A bicycle adventure takes Jamie and Jennifer through the beautiful countryside of Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. The island’s soil, rich in iron oxide, make agriculture one of the most important industries on the island. Wanting to learn more, the hosts enlist the help of Kyle Jewell, a 14-year-old dairy farmer. He’s competing at the annual 4H Rural Youth Fair. Jamie and Jennifer have fun learning how to care for all sorts of animals, before heading back to Kyle’s family farm to hear about what’s involved with running a dairy farm.
Grade levels: Upper Elementary (4-6)
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Discovering Les Îles – Les Îles de la Madeleine
Located in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, Quebec’s Les Îles de la Madeleine are the destination on this episode. The islands are mostly French-speaking, but a small Anglophone minority, including 14-year-old Terry Lapierre also make their home here. Terry joins Jennifer and Jamie in a body-surfing expedition of the seaside caves, before taking them out on his family’s boat, to learn how to fish for Mackerel, just one of the fish caught off the Islands. The hosts soon realize that fishing is the island’s most important industry.
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Woof!: A Guide to Dog Training
When good dogs do bad things, they aren’t necessarily problem dogs, but dogs with problems. So forget the rolled up newspaper-Woof! A Guide to Dog Training features simple and loving training methods and advice that can help you turn your troublemaker into a happy and obedient dog. Join host Matthew Margolis on location as he works through common problems with his students and their dogs. Uncle Matty also demonstrates how to evaluate a dog’s personality and change your training techniques to match, dispels some common training myths, and provides practical solutions for issues such as nipping and chewing. Not only can Uncle Matty’s techniques and tips help you train your dog, but they can help strengthen the bond between you and your beloved pup as well. Matthew Margolis has been working with dogs for over 30 years and is a noted “trainer to the stars.” Uncle Matty, the host of PBS’s series Woof! It’s a Dog’s Life, is a frequent radio and television talk show guest and is the co-author of 17 books on dog training. 126 min on 1 disc
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NOVA scienceNOW: How Does the Brain Work?
Host Neil deGrasse Tyson will tackle one of science’s major challenges in each episode, framed as a simple question that ordinary people wonder and worry about. Neil will guide us as he explores dramatic discoveries and the frontiers of research that connect each central, provocative mystery. Episode includes: 1) Magic and the Brain – Neuroscientists join Penn and Teller to explore why humans are so easily fooled by magic tricks. 2) Can Machines Think Like Us? – A computer named Watson is the latest contestant in machine v. human battles of the “mind.” 3) Magnetic Mind Control – Using magnetic wands, researchers can control the brain functions of human subjects. Sound scary? 4) Profile: David Eagleman – A neuroscientist finds inventive ways to study the brain-like sending test subjects into a terror-inducing free-fall.
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NOVA: Hunting the Elements
Where do nature’s building blocks, called the elements, come from? They’re the hidden ingredients of everything in our world, from the carbon in our bodies to the metals in our smartphones. To unlock their secrets, David Pogue, the lively host of NOVA’s popular “Making Stuff” series and technology correspondent of The New York Times, spins viewers through the world of weird, extreme chemistry: the strongest acids, the deadliest poisons, the universe’s most abundant elements, and the rarest of the rare-substances cooked up in atom smashers that flicker into existence for only fractions of a second. Why are some elements-like platinum or gold-inert, while others-like phosphorus or potassium-are violently explosive? Why are some vital to every breath we take while others are lethal toxins that kill off their discoverers, as with Marie Curie? As he digs for answers, Pogue reveals the story of the elements to be a rich stew simmering with passion, madness, and obsessive scientific rivalry. Punctuated by surprising and often alarming experiments, this program takes NOVA on a roller-coaster ride through nature’s hidden lab and the compelling stories of discovery that revealed its secrets.
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First Flower
In a vivid story, blooming with beauty and scientific mystery, NOVA goes hunting for the world’s earliest flower. Although flowers have long been at the center of human life, gracing our gardens and expressing our emotions-not to mention providing us with food, crops, and medicines-the question of how flowers evolved has long baffled scientists. Charles Darwin called it “an abominable mystery.”
But now a tantalizing fossil that bloomed during the reign of the dinosaurs has surfaced in China. In First Flower, NOVA probes the controversy ignited by this unique fossil, and pursues the trail through the stunning lost world of China’s remote Hengduan Mountains. In this spectacular landscape-dubbed the “Mother of All Gardens”-lie the origins of dozens of plants we take for granted today, including forsythia, clematis, rhododendrons, dogwoods, primroses, and the regal lily. How did they reach our gardens? The detective story behind the evolution of our favorite flowers continues to unfold. Join NOVA on the trail of botany’s most beguiling mystery. -
The Four-Winged Dinosaur
Imagine a moment from the age of dinosaurs frozen in time: primitive birds, bees, insects, early mammals, the first known flowering plants, and of course, dinosaurs, all exquisitely preserved in fine-grained fossils from China’s Liaoning province. Volcanic eruptions in this “dinosaur Pompeii” killed and buried victims quickly, capturing soft, fragile features not normally preserved in fossils – notably the feathers on animals that had never been known to have them before. Now, with state-of-the-art animation to bring this lost world to life, NOVA investigates the mysterious feathered dinosaurs that are challenging old ideas about the origin of bird flight. The central character in this drama is a strange little dinosaur with wings on its legs as well as its arms. The pigeon-sized Microraptor is the smallest adult dinosaur ever found, perhaps the first known tree-dweller. But could it really fly? Is it the key to understanding the origin of flight or merely an evolutionary dead end unrelated to the ancestry of birds? To help solve the riddle, NOVA assembles a team of top paleontologists, aeronautical engineers, and paleo-artists to reconstruct Microraptor and build a sophisticated model for a wind tunnel experiment. The results have surprising implications for long-accepted ideas about how winged flight began.
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Bees – Tales from the Hive
Amazingly up-close footage filmed with specially developed macro lenses brings you the most intimate- and most spectacular- portrayal of a working bee colony ever filmed. It’s not frightening- it’s fascinating. See things you never imagined. Hear things only bees hear. Discover new found facts about the strange and complex life of bees.
Have you ever seen the high-speed mid-air “wedding flight” of a drone and his queen? Do you know how the colony defends itself against honey-loving bears? Did you know it takes nectar from 10 million flowers to create a single liter of honey? No wonder they’re called worker bees! Bees: Tales from the Hive exposes a bee colony’s secret world- detailing such rarely-seen events as the life-or-death battle between a pair of rival queens, a bee eater’s attack on the hive, and a scout bee’s mysterious dance that shares special “nectar directions” with the rest of the hive. -
Kingdom of the Seahorse
They’re the stuff of myth: a remarkable fish whose male becomes pregnant and gives birth. Tour the magical and complex world of the seahorse-from an underwater enclave in Australia (where their mating dance is caught on film for the first time) to the bustling apothecary shops of Hong Kong to a village in the Philippines dependent on the seahorse for survival.
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Shark Attack!
Are sharks developing a taste for human flesh? A rash of shark attacks off Hawaii spurs a team of researchers to track the predators’ elusive movements-and the scientists discover some surprising truths about the way sharks kill.