December 2008 Archives

Three percent of all births in the US are multiples and ninety-five percent of those are twins. I have always wondered, "what makes identical twins different when so much on the surface is the same?"

I have grown up with twins, worked with a twins, and have been friends with twins. In all cases I have found that there are way more similarities than differences, but the differeneces that are present are HUGE. One was significantly more intelligent than the other, or one more athletic than the other or more driven the other. You get the idea. There are differences.

I always felt kind of bad for the lesser of the two twins. How could you not? That person will always be compared to their counterpart no matter what they do in life. You can escape a sibling, you can escape a friend, but there is no way you can escape someone that split from the same embryo.

What do you think?

Nat Geo is going back in to the womb to figure out what exactly occurs when an embryo splits. In The Womb: Twins premieres Sunday December 21 at 9p e/p.

Think you can tell them apart? Click here.

Place. Taiwan. Year. 2004. What. Whale explosion.

In 2004, Taiwanese Whale Biologist Professer Wang is called to the scene of a washed up humpback whale at a nearby oyster farm. Over the next days, as he and his team begin to move the gigantic mammal to his laboratory to perform an autopsy to determine the reason for death. Unknowing to the scientists, there has been a buildup of decomposing gases rumbling inside the decaying carcass.

As they approach the laboratory, they realize that the animal is too big to get in to the gate and re-route the tests to a conservation area across the city. In the middle of the city and during morning rush hour, the buldup of gas is too much for the whale blubber to hold. It explodes spraying hundreds of kilos of whale intestines, blubber and organs around neighboring streets.

Years later, researchers analyze what exactly occurred inside the whale and how it resulted in such an enormous explosition. Click below to find out what they find.

The Whale that Exploded premieres Saturday, December 13 at 8p e/p

Journey to the Edge of the Universe premiered last night so I thought I would pass along some Monday morning stories, a digestif if you will after last nights stunning premiere.

Hubble sends back an amazing view of a cluster of stars, much to Milky Way's chagrin.

The moon, Jupiter and Venus collectively smile down on Earth...our lucky day.

Speaking of Jupiter...Apparently scientists lost its birth certificate and aren't sure when the planet was born.

Enceladus, (Saturn's moon), is way better than your hot tub.

NASA has higher standards, reschedules launch of new Mars Rover until 2011.

Missed the premiere of Journey to the Edge of the Universe? Catch the replay Thursday December 11 at 8p e/p.

The firsts stars exploded 13.5 billion years ago, but because their light takes so long to reach us, we can still see what they looked like and even watch them explode.

If you attempted to count all the stars in a galaxy at a rate of one every second it would take around 3,000 years to count them all.

90% of the Universe is invisible. This mysterious missing stuff is known as 'dark matter'.

The elements Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen - all crucial to life - are found in roughly the same proportions in comets and human beings.

Want to know more? Click here.

Journey to the Edge Director Yavar Abbas discusses what it took to make the film and how this film is unprecedented to what he has worked on before...

Want to look over the edge? Click here.

For the complete journey, go here.

Journey to the Edge of the Universe premieres Sunday December 7 at 8p e/p.

Nigel Henbest
Pioneer Productions

Many years ago, I was a keen young stargazer, spending long hours out with my telescope on snowy star-studded winter nights. Back then, our views of the Universe - even taken through the world's biggest telescopes - were hardly any more compelling than my backyard observations: the photographs were in black-and-white, and fuzzed out by the Earth's turbulent atmosphere.

I often wondered... What was it really like out there? How would the deserts of Mars look in close up; the Orion Nebula in full colour; or the rings of Saturn in 3D?

Fast forward to a year or so ago. NASA's Cassini spacecraft is orbiting the ringed world Saturn. The robot explorers Spirit and Opportunity are roving over the Martian plains. And the Hubble Space Telescope - with its crystal-clear outlook from Earth-orbit - has the Crab Nebula in sharp full-colour focus, along with hundreds of other distant wonders of the Universe.

Inspired by such images, I sat down with Stuart Carter - my colleague at Pioneer Productions (and now Executive Producer of Journey) - to think of a way we could link our incredible new views of the Universe, plus astounding new astronomical discoveries (such as black holes), into a single TV program.

How would we explore the whole Universe, from the Moon right out to the farthest galaxies? Our first thought was a "cosmic zoom": boring deeper and deeper into the Cosmos with what was effectively a single zoom-lens. But that restricted us from looking around when we arrived at a new planet or nebula. Instead, our program became a "journey", from here to infinity...