QUEST: INVESTIGATING OUR WORLD



#101 Survival: The Human Body in Extreme Environments
How can a man survive two nights at 30 below zero in the White Mountains of New Hampshire? How can another live through the night on a frozen buoy in the Atlantic in winter? Our bodies are constantly monitoring, balancing and adapting to the outside environment through a process called “homeostasis.” We journey to the limits of human endurance as New England scientists and survivors examine how the body attempts to maintain its steady state at high mountain altitudes, in extreme cold and heat and even in outer space. Why, all things being equal, does one person survive and another not? Would you survive?

#102 Pandemic
This program grapples with what we know and don’t know about infectious disease, particularly viruses. Using diary entries from a small town in Vermont, we experience the devastation of a working town and watch helplessly, as they did, at a disease that ravages a New England community. We will compare the 1918 influenza pandemic with today’s emerging invaders West Nile virus and Lyme disease. What is a virus? How does the body protect itself? How does a virus get past our immune system? In the neverending battle between disease and pharmaceuticals, epidemiologists are betting on the microbes to eventually win the war. This documentary also provides insight into why Avian flu is one of the top concerns of the health community and how this nightmare could become a reality.

#103 Summer: Getting the Bugs Out
It’s no secret that northern New England is home to many insects in the summertime. We share this season with at least 16,000 species of insects – and those are just the ones we know about. Insects outnumber all other kinds of animals combined. Summertime is when they’re at their peak of activity. They suddenly appear and then multiply right before our eyes. For many of these bugs, their lives are very short and terribly dangerous. There’s so much to learn about the lives these diminutive animals lead. And there’s no better time to see that than in the summer. But imagine trying to identify and count all the different species of insects as well as other forms of life? That’s what a BioBlitz is all about. And to make it even tougher, they give themselves just 24 hours to do it. There’s a remarkable flush of life in the summer. Could it be that insects are at the center of it all?

#104 Aquaculture: Down on the Salmon Farm
Largescale farms growing Atlantic salmon along the Maine coast provide an affordable alternative to wild salmon. But is aquaculture creating more problems than it's solving? There is no shortage of people getting in on this rapidly changing industry in northern New England and across the globe. But this young industry has spent 30 years addressing one controversy after another. Can science help find the solutions? These were some of the questions we set out to answer. While researchers at universities around the region are racing to come up with innovations to help fish farmers deal with pollution, disease and other problems, they may not be able to save the many small family fish farms that are suddenly disappearing from Maine waters. Many of their solutions have fish farms moving ashore or to deeper, more turbulent waters way offshore.

#105 Archaeology
Why do archaeologists travel in packs? How can finding just a thin flake from a prehistoric spear point be so exciting? Sorting out the hidden pasts of people who haven’t been around for thousands of years can take a lifetime for an archeologist. For every hour or two in the field, archaeologists spend another 10 to 12 hours working in the laboratory toiling over their discoveries, trying to make sense of them. And yet it’s also a team sport. We'll follow several teams of professional and amateur archaeologists as they carefully unearth pieces of northern New England's past. We'll see the latest techniques and technologies they're using to detect, excavate and preserve their interesting finds.

#106 The Scientist
What's it really like to be a modern scientist? From the atoms and molecules of nanoscience at the University of New Hampshire to field biologists at Allied Whale in Bar Harbor, Maine, who study the largest animals on earth, the classic picture of men in white lab coats is dispelled with this indepth look at two groups of scientists at work. Allied Whale’s cataloging work has been a key to assessing the health of whale stocks in the North Atlantic. When humpback whales come up into the Gulf of Maine they’re literally starving. They’re there exclusively to feed and biologists want to know how they’re faring during such a critical period for them. So what’s nanoscience? Instead of measuring with an inch or a centimeter, nanoscientists use a nanometer, or a billionth of a meter. On this scale, a flea is about a million nanometers. Even a single red blood cell is about seventhousand nanometers across! As the latest, greatest buzzword making science news, we’ll see why nanotechnology is the new darling.