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Private Notes
Season Opener: Myths and misconceptions are often born from the concealment of facts. This program brings the penis front and center for an unfettered study of the male organ's place in history, art, religion, and contemporary life.
Imagine if a new disease suddenly began to kill off some of the healthiest young people in your community. Starting with flu-like symptoms, it soon escalates and kills its victims within hours. People literally drown as their lungs fill with fluid. In the spring of 1993, a young Navajo couple and their infant son were just beginning their life together when unexpectedly and unannounced, tragedy struck.
Despite astonishing advances in many areas of modern medicine, the treatment of Parkinson's disease has changed very little since drug therapy was introduced nearly 40 years ago. Today however, doctors are gaining new insights into this complex disabling disease through the use of experimental surgery. Lynda MacKenzie has waited two years for experimental brain surgery for Parkinson's disease.
We've all felt the terror of being lost - even for just a few moments. We lose our way; a child unexpectedly vanishes in the aisles of a supermarket.
A baby perfect in every detail. Every one of the billions of cells in this baby carry all of the genetic information needed to produce every part of the body. But what happens if this genetic information is incomplete, the design modified, the function altered or destroyed by trauma or disease or a body part simply wears out? Engineers world wide are working with plastics, metals and living tissues. Trying to mimic Mother Nature and return the damaged body to function and dignity.
When David Suzuki was born 1936, there were two billion human beings. In his lifetime, our population has tripled. And in that time, virtually all of the modern things that we take for granted, the birth control pill, computers, jet planes, satellites -- you name it, have become a part of our daily lives. When you add all of that together, our numbers, our consumption, our technology, our economy -- we have become something never seen before on this Earth. A species so powerful we are changing the biological and physical features of the planet.
In our previous program, we saw how science and technology have presented us with a paradox -- a world in which we are increasingly powerful yet increasingly vulnerable at the same time. We looked at the consequences of our ever- increasing consumption of the earth's resources, at the growth of environmental consciousness. A world where it sometimes seemed that we had little sense of our real goals. Tonight, the stakes get higher as we travel into the future.
A nuclear power plant whether Chernobyl or this one near Toronto, is not a place you want run by people who are half asleep. But from all over, from surgeons, police, parents, you hear the same complaint -- they're tired. They can't get enough sleep. It's been called a sleep famine. Part of the price we pay for a non-stop 24 hour a day lifestyle. Life goes on around the clock. And in our 24 hour a day, seven day a week society, one of the major victims has been sleep.
These are 12-year-old Americans. Like all children their age, their personalities are already well defined. We assume their personalities come from their parents but a controversial new theory says we've got it all wrong. When someone proposes an idea that runs counter to what most people think, a controversy results. The influential role of parents has rarely been questioned until now.
Mass bleaching of coral has swept the world's tropical oceans, in places leaving hundreds of miles of coral coastline severely damaged. This program examines the issues associated with damage to corals: rising temperatures, and acidification due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Wild Goose Chase explores the ways in which city-dwelling Canada Geese and arctic-nesting Lesser Snow Geese have turned the modern, human-altered landscape to their advantage.
The Birth of The Human Mind takes viewers on an amazing journey back in time, exploring the use of language, tools and how our distant ancestors came to walk.
Did we kill off our cousins, interbreed and merge with them, or did they just die out? It took five million years for an upright ape to evolve into an agile, quick-thinking and inventive human being.
Violent thunderstorms develop in the heat of spring and summer. The heat quickly draws large amounts of water vapour into the air. As the cloud grows, it rises high into the atmosphere. Eventually it hits a layer of cold air -- the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Blocked from rising, the cloud spreads into an anvil shape. Within the cloud, the droplets combine and grow until gravity draws them back to Earth. It takes a million droplets to make a single rain drop.
The strip of vegetation along a waterway is called the riparian zone, the 'green zone.' This program shows that protecting a stream or restoring a river often means repairing this green riparian zone, which scientists say is as important to the river's ecosystem as the water itself.
