American Museum of Natural History.

Although Dave (LeVar Burton) and his family are poor sharecroppers in the Deep South in the 1930s, this 15-year-old's problem is shared by teenagers in every era: he stands with one foot in adulthood and the other in childhood. "Almos' a man" yet still treated like a child, Dave struggles for an identity - and there's one thing, one symbol of manhood, he thinks, that could guarantee him instant respect: a gun. Dave finds a way to buy a pistol, and...

Sometime in the 1940s a brown tree snake hitched a ride aboard a U.S. Air Force plane in New Guinea traveling across the Pacific to the island of Guam. As a result, Guam lost all its native bird life. More recently, an African fungus crossed the Atlantic to cause a damaging disease in Caribbean coral, and the European gypsy moth has been steadily transforming America's forests. However, these occurrences are far from unique and are in fact becoming...

The MESSENGER orbiter's January 2008 flyby of the planet Mercury was historic. The last time a spacecraft visited was 1975, and it only mapped half the planet. MESSENGER is now sending back a complete picture of Mercury, shedding light on its geological history. But the ongoing mission will return much more than images. Its data on the planet's core, magnetic field, composition, and other attributes will help scientists answer pressing questions about...

In 2000, building on its pioneering efforts in establishing land and sea parks, the Commonwealth of The Bahamas initiated one of the world's first networks of marine reserves. This designation provided an international team of researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to study the physical, biological, and socioeconomic impacts of such a network and to integrate all of these aspects into recommendations for future conservation strategies. As this...

Collisions between space objects are a vital part of the evolution of our Solar System. Most of Earth's impact craters have been wiped away due to plate tectonics, but evidence of such cosmic catastrophes, such as Arizona's 50,000-year-old meteor crater, do remain. When is Earth due for another major blast? This science bulletin introduces viewers to the professional and amateur astronomers who may be the first to know: first at LINEAR, a near-earth...

The Sun continuously sheds its skin, blowing a ferocious wind of charged particles in all directions, including Earth's. From time to time, storms on the Sun's surface - solar flares, coronal mass ejections - toss off added masses of energy and ions. When that turbulence slams into Earth, it produces "space weather," a natural phenomenon with sometimes spectacular consequences, from colorful auroras to satellite, power, and communications failures....

The journey of a lifetime for young Lily Strickland begins not out of her love for adventure but out of heartache. Longing for the father she lost to the ocean and having no way to say goodbye, Lily strikes out on her own, beginning a journey of the spirit and of the heart. Her mother has found a new man to share her life with and Lily is the bearer of unpleasant secrets in his life that only she knows. Leaving behind a safe, loving environment with...

If technology, cost, and terrain permitted, scientists seeking key data on stars in our galaxy would have loved to construct a behemoth 330-meter-wide telescope atop Mount Wilson, just northeast of Los Angeles. Instead, they arranged six smaller telescopes over an identical area, synchronizing the light to achieve an equally superlative resolution. Called the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA), the array uses the technique of interferometry...

Oxygen is key to Earth's success as a habitable planet. But where did it come from? And when and how did it begin to transform the early atmosphere? This science bulletin explains how scientists are coming to understand oxygen's origins - not by studying ancient air, but by retracing its impact on Earth's surface.

Taking a census of all the luminous objects in one-quarter of the visible cosmos is a hefty accounting job. It takes a specially built telescope on task every clear night for eight years, wielding one of the biggest digital cameras on the planet. More than a hundred million stars, galaxies, and quasars have been tallied so far. This science bulletin introduces viewers to the astronomical observers and theorists set on divining the three-dimensional...