From 93 million miles away, the sun fixes its heated gaze on the scorched desert expanse of Death Valley National Park — the hottest, driest place in North America. But this is no typical desert. Here, breathtaking mountains rise two miles above sprawling salt flats, and mighty sand dunes dance alongside deep craters. Nowhere else is a land so exquisite in its beauty yet brutal in its extremes.

In this ultimate testing ground, the rules are simple — adapt or perish. Fascinating desert dwellers have ingenious ways to outwit Mother Nature in their quest to survive. Tiny antelope squirrels lay with their bellies to the ground in order to purge their bodies of excess heat, while jackrabbits use their long ears to cool themselves.

Whereas the animals appear to do everything in their power to avoid the extreme conditions of Death Valley, many visitors are drawn to the park for the sheer challenge. Top athletes flirt with their own mortality in what has become known as the toughest footrace on the planet, the Badwater Ultramarathon. This 135-mile road race snakes through the valley during the cruel blaze of summer.

In Death Valley, things are never quite as they seem. Beneath its parched surface lies one of America’s largest aquifer systems. Rare access into this astonishing, water-laden underworld brings viewers into a secret realm. Here, a team of biologists works to protect the critically endangered Devil’s Hole pupfish, a species that has lived in this watery cavern since the last Ice Age.

Explore the mystique and the majesty of the largest park in the continental United States on Life in Death Valley.

Online content for Life in Death Valley was originally posted September 2004.

Rom’s snake park and crocodile bank in India, where he works to conserve and breed reptiles in the wild, were the first of their kind when he created them. Now he travels the world in search of modern day dragons. In the caves of Slovenia, he encounters the peculiar creature known as the olm, a cave-dwelling blind salamander once believed to be a baby dragon.  In the rainforests of India’s Western Ghats, Whitaker handles flying lizards, belonging to the species called Draco. When threatened or courting, the males extend the bright yellow flaps on their necks. Whitaker captures one and gently stretches out its amazing wings. Finally, Rom’s quest leads him to Indonesia’s Komodo Island, where he sees a wild Komodo dragon for the first time.

The Dragon Chronicles follows Rom as he journeys around the world, reimagining the lines between fact and fantasy, in search of the fabled beasts’ contemporary counterparts.

Photo © WNET.ORG/Icon Films

You know those beautiful little tropical frogs with electric blue or orange markings? A single touch of their skin could kill you.

Have you ever seen an elegant cone snail shell lying on the beach? Well, beware! It hides a poison harpoon that is deadly.

And watch out! Those snakes and lizards could be armed with venom and toxic saliva.

Amazingly, they may also hold cures to many human diseases. Scientists have discovered that natural poisons, toxins, and venoms contain chemicals that can be used to create an array of drugs for treating everything from chronic pain to cancer. For instance, the cone shell’s venom, packed with nerve-debilitating conotoxins, provides the basis for a new painkiller. Contortrostatin, a component found in copperhead venom, is being used to attack breast cancer cells and to prevent cancer from spreading.

Call it the poison paradox — or The Venom Cure.

To order a copy of The Venom Cure, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Venom Cure was originally posted April 2005.

The natural world is filled with “moments of impact” – the split seconds when animals come into contact with each other and the world around them. Previously many of these moments were too fast or too hidden for us to see. But now new camera technologies reveal what’s behind these remarkable moments, and cutting edge animations illustrate the “inside story” of animal bioengineering that allows each moment of impact to take place.

Episode 1: Hunters & Herds
They are the scenes of some of the largest concentrations of predators and prey on the planet – the vast tracts of grassland and savannah found on every continent but Antarctica. Yet survival in this kind of open, horizontal world is far from easy, with few places to hide, a scarcity of vegetation, drought, fire and the threat of attack by some of the world’s fastest and most powerful hunters.

From Africa’s Serengeti to California’s grasslands, some of nature’s most dramatic moments are caught, examined and “fractured” into their unique parts … within creatures great and small … to reveal the amazing abilities that give each animal the instinct, intelligence and brute prowess to survive. From elaborate impact sequences that spin around animals caught in a “frozen moment” to animations that go inside their bodies – a unique view of animals’ amazing biomechanics is revealed.

Episode 2: Jungle
Teeming with creatures in every shape and form, the jungle is the most diverse habitat on the planet and home to nearly half of the world’s plant and animal species. Rising hundreds of feet from the dark depths of the tropical forest floor, through layers of twisting branch and canopy full of life – this vertical landscape pushes the limits of animal engineering.

The jungle’s layers are peeled back to dissect more amazing moments of impact. Stealth and ambush reign in the jungle and survival depends on highly tuned senses and ingenious defenses. From ninja ants to flying snakes, cameras dive underwater, sail through trees and penetrate fur, feathers, skin and bone to reveal the science of some amazing animal engineering hidden deep in the jungle.

Moment of Impact premieres over two Sundays, April 4 and April 11, 2010.

NATURE’s The Reptiles: Lizards explores the world of the great escape artists of the wild, and looks at their remarkable bag of tricks.

The Reptiles series concludes with the most extraordinarily diverse of all reptiles. Lizards can be found on mountain tops, in the oceans, and in deserts and forests. Viewers meet some of nature’s most spectacular and beautiful varieties, ranging from giants more than ten feet long to tiny creatures no larger than a child’s finger. Lizards bite, lose their tails, have tongues longer than their entire body, and some can even walk on water.

The show travels across the globe to feature some of the most fascinating varieties of lizards, including Indonesia, for a look at the deadly Komodo dragon. The program also looks at people who form strong attachments to the animals, such as Henry Lizardlover, who changed his name to express his feelings for the reptiles. Henry sells photographs of his many lizards posed in a variety of humorous settings.

To order a copy of The Reptiles: Lizards, please visit the NATURE Shop.

Online content for The Reptiles: Lizards was originally posted February 2003.