There is a parlor game physics students play: Who was the greater genius? Galileo or Kepler? (Galileo.) Maxwell or Bohr? (Maxwell, but it's closer than you might think.) Hawking or Heisenberg? (A ...

The last remaining master animal-skin parchment maker in the world demonstrates how paper was made in medieval Europe (and why it wasn’t for vegetarians).

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. To find out, we imagined a souped-up spacecraft that could ...

The planet looks blue from space, but new research shows that most of Earth's water may actually be deep underground. Share Earth is a jewel of the solar system, painted blue by the vast oceans that ...

(This program is no longer available for streaming). In 1948, a British pilot serving in Iraq acquired a clay tablet with an intriguing, 3,700 year-old inscription. The ancient writing tells the story ...

Elephants die; we all do. In elephants and some others, it matters who has died. It’s why they are “who” animals. The crucial importance of memory, learning, and leadership in a family’s survival is ...

(This program is no longer streaming). Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in a fiery global catastrophe. But we know little about how their successors, the mammals, ...

There could be a gaping hole in the Big Bang theory. Or rather, a giant, colossal black-hole caused by the collapse of a four-dimensional star. One of the main problems with the Big Bang is that the ...

An electrical engineer works on Form Energy's 2022 battery module in the company's lab in Berkeley, California. Image courtesy of Form Energy Share Weirton, West Virginia has iron in its blood. The ...

In a contest for the least contentious statement a person can make, “What goes up must come down” is surely a strong contender. Of the four known fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, ...

To the nervous system, memories and chronic pain are strikingly similar. Can we use the same technique to erase them? ByEleanor Nelson Wednesday, August 13, 2014 NOVA NextNOVA Next Nerve cells, like ...

What if the fundamental “stuff” of the universe isn’t matter or energy, but information? That’s the idea some theorists are pursuing as they search for ever-more elegant and concise descriptions of ...