This series explores the startling new map of the brain that has emerged from the past decade of neuroscience and shares a revelatory view of this most complicated organ, which now contradicts much of what we previously believed. Narrated by actress Blair Brown, the series tells stories through a mix of personal histories, expert commentary and cutting-edge animation. Viewers will not only learn startling new truths about the brain, they will voyage...

Who would have predicted that a hot spot left over from the Big Bang would eventually lead to our galaxy, the solar system, the Earth, - and to us? Origins explores how the universe and our planet began amid chaos and eventually gave birth to the first stirrings of life. Join cutting-dege scientists on a voyage deep into the Earth to find analogs to the earliest life on our planet, and travel a million miles from Earth with a space probe designed...

Disc 1: Tour the surface of Earth's life-giving star. Mars may be the future of humanity - uses data collected from probes and robotic rovers. Scars on the planet's surface and in its fossil record illustrate the threat posed by meteorites, comets, and asteroids that routinely collide with Earth. Two and a half times the size of all the other planets in the solar system combined, and half a billion miles from Earth, Jupiter is a colossal riddle. Disc...

Examines the series of catastrophes that have struck Earth since its creation 4.5 billion years ago. Dinosaurs found themselves victims of these catastrophes and dominant species were wiped out, but hardier creatures survived and thrived until the next cycle of catastrophe and extinction.

Four and a half billion years ago, how did life emerge on Earth? Robert Hazen advances a startling idea, that the rocks on Earth were not only essential to jump-starting life, but then, life helped give birth to hundreds of minerals we rely upon today.

Over 60,000 years ago, the first modern humans left their African homeland and entered Europe, then a bleak and inhospitable continent in the grip of the Ice Age. But when they arrived, they were not alone: the stocky, powerfully built Neanderthals had already been living there for hundreds of thousands of years. So what happened when the first modern humans encountered the Neanderthals? Did they make love or war?

The trial of John Scopes, a Tennesee biology teacher arrested in 1925 for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. The Scopes trial was America's first major media event.

"Join geneticist Spencer Wells and a team from National Geographic's Genographic Project as they trace the human journey through time, from our origins in the heart of Africa to the ends of the world. Cutting edge science, coupled with a cast of New Yorkers -- each with their own unique genetic history -- helps paint a picture of these amazing journeys. The human family tree answers some of humanity's most burning questions -- who we are and where...

The source of the earth's great variety of animals was a scientific mystery until Charles Darwin proposed the idea of natural selection. Nova presents breakthroughs in a new science nicknamed "evo devo" that are linking the enigma of origins to another of nature's mysteries, the development of embryos.

Nova and National Geographic present exclusive access to an astounding discovery of ancient fossil human ancestors. Deep in a South African cave, a special team of experts has brought to light an unprecedented wealth of fossils belonging to a crucial gap in the record of our origins that spans the transition between the ape-like australopithecines (such as the famous Lucy) and the earliest members of the human family. The film describes the 2013 discovery,...