NOVA scienceNOW : 50 - Moon Smasher, Secrets in the Salt, Bird Brains, Profile: Lonnie Thompson

Moon Smasher - 02:15

Tag along with a team of scientists at NASA who will smash two SUV-sized rockets onto the lunar surface and unleash a debris cloud to study with LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite). The data could provide the key to understanding how to build a permanent base on the moon, accelerating a new "race to the moon."

Secrets in the Salt - 13:06

The ancient Egyptians preserved their dead with salt. The technique worked so well that bodies thousands of years old still survive today as mummies. Now researchers are uncovering evidence that salt has preserved life-forms much older than any pharaoh. Correspondent Ziya Tong explores a place where the ultimate natural preservative may enshroud remnants of life a quarter billion years old.

Bird Brains - 24:56

Birds have an undeserved reputation for low brainpower. In fact, they produce one of the most glorious phenomena in nature: birdsong. How do their brains do it? And what does this skill tell us about the evolution of another remarkable phenomenon, human language?

Research on an Australian songbird called the zebra finch is shedding light on babbling in babies, stuttering, and the neuronal processes of understanding and making sounds. Evidence of the evolution of birdsong as well as human speech may lie in our genes, including an intriguing gene called FOXP2.

Profile: Lonnie Thompson - 38:20

For more than 30 years, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson has been collecting ice. Why? Because cores of ice from high mountain glaciers contain significant data about past climate change, which can be useful in helping us combat current climate change. All told, Thompson has worked in 15 countries on five continents, helping to build an invaluable archive dating back 700,000 years.

Cosmic Perspective & LCROSS: The Search For Water - 49:49

Turkish subtitles will be added soon.

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