Venom: Nature's Killer
Hunting down the most venomous animals to reveal their medical mysteries
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Venom: Nature's Killer
Over the millennia, thousands of creatures have developed that most sophisticated of biological and chemical weapons: venom. These complex chemicals can scramble your brain signals, paralyze your muscles, puncture your blood cells, even begin digesting you from within. But nature's most potent toxins might also contain the keys to a new generation of advanced drugs. Such drugs might help doctors treat heart attacks, cancer, diabetes, and other serious illnesses. Follow NOVA crews as they join scientists on a dangerous quest to track down and capture the world's most venomous animals—to find out both how they can kill us, and how they can save us.
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How Smart Are Animals?
Would you care to match wits with a dog, an octopus, a dolphin, or a parrot? You may think twice after watching the segments in this NOVA scienceNOW episode. While we may not be ready to send pets to Harvard, the remarkable footage and findings presented here demonstrate that many animal species are much smarter than we assume and in ways we had never imagined.
How Smart Are Animals?
Dogs, dolphins, parrots, and even octopuses (mere mollusks!) may be smarter than you think.
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- 14:52
How Smart Are Dogs?
New discoveries are revealing that "man's best friend" is smarter than we ever thought, with a brain that resembles our own in ways we never imagined. Travel to Wolf Park, where scientists are tracing the evolutionary path that turned wild animals into our cuddly companions, and meet a superdog with a vocabulary of over 1,000 words.
How Smart Are Dogs?
Meet an extraordinary Border collie and other dogs that are changing our view of canine intelligence.
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- 10:50
How Smart Are Dolphins?
Off the coast of Honduras, on Roatan Island, a legendary experiment in dolphin communication is being attempted for the first time in 20 years—one that could prove that dolphins can, in effect, "speak" with one another to coordinate their behavior. Other studies reveal that these playful marine mammals can plan ahead and problem-solve in ways few other animals can.
How Smart Are Dolphins?
These brainy marine mammals can "read," plan ahead, and communicate in astounding ways.
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- 09:58
How Smart Is An Octopus?
Cephalopods—octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—are some of the weirdest creatures on Earth. They perform fantastic feats of camouflage, boast surprisingly large brains, and can even solve problems—like how to get tasty shrimp out of a twist-top jar. But are these remarkable behaviors truly a sign of intelligence?
How Smart Is An Octopus?
Hold your fork—octopuses and other mollusks are more intelligent than you may think.
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- 11:55
Profile: Irene Pepperberg & Alex
An unlikely scientific team, Irene Pepperberg and her talking parrot, Alex, revolutionized scientists' ideas about animal communication and intelligence. Yet even after Alex's premature death, Pepperberg still struggles to convince some critics that Alex's accomplishments—counting, reasoning, identifying shapes and colors—are more than mere party tricks. (In this photo, Pepperberg poses with a new study subject named Griffin.)
Profile: Irene Pepperberg & Alex
One woman's 30-year relationship with an African gray parrot transformed our understanding of bird intelligence.
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Dogs Decoded
(Program not available for streaming.) "Dogs Decoded" reveals the science behind the remarkable bond between humans and their dogs and investigates new discoveries in genetics that are illuminating the origin of dogs—with surprising implications for the evolution of human culture. Other research is proving what dog lovers have suspected all along: Dogs have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to dogs with the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between humans and dogs come to be? And how can dogs, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently?
Dogs Decoded
How smart are dogs, and what makes them such ideal companions?
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- 52:22
Lizard Kings
They look like dragons and inspire visions of fire-spitting monsters. But these creatures with their long claws, razor-sharp teeth, and muscular, whip-like tails are actually monitors, the largest lizards now walking the planet. With their acute intelligence, monitors—including the largest of all, the Komodo dragon—are a very different kind of reptile, blurring the line between reptiles and mammals. Thriving on Earth essentially unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs, they are a very successful species, versatile at adapting to all kinds of settings. This program looks at what makes these long-tongued reptiles so similar to mammals and what has allowed them to become such unique survivors.
Lizard Kings
Meet the monitors, the largest, fiercest, and craftiest lizards on Earth.
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- 11:30
Gangster Birds
Woodpeckers watch out: Cowbirds might make you an offer you can't refuse. The common cowbird, a species found in backyards throughout North America, is a "brood parasites"—a phrase ecologists use to describe animals that skip out on parenting by depositing their young in the care of another. In this program, see how ecologist Jeff Hoover has stumbled on a clue that might unravel the most brutal reign of terror in the avian world.
Gangster Birds
Common cowbirds are brood parasites that may be operating a mafia-style protection racket in your backyard.
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- 10:35
Smart Marine Mammals
Scientists studying the behavior and intelligence of seals, sea lions, and other captive marine mammals at the University of California's Long Marine Lab say that these animals are challenging long-held assumptions about what makes humans different from other animals. Correspondent Ziya Tong discovers just what the researchers mean after she meets some of their gregarious pinniped students.
Smart Marine Mammals
Marine mammals are wowing researchers with more than just circus tricks.
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- 15:05
Dinosaur Plague
What killed off the dinosaurs? Over the years, experts have suggested everything from global climate change to a spate of massive volcanic eruptions to the most widely accepted culprit: an asteroid that unleashed global devastation. But as correspondent Chad Cohen reports, some scientists believe the giant reptiles might have been taken down by something almost too tiny to see.
Dinosaur Plague
Insects caught in amber spark a controversial theory about what killed the dinosaurs.
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- 09:44
Profile: Maydianne Andrade
Maydianne Andrade's career might seem like something out of a horror film (her favorite genre), but Andrade can't imagine how she would spend her days and nights if not studying the cannibalistic behavior of the Australian redback spider. She has discovered why it makes evolutionary sense for the males of this species, a type of black widow, to make the ultimate sacrifice, what she calls "adaptive suicide."
Profile: Maydianne Andrade
By peering into the sex lives of spiders, this evolutionary biologist has shown the upside of cannibalism.
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