre-launch run-through. In disarray, and threatened by the prospect of a Soviet Union victory in the space race, NASA decided upon a radical and risky change of plan: turn Apollo 8 from an earth-orbit mission into a daring sprint to the moon while relying on untried new technologies. Fifty years after the historic mission, the Apollo 8 astronauts and engineers recount the feats of engineering that paved the way to the moon.

#19 - Marathon Challenge

Season 34 - Episode 11 - Aired 10/30/2007

13 amateurs train for the 26.2 mile Boston Marathon.

#20 - The Renewable Tree

Season 3 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/7/1976

Each Sunday edition of the New York Times consumes 153 acres of trees. The paper packs, napkins, paper cups and packing used by McDonald's gobble up 315 square miles of trees every day. NOVA asks if, at this rate, trees can remain a renewable resource.

#21 - The Case of ESP

Season 11 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/17/1984

In the past decade, a number of researchers have begun systematic laboratory research into extrasensory perception—ESP. NOVA considers the claims for—and against—paranormal phenomena and looks at some startling applications in the field of archaeology, criminology and warfare.

#22 - Shadow of the Condor

Season 20 - Episode 14 - Aired 11/2/1993

NOVA soars with the condor, an extraordinary bird that lives a tenuous existence in the California mountains and the Andes of South America. Footage includes never-before-photographed nesting sites in the cliffs of Patagonia.

#23 - Deadliest Tornadoes

Season 39 - Episode 9 - Aired 4/11/2012

In April 2011, the worst tornado outbreak in decades left a trail of destruction across the U.S., killing more than 360 people. Why was there such an extreme outbreak? How do such outbreaks form? With modern warning systems, why did so many die? Is our weather getting more extreme—and, if so, how bad will it get? In this NOVA special, we meet scientists striving to understand the forces at work behind last year's outbreak. Could their work improve tornado prediction in the future? We also meet people whose lives have been upended by these extreme weather events and learn how we all can protect ourselves and our communities for the future.

#24 - Invisible Universe Revealed

Season 42 - Episode 8 - Aired 4/22/2015

Follow the historic rescue of Hubble—the space telescope that unveiled the cosmos.

#25 - Why The Towers Fell

Season 29 - Episode 7 - Aired 4/30/2002

Can lessons learned from the Twin Towers' collapse make new buildings safer?