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Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin – PBS (2014)

September 24, 2024 at 4:06 pm / Evolution, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Your Inner Fish, is the first installment of a three part PBS series by Neil Shubin. After a quick review of our shared anatomy with the fish and a whirlwind tour along the evolutionary timeline, the program plunges us into the fascinating saga of discovery of the tetrapods that explains how limbs of the terrestrial vertebrates came to be. Watch how the legendary 375 million year old (Devonian) tetrapod fossil Tiktaalik was discovered after a series of adventurous Arctic expeditions. […]

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Visiting the most vulnerable place on Earth: the ‘doomsday glacier’ – PBS Newshour (2020)

October 5, 2020 at 4:45 pm / Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature

For a little over more than 33 million years, the Antarctic continent remained an exceptionally isolated land mass due to the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that forms a thermal shield around it. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on our planet flowing without obstruction from any other land masses. Unfortunately human induced global warming is changing all that and the effects of the climate change is being felt at both poles of the planet through a phenomenon known […]

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Decoding COVID-19 – Sara Holt | NOVA / PBS (2020)

August 17, 2020 at 8:46 pm / Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Center for Disease Control (CDC) has been one of the most effective institutions in fight against emerging diseases. Yet, strikingly, the US has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Elimination of the immensely important the Global Health Security and Biodefense unit — responsible for pandemic preparedness — established in 2015 is now deemed one of the biggest political mistakes of our time. Unfortunately political interference continued to render experts of this most cutting edge organization largely ineffective and left […]

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Life’s Rocky Start – PBS/NOVA (2016)

July 12, 2020 at 3:33 pm / Evolution, Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, Video

Geology and biological evolution of life influence each other tightly. The title of the documentary “Life’s Rocky Start” reflects this relationship superbly. The six stage transformation of our planet from black, gray, blue, red, white to green is a wonderfully concise way of outlining the geological and biological evolution. More than half of the minerals now incorporated into the upper crust of our planet were produced by living organisms. The movement of continental plates has played a fundamental role in […]

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Learning to Live on the Moon – PBS

May 17, 2016 at 2:04 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Human Nature, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Energy flows, nutrients cycle. This is how we can define working principles of an ecosystem in a nutshell. Our planet has a very complex land-air-water interaction and we are only beginning to understand the behavior of these systems by simplifying them in enclosed systems such as Landscape Evolution Laboratory (LEO). Due to its proximity, the Moon appears to be the most convenient celestial body to colonize. The Moon is so close that it can even occasionally get shielded by the […]

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Coelacanth: The Fish That Time Forgot – PBS NOVA (2001)

December 12, 2015 at 7:00 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Coelacanth morphology and genome has been extremely informative in understanding tetrapod evolution. Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was the curator of a natural history museum in East London. In 1938 a local fisher brought a curious fish specimen which was to become a major discovery in evolutionary biology. Latimer described the fish as Latimeria chalumnae. The fish was over 1 m long, bluish in color. Most interestingly it had fleshy fins that resembled the limbs of terrestrial vertebrates. The discovery was a hugely interesting […]

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Chasing El Niño – Carol L. Fleisher – PBS NOVA (1998)

August 13, 2015 at 9:42 am / Ecological Documentaries, Global Patterns, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Can we predict El Niño? Moreover can we calculate it’s severity and effects on different parts of the world? On board the research ship Ka’imimoana scientists carry out measurements and then build computer models to understand the climate cycle that produces El Niño. The documentary “Chasing El Niño” was released by the aftermath of an intense El Niño event observed during 1997/1998 measured. In March 2015 climatologists have started to detect early signs of another one beginning to develop. They […]

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Revealing the Origins of Life – PBS (2011)

March 6, 2013 at 11:28 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Nova Documentaries, Video

How life began is a very fundamental question. This short documentary is an outstanding primer for scientific explanation of the origin of life. Featuring Nobel prize winner Jack Szostack of Harvard University and John Sutherland of University of Manchester, it explains the chemical evolution leading to the formation of RNA. Scientists all agree that formation of basic building blocks of life is suprisingly very easy. The burning question is how do they react to form complex molecules? RNA world hypothesis […]

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When and Why We Lost Hair?

March 9, 2012 at 1:16 pm / Evolution, Human Nature, Nova Documentaries, Video

When and why our ancestors began to wear clothing is a curious story. Clothing may have emerged for insulation of body heat. Similarly it also have provided a means to carry things and improve mobility. Cold snaps engulfed the earth many times. Using ice cores from Antarctica scientists identified 8 glacial cycles within the last 800 thousand years alone. An archaelogical site from Israel provides the earliest evidence of controlled fire by humans spanning the same time period. We know […]

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