Season 20 - Episode Guide

Episode: 20x01 | Airdate: Aug 25, 1992

NOVA looks at grace, speed, strength and endurance of humans and animals.

Episode: 20x02 | Airdate: Sep 29, 1992

Physicists Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard reenact the signing of the 1939 letter that alerted President Franklin Roosevelt to the feasibility of atomic weapons. Szilard drafted and Einstein signed the famous warning, which led to the building of the first atomic bomb.

Episode: 20x03 | Airdate: Oct 13, 1992

NOVA goes behind the scenes to give the real story behind the FBI unit popularized in the Academy Award-winning film, The Silence of the Lambs. Using a detailed psychological profile, the unit helped the Rochester, New York police department catch a notorious serial killer who targeted prostitutes. Actor Patrick Stewart narrates.

Episode: 20x04 | Airdate: Oct 20, 1992

NOVA follows the trail of America's first inhabitants. Did they migrate across a Bering Sea land bridge at the end of the last ice age, as we all learned in school? Or did they arrive thousands of years earlier, possibly by some different route, as new archaeological evidence increasingly hints?

Episode: 20x05 | Airdate: Oct 27, 1992

NOVA explores Earth's greatest natural wonder by rafting down the river that created it, repeating the spectacular first canyon voyage of the 19th-century explorer John Wesley Powell. The Grand Canyon tells the story of nearly 2 billion years of Earth history plus the changes caused by three decades of human intervention.

Episode: 20x06 | Airdate: Nov 4, 1992 (90 min)

In a 90-minute special presentation, NOVA reveals the ancient secrets of how the pyramids were built by actually building one. A noted Egyptologist, Mark Lehner, and a professional stonemason, Roger Hopkins (This Old House), join forces in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza to put clever and sometimes bizarre pyramid construction theories to the test.

Episode: 20x07 | Airdate: Nov 10, 1992

Five thousand years ago, a man perished in a mountain storm. In 1991, his frozen body was found along with artifacts of his vanished way of life. NOVA covers the international effort to unlock the secrets of this astonishing discovery.

Episode: 20x08 | Airdate: Nov 17, 1992

NOVA delves into the deep sea drama of life among the dolphins at research stations in Florida and Australia. Like humans and chimpanzees, dolphins have evolved a sophisticated social system that provides clues about the origins and purpose of big brains and intelligence.

Episode: 20x09 | Airdate: Dec 1, 1992

Two paralyzed drug addicts travel to Sweden to receive a revolutionary treatment for brain disease that is largely unavailable in the US due to the ban on fetal tissue research. "Brain Transplant" continues the remarkable story of a mysterious malady linked to a bad batch of synthetic heroin that NOVA first covered in the 1986 award-winning film, The Case of the Frozen Addict.

Episode: 20x10 | Airdate: Dec 22, 1992

NOVA looks at how Russia and the United States are attacking the intractable problem of alcohol abuse with old and new weapons—including prohibition, hypnotism, imprisonment, surveillance, deception, aversion therapy and group therapy as practiced by Alcoholics Anonymous.

Episode: 20x11 | Airdate: Dec 29, 1992

NOVA examines the high-tech efforts to preserve the world's animal diversity. Noah needed only an ark—but today's conservationists need all the tools that biology, ecology, diplomacy and politics can muster if endangered species are to survive beyond the next century.

Episode: 20x12 | Airdate: Jan 5, 1993

NOVA follows the international team of advisors who are fulfilling the UN mandate to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear technology, poison chemicals, missiles and giant guns are some of the threats that inspectors must hunt down in a cat-and-mouse game with the Iraqis.

Episode: 20x13 | Airdate: Jan 19, 1993

The Gulf War was fought in 38 days of non-stop bombing and four days of swift ground action. Did bombing win it? NOVA looks at the history of strategic bombing and asks whether bombing has now achieved preeminence in warfare.

Episode: 20x14 | Airdate: Jan 26, 1993

For four decades, 400 African American men from Macon, Alabama were unwitting participants in a government study of untreated syphilis. NOVA tells the story of this notorious human experiment. George Strait, ABC News Medical Correspondent, hosts.

Episode: 20x15 | Airdate: Feb 2, 1993

NOVA tells the story of the German scientists abducted to the Soviet Union after World War II to help build an atomic bomb. The success of the crash program in 1949, with the explosion of the first Soviet nuclear weapon, shocked the world.

Episode: 20x16 | Airdate: Feb 9, 1993

NOVA covers scientists on the brink of a sputtering, shaking, impatient volcano, trying to forecast when it will go off. When it does, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines goes big time, producing the largest volcanic eruption in 80 years.

Episode: 20x17 | Airdate: Feb 16, 1993

Athletes are training smarter, running faster, jumping higher and generally outperforming their predecessors—thanks to high technology. NOVA covers the record-setting trend for improving sports performance with science.

Episode: 20x18 | Airdate: Feb 23, 1993

These days, piracy on the high seas often involves sonar, magnometers, metal detectors and other high-tech equipment for finding and plundering sunken ships. NOVA explores the swashbuckling seafaring pirates of old and their present-day successors.

Episode: 20x19 | Airdate: Mar 2, 1993

Wherever we shed our body cells, we leave an indisputable identity card: our DNA. NOVA investigates the new science of DNA typing which is putting increasing numbers of murderers and rapists behind bars.

Episode: 20x20 | Airdate: Mar 30, 1993

NOVA covers both sides of the stormy controversy over the Tasaday tribe. When these isolated cave dwellers were discovered in the Philippines in 1971, they were hailed as a Stone Age relic. Now, many anthropologists denounce them as fakes.