Granada Media (Firm).

This program shows how and why the Nazi concept of racial superiority developed, and how and why the German nation was organized to achieve it. It focuses on the 1936 Olympics as grist for the German propaganda mill; organized, planned persecution as an element of government policy; political suppression and anti-Semitism; Mein Kampf as a blueprint; the Nuremberg Laws defining racial purity; Joseph Goebbels and the Big Lie; and how German youth were...

This program opens in the emergency room of a large hospital where head injuries are an all-too-common problem. The importance of the brain is evident from the skill and technology employed in ensuring that any damage to it is minimized. Using combinations of computerized tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and advanced surgical techniques, the program shows why the brain is so important and explores what is known about how it works....

This program introduces the concepts of naturally occurring and artificially induced mutagens, demonstrates how X-radiation and chemical additives can produce genetic mutations, introduces Dr. Maclyn McCarty (one of three researchers who identified DNA as the substance that transformed one variety of Pneumococcus into another), and shows how DNA is extracted and precipitated. After viewing the program, students should understand why Drosophila melanogaster...

The roots and foreign branches of the guitar-family tree. The program looks at the more important of the many relatives of this instrument.

Dwarfism - achondroplasia - affects one out of every 25,000 children. This program follows four families impacted by this condition: a person of short stature whose husband is of average height anxiously waits to learn if her unborn child will be a dwarf; a 13-year-old little person, taunted at school, opts for an extraordinary operation that will lengthen her legs; a couple, comfortable with their own dwarfism, talk about their life; and another...

After seven years, Odysseus the much-enduring leaves Calypso and is shipwrecked once again, this time to be tossed ashore in the Land of the Phoecians, where Nausicaa provides the hospitality the gods require of all mortals and Odysseus tells the story of his adventures to King Alcinous. Landing finally in Ithaca, he is greeted by the goddess Athene disguised as a beggar, who advises him on the strategy for regaining his palace and his wife.

A fascinating chapter in the history of the English language is illustrated by the 10th-century Norse village excavated in present-day York. A careful, scholarly reconstruction of the site demonstrates life in England around the time of the Domesday Book-roughly equidistant between Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales. The program explains the Norse element in the English language.

Sediment sequences deposited under glacial conditions during the Pleistocene period cover some 10% of the earth's land surface. This program concentrates on the interpretation of a sediment sequence exposed in a river cliff cut by the River Severn in England. Techniques of sampling and analysis are illustrated, with emphasis on the measurement of particle size and of particle dip and orientation. This analysis suggests that the deposits were laid...

Aluminum is extracted and purified from clays and rocks at a British plant by purifying bauxite ore to aluminum oxide and reducing this oxide to molten metal. The influence of economic factors is seen in the location of aluminum plants, which consume large amounts of electrical energy. In the United States, plants are located close to the power source rather than to ore deposits; in England, where electricity is uniformly priced throughout the country,...

At ground level, shallow seas, broad beaches, dunes, and waterlogged hollows seem to comprise a chaotic environment. In fact, there is order and form, produced by the interaction of wind, vegetation, and moving sand. Because sand dunes develop rapidly, the development of a landform can be observed. Measuring wind velocity demonstrates how saltation, sand movement, and erosion happen. The program demonstrates the morphology of dune development and...