After the devastating 2019 fire at Notre Dame, two mysterious sarcophaguses were discovered under the cathedral’s stone floor. Who is buried in them, and what secrets will these coffins reveal?

Today there is mounting concern about the threat of a bioterrorist attack using smallpox—so much concern that in October 2001 the American government decided to order enough vaccine to protect ...

ROCK IT, standing up, side-to-side. Or, maybe try to ROLL IT, lying down, on round palm poles, or perhaps DRAG IT on its back. Among the many secrets buried in Easter Island prehistory is the ...

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?

NOVA: There have been claims that a great civilization predates ancient dynastic Egypt—one that existed some 10,500 years B.C.—and that this civilization was responsible for building the ...

Unlike the octopus's arms, which that animal often uses to move and carry objects, the cuttlefish's eight arms are specialized for grasping prey after the cuttlefish captures it with its two ...

Heavy water is a form of water with a unique atomic structure and properties coveted for the production of nuclear power and weapons. Like ordinary water—H 2 0—each molecule of heavy water ...

The search for the cause of the fire that brought down Swissair Flight 111 on the evening of September 2, 1998, killing all 229 people aboard, took over four years and cost $39 million. It was one ...

Over 2,700 years ago, the Assyrians exiled the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel. The ten tribes would have returned at once to the Holy Land had not the Lord encircled them with the legendary ...

The question of who built the pyramids, and how, has long been debated by Egyptologists and historians. Standing at the base of the pyramids at Giza it is hard to believe that any of these ...

NOVA has over 200 companion Web sites to past TV programs. Find them by interest, program title, or year of broadcast.

When the subject of alien abductions was first suggested as a possible NOVA, I was intrigued. As a long-time sci-fi buff and one open-minded to the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence, I could ...