Wednesday, August 3 at 9:00 p.m.
Rat Attack
Shot in the Indian state of Mizoram, where the massive onslaught occurred on schedule
in 2008, footage shows hordes of rats emerging from the forest right at harvest season—
consuming entire crops and leaving subsistence farmers facing starvation. The chance
to document and study this remarkable rat outbreak won’t occur again for another half-century.
In the film, the world’s foremost rat biologist, Ken Aplin of the Australian National Wildlife
Collection (and National Geographic research grantee), arrives before the onset of the
attack to try to understand the cause of the colossal infestation, which is steeped in local
lore.
Wednesday, August 24 at 9:00 p.m.
Hunting the Hidden Dimension
What do movie special effects, the stock market, heart attacks and the rings of Saturn have in common? They're all connected by a revolutionary new branch of math called fractals, which has changed the way we see the world and opened up a vast new territory to scientific analysis and understanding. NOVA tells the dramatic story of a group of pioneering mathematicians who developed fractals from a curiosity that few took seriously to an approach that is touching nearly every branch of understanding — including what happened after the Big Bang and the ultimate fate of our universe.
Wednesday, August 31 at 9:00 p.m.
Becoming Human: Birth of Humanity
Featuring interviews with world-renowned scientists, each hour unfolds with a CSI-like
forensic investigation into the life and death of a specific hominid ancestor. Becoming
Human was shot “in the trenches” where discoveries were unearthed throughout Africa
and Europe. Dry bones spring back to life with stunning computer-generated animation
and prosthetics. Fossils not only give us clues to what early hominids looked like, but, with
the aid of ingenious new lab techniques, how they lived and how we became the creative,
“behaviorally modern” humans of today.
Wednesday, August 31 at 10:00 p.m.
Becoming Human: Last Man Standing
NOVA probes a wave of dramatic new evidence, based partly on cutting-edge DNA analysis, that reveals new insights into how we became today’s creative and “behaviorally modern” humans and what really happened to the enigmatic Neanderthals who faded into extinction.The program examines the fate of the Neanderthals, our European cousins who died out as
modern humans spread from Africa into Europe during the Ice Age. Did modern humans interbreed with
Neanderthals and/or exterminate them? It explores crucial new evidence from the recent
decoding of the Neanderthal genome, which until just a few years ago was thought to be an impossible
technical feat.
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