Season 29

October 2, 2001

The program chronicles the tobacco industry's decades long effort to create a "safer" cigarette.

October 9, 2001

The program investigates the brave new world of assisted reproduction.

October 23, 2001

This NOVA program delves into the mind-tingling efforts of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran to discover how the brain works.

October 30, 2001

The film investigates the complicated world of gender identity.

November 6, 2001

NOVA takes an intimate look at the men who are in control of Russia's nuclear missiles, standing just a heartbeat from the top Russian politicians and Armageddon. Hosted by Vladimir Pozner, Russia's top television journalist, this startling film shows that despite low pay and the tedious existence that these soldiers and their families live with, these men are motivated by a strong sense of patriotic duty and responsibility for the ultimate powers of destruction at their fingertips, in a job that requires complete perfection.

November 13, 2001

The film follows three New York Times reporters as they delve into the murky past of bioweapons research and grapple with the current threat of anthrax and other attacks.

November 20, 2001

A sequel to the most popular NOVA of all time, "Miracle of Life," the program once again uses the extraordinary microimagery of Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson to track human development from embryo to newborn.

December 11, 2001

Marked by striking imagery and a poetic style, the film dramatizes the life cycle of the world's oldest living thing, the bristlecone pine of California's White Mountains.

December 25, 2001

The program, with Sir David Attenborough narrating, celebrates the extraordinary antics male bowerbirds get up to when courting a female.

January 8, 2002

The program probes the deep mysteries of gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful celestial explosions since the big bang.

January 22, 2002

The film probes the enigma of our Neanderthal cousins and the roots of our own ancestry.

January 29, 2002

February 5, 2002

The program chronicles the lives and covert activities of the so-called "atom spies" in the 1940's, including the big one that got away, Theodore Alvin Hall.

February 26, 2002

A paleontological tour-de-force and suspenseful scientific detective story, the program documents the search for the ancestor of all four-limbed animals, including humans.

March 26, 2002

In October and November 1999, NOVA journeyed into ice-choked Antarctic waters and onto the shores of rugged Elephant and South Georgia Islands as we followed in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton. This legendary explorer's 1914-1916 Endurance expedition is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. Then, in April 2000, we returned to document Shackleton's final trial -- the crossing of South Georgia -- by three of the world's most distinguished mountaineers, Reinhold Messner, Conrad Anker and Stephen Venables. Follow the expeditions as they unfolded in real-time on this Web site, and also watch for a NOVA Giant Screen Film Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure, as well as a NOVA program, "Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance," which originally aired on March 26, 2002.

April 30, 2002

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

May 7, 2002

In the program, NOVA accompanies the men and women of a wildland firefighting crew known as the Arrowhead Hotshots as they battle one of the most destructive wildfire seasons ever, the summer of 2000.