Season 4

March 3, 2004

(Disease & Disaster) In 1918, a flu pandemic ripped through the global population with such speed and virulence that by the end of the following year an estimated 40 million people would be dead. Where did this come from and what made it so deadly? Virologists and epidemiologists the world over are still hunting down the answers.

April 11, 2004

In the summer of 2002, a team of textile restorers was invited to Turin to undertake an unprecedented renovation of the shroud, which called for the removal of the shroud's backing cloth and all of its medieval patches. The results were staggering -- brand new forensic evidence that the shroud is indeed 2,000 years old, dating from the time of Christ. Is it the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ, or just a brillian medieval fake?

May 19, 2004

In the three years leading up to D-Day, the Allies had assembled an array of weapons and transport vessels specially designed to overcome Hitler's defenses --  among them gliders, landing craft, minesweepers, and swimming tanks. This is the story of the maverick innovators who conceived of such an armory and its implementation into the largest amphibious invasion in the history of the world, and of the brave young men who woe;dd it so capably on the beach of Normandy. Runtime: 1:36.

August 4, 2004

(Archaeology) The myth of the Amazons, a tribe of bloodthirsty blond women thundering across arid battlefields to the horror of their male foes, has lingered for centuries. Their exploits seized the imagination of the Greek scribes Homer, Hippocrates, and Herodotus. But proof of their existence had always been lacking. Now, a 2,500-year-old mystery may have been solved, cracked by an American scientist whose ten-year odyssey led her tens of thousands of miles in pursuit of the truth. After unearthing evidence of a culture of ancient warrior women in the Russian steppes, Dr. Jeannine Davis-Kimball followed a trail of artifacts to a remote village in Western Mongolia, where her quest for a living link to a long-imagined tribe ended with a startling discovery. There, among the black-eyed Mongols, Davis-Kimball found a blond child, a 9-year-old girl named Meiramgul. Through DNA testing, Davis-Kimball finds that the DNA sequences of the warrior women and those from the girl of Mongolia are identical.