NOVA | scienceNOW | About the Series

For more than three decades, NOVA has been unrivaled in bringing authoritative, innovative, and entertaining science documentaries to television. Now the same award-winning producers have teamed up with Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and host, to present multiple stories in a magazine format show. Each hour-long episode of NOVA scienceNOW features Tyson's "Cosmic Perspective" and four fast-paced, timely science and technology stories, including a profile piece on an intriguing personality in the field.

Since its premiere in 2005, NOVA scienceNOW has covered everything from stem cells to hydrogen fuel cells, from T. rex to the ivory-billed woodpecker, from surgery on pet fish to frogs that freeze solid in winter.

In its third season, NOVA scienceNOW returns this summer with six new episodes on its own night—Wednesdays on PBS. The shows explore new discoveries in computer science, astronomy, engineering, and medicine, including a segment on a dark matter detector buried at the foot of an abandoned mine, a report from a lab where mice are retrieving their lost memories, and a search for the very first primate, which might turn out to be a tree-climbing creature the size of a mouse. Scientists profiled for this summer's episodes include Pardis Sabeti, a bass-playing geneticist who combines rhythmic intensity and impassioned vocals with cutting-edge science, and Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, who jumped the border fence separating Mexico and the U.S. two decades ago and who is now an assistant professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins University.

"Our experience is that NOVA viewers thirst for knowledge and want to meet the people who are changing the world around them," says Paula Apsell, director of the WGBH Science Unit and Senior Executive Producer of NOVA. "We are confident that NOVA scienceNOW will help satisfy their scientific appetite."