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NOVA: Mystery of a Masterpiece

A new breed of experts are approaching “cold case” art mysteries as if they were crime scenes. Watch Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8pm.

In October 2009, a striking portrait of a young woman in Renaissance dress made world news headlines. Originally sold two years before for around $20,000, the portrait is now thought to be an undiscovered Leonardo da Vinci masterwork worth more than $100 million. How did cutting-edge imaging analysis help tie the portrait to Leonardo? NOVA meets a new breed of experts who are approaching “cold case” art mysteries as if they were crime scenes, determined to discover “who committed the art,” and follows art sleuths as they deploy new techniques to combat the multi-billion dollar criminal market in stolen and fraudulent art.

NOVA: Mystery of a Masterpiece
Watch Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 8pm.

Watch Mystery of a Masterpiece Preview on PBS. See more from NOVA.

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NOVA: What Darwin Never Knew

Reveals answers to the riddles that Darwin couldn’t explain. Watch Wednesday, December 21 at 8pm.

Following the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s famous On the Origin of Species, NOVA reveals answers to the riddles that Darwin couldn’t explain. Stunning breakthroughs in a new science — nicknamed “evo devo” — are linking the enigma of origins to another of nature’s great mysteries: the development of an embryo. To explore this exciting new idea, NOVA takes viewers on a journey from the Galapagos Islands to the Arctic, from the Cambrian explosion of animal forms half a billion years ago to the research labs of today. Here, scientists are finally beginning to crack nature’s biggest secrets at the genetic level. And, as NOVA shows in this absorbing detective story, the results are confirming the brilliance of Darwin’s insights, while exposing clues to life’s breathtaking diversity in ways he could scarcely have imagined.

Watch Wednesday, December 21 at 8pm.

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NOVA: Elegant Universe

Scientists revolutionized string theory. Watch Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 9pm.

The final episode shows how in 1995 Edward Witten of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, aided by others, revolutionized string theory by successfully uniting the five different versions into a single theory that is cryptically named “M-theory,” a development that required a total of 11 dimensions. But the new 11th dimension is different from all the others, since it implies that strings can come in higher dimensional shapes called membranes, or “branes” for short. These possess truly science-fiction-like qualities, since in principle they can be as large as the universe. A brane can even be a universe — a parallel universe — and we may be living in one right now.

Watch Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 9pm.

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NOVA: The Illusion of Time

Time. We waste it, save it, kill it, make it. Watch Wednesday, Science & Nature Night, November 9, 2011 at 8pm.

Time. We waste it, save it, kill it, make it. The world runs on it. Yet ask physicists what time actually is, and the answer might shock you: They have no idea. Even more surprising, the deep sense we have of time passing from present to past may be nothing more than an illusion. How can our understanding of something so familiar be so wrong? In search of answers, Brian Greene takes us on the ultimate time-traveling adventure, hurtling 50 years into the future before stepping into a wormhole to travel back to the past. Along the way, he will reveal a new way of thinking about time in which moments past, present, and future—from the reign of T. rex to the birth of your great-great-grandchildren—exist all at once. This journey will bring us all the way back to the Big Bang, where physicists think the ultimate secrets of time may be hidden. You’ll never look at your wristwatch the same way again.

NOVA: Fabric of the Cosmos — The Illusion of Time
Watch Wednesday, Science & Nature Night, November 9, 2011 at 8pm.

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