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EPISODE · PRIME VIDEO
Season 38 · Episodes 12–13
Landed Wed, 9 Feb 2011 · 21:00 your time · 2 episodes · 2h 0m
Season 38, Episodes 12–13 of NOVA aired Wednesday, 9 February 2011 at 9pm ET on PBS.
- S38E12Making Stuff Smarter (4)"Making Stuff: Smarter" looks at materials that respond to their environments and even learn, such as an airplane wing that changes shape as it flies. Scientists are turning to nature in developing such "smart" stuff. Sharkskin, for instance, has inspired a substance that, when sprayed in hospitals, could eliminate antibiotic-resistant bacteria. David Pogue visits a scientist who has even created a material that can render objects invisible. "Smarter" concludes with a vision of the ultimate in "life-like" stuff: programmable matter that could create a duplicate of a human being.
- S38E13Smartest Machine on EarthJeopardy! challenges even the best human minds. Can a computer win the game? "Watson", an IBM computing system, is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge—taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent".
NEXT IN SEASON 38
Episode 14
Wed 16 Feb · 21:00
NOVA
53 seasons · 1014 episodes · airing
AVAILABILITY
Streaming on Prime Video in United States.
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