The Central Dogma: From Genomic Information to Protein Synthesis

Featuring Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book, this special takes viewers on an exploration of the human relationship with the plant world — seen from the plants' point of view. Narrated by Frances McDormand, the program shows how four familiar species — the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato — evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication.

Blue Whales: Return of the Giants 3D takes viewers on a journey of a lifetime to explore the world of the magnificent blue whale, a species rebounding from the brink of extinction. Following two scientific expeditions—one to find a missing population of blues off the exotic Seychelles Islands, the other to chronicle whale families in Mexico’s stunning Gulf of California—the film is an inspirational story that transforms our understanding of the largest animal ever to have lived.

Each day, some 2.5 trillion bytes of data are exchanged, a deluge known as "big data." How can we classify, store, and give meaning to this mass of digital information? Will our digital society remain capable of producing a lasting memory? Learn the fate of memory storage in the future.

A documentary of insect life in meadows and ponds, using incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography. It includes bees collecting nectar, ladybugs eating mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their catch, a scarab beetle relentlessly pushing its ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider creating an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.

A breathtaking adventure across five continents and through time to reveal nature's most vital secret. Watch a flying fox gorge itself on a midnight snack of figs. Climb into the prickly jaws of insect-eating plants. Witness a mantis disguised as a flower petal lure its prey to doom.

It's a condition known as "hypertrichosis" or "Ambras Syndrome," but in the 1500s it would transform one man into a national sensation and iconic fairy-tale character. His name: Petrus Gonsalvus, more commonly known today as the hairy hero of Beauty and the Beast.

The documentary depicts the birth of eugenics - a pseudo-science created in the 19th century that propounded the theory of perfecting the human race. According to the views of eugenicists, only healthy and creative individuals should reproduce. The film shows how these controversial ideas influenced the intellectual and political elite of the West in the 20th century, including the dictator of the Third Reich, Adolf Hitler. Eugenics is a pseudoscience created in the 19th century and treating the improvement of the human race. According to eugenicists, only healthy and creative individuals could procreate, and the procreation of the sick or disabled and racially unworthy (prostitutes, the poor, beggars) should be forbidden. The author of the film posits that modern genetics, the killing of unborn children and euthanasia have their roots in this infamous pseudoscience.

When Harvard PhD student Jennifer Brea is struck down at 28 by a fever that leaves her bedridden, doctors tell her it’s "all in her head." Determined to live, she sets out on a virtual journey to document her story—and four other families' stories—fighting a disease medicine forgot.

Travel alongside the astronauts as they deploy and repair the Hubble Space Telescope, soar above Venus and Mars, and find proof of new planets and the possibility of other life forming around distant stars.

Many geneticists and archaeologists have long surmised that human life began in Africa. Dr. Spencer Wells, one of a group of scientists studying the origin of human life, offers evidence and theories to support such a thesis in this PBS special. He claims that Africa was populated by only a few thousand people that some deserted their homeland in a conquest that has resulted in global domination.

In 1858 Charles Darwin struggles to publish one of the most controversial scientific theories ever conceived, while he and his wife Emma confront family tragedy.

Documentary footage from various sources, set to music. Showing the whole of human life, from birth to death and beyond.

A scientific film essay, narrated by Phil Morrison. A set of pictures of two picnickers in a park, with the area of each frame one-tenth the size of the one before. Starting from a view of the entire known universe, the camera gradually zooms in until we are viewing the subatomic particles on a man's hand.

Take a fascinating journey inside the bizarre world of a living human being with this compelling documentary from National Geographic, where microscopic cameras and other state-of-the-art technologies reveal perspectives that will blow your mind. Tracking the body of a female from infancy to old age, viewers will observe the digestion of a meal, the development of the cardiac system and other mesmerizing aspects of the body's inner workings.

The unsolved rape, mutilation and murder of young G.I. Darlene Krashoc has haunted Joe Kenda in the years since he turned in his gun and badge. Until a crack team of cold case cops uses Kenda’s groundwork to set a trap for a monster hiding in plain sight.