NOVA Season 2

Right now you can watch NOVA Season 2 on and — and it earns the access it was given. A compact run that never overstays its welcome. 140 viewers have already rated it on TMDB — the kind of consensus that does not happen by accident. Rigorous in a way documentary storytelling does not always commit to. Available now — press play and find out why people keep recommending it.

NOVA Season 2 is not trying to be everything to everyone, and that focus is exactly what makes it work. What makes NOVA Season 2 work is a willingness to sit with complexity instead of resolving it neatly. Season 2 of NOVA includes 17 episodes. It aired from November 1974 to April 1975. Episodes include "Why Do Birds Sing?", "How Much Do You Smell?", "The Hunting Of The Quark". It was aired in 1974. What elevates NOVA Season 2 above most documentary work is a refusal to settle for the easy version of the story. It knows exactly what it is, and does not try to be anything else.

Anyone after documentary work that genuinely informs rather than confirms will value NOVA Season 2. It stands on its own even without an obvious comparison point. Best experienced as a single, sustained watch if your schedule allows. The access the production gets is remarkable, and the storytelling does full justice to it. Worth watching in order, from the beginning.

📡 Where to Watch NOVA Season 2

🇦🇺 Australia

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🇺🇸 United States

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🇬🇧 United Kingdom

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🇨🇦 Canada

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🇳🇿 New Zealand

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🎬 NOVA Season 2 — Episode Guide

Why Do Birds Sing?

1974-11-03

NOVA travels to forests and marshes to discover why birds sing and finds surprising parallels with the acquisition of speech in humans.

How Much Do You Smell?

1974-11-10

Many insects and some mammals use smell as a primary means of communication. NOVA explains how, for example, the entire economy of an ant's nest is organized by smell, and how some moths use smell for population control—an ability we is now beginning to understand.

The Hunting Of The Quark

1974-11-17

Smashing matter into ever smaller pieces in an attempt to find its fundamental building blocks has produced a confused nightmare of particles. NOVA looks at this on-again, off-again story—one of sciences's most mysterious—and, one of the most expensive, involving some of the biggest machines in the ...

The Secrets Of Sleep

1974-11-24

Most of us spend one-third of our lives in a state of which we understand remarkably little—some people sleep for only a few minutes a night, and function perfectly well, while others declare that eight hours isn't enough. NOVA explores traditional notions about how much sleep we need; looks at effe...

Inside the Golden Gate

1974-12-01

NOVA joins a team of U.S. Geological Survey scientists on a mission to find out just how San Francisco Bay works: its physics, its chemistry and its biology.

The Men Who Painted Caves

1974-12-08

Just why did Cro-Magnon man living in France's Dordogne Valley some 15,000 years ago take time out from the desperate business of survival to paint pictures in inaccessible corners of his cave dwellings? NOVA joins French and American archeologists as they piece together the lifestyle of these hunte...

Red Sea Coral

1974-12-15

NOVA joins a group of English biologists living literally on a platform in the middle of the Red Sea, who for several years have been studying the crown-of-thorns starfish, notorious for the devastation it has wrought on the coral reefs of Australia and the Pacific.

War From the Air

1975-01-05

What Time is Your Body?

1975-01-12

Have you ever sensed that your body reacts differently at different times of the day? NOVA examines the best and worsetimes for work, good times for sex drives and your body's most reactive time of day for alcohol consumption.

E10

The Rise And Fall Of DDT

1975-01-19

Has the case against DDT been proven? A strange question, perhaps, to be asking one year after the US has banned the insecticide, but NOVA dares to ask. Tracing the history of DDT from its discovery through its banning in the States, NOVA asks whether America overreacted with its total ban of this o...

E11

Take the World From Another Point of View

1975-02-02

NOVA profiles two very different scientists: Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, at the pinnacle of his career—a Nobel prizewinner; and Richard Lewontin, a biologist and highly regarded population geneticist from Harvard University.

E12

The Lysenko Affair

1975-02-09

NOVA explores T.D. Lynsenko's rise to power in the Soviet Union in the early 20th century, and how it affected plant genetic research in the USSR.

E13

The Tuaregs

1975-02-16

High in the Hoggar Mountains, in the exact center of the Sahara desert, lives Sidi Mohammed and his family: children, grandchildren, cousins and a few former slave women. Their environment, one of the most ungenerous on earth, provides them with almost nothing. NOVA examines the changing lifestyle o...

E14

The Plutonium Connection

1975-03-09

How likely is it that a terrorist group will steal plutonium intended for nuclear reactor fuel and put together a blackmail weapon of unprecedented power in the shape of a homemade atom bomb? That question is posed by Theodore Taylor, former A and H bomb designer at Los Alamos, in a recent book, The...

E15

The Other Way

1975-03-16

Since the Industrial Revolution, bigger has been better. NOVA profiles E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, who thinks that enough is enough; that the time has come for technology to return to a human scale, where the ability to create is returned from the machine to people.

E16

The Lost World Of The Maya

1975-03-30

For over a thousand years the Mayan civilization grew and flourished in the rain forests of Central America. Discovered and finally destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors, it was lost again until explorers brought it to light in the 19th century. Eric Thompson, an archaeologist who has had a 45 year...

E17

Will The Fishing Have to Stop?

1975-04-06

Fish is an excellent source of protein; it could help ease the growing international food shortage. But in 1972 the total world fish catch dropped. NOVA explores the possible reasons for this decline.

📡 Where to Watch NOVA Season 2

🎬 NOVA Season 2 — Episode Guide

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