National Geographic is justly renowned for its incredible photographs and eye-popping video footage, capturing all manner of natural marvels in gorgeous, jaw-dropping detail. Now the people behind those amazing shots are getting their moment in the spotlight with the documentary series, Photographer.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about what it’s really like to be a NatGeo photographer, this series will take you behind the scenes as the photographers strive to meet the challenges and inevitable surprise obstacles to get that timeless shot. Each episode focuses on a different photographer, combining vérité footage with in-depth interviews and archival footage to help viewers see the world through their eyes—whether it be capturing a hummingbird in flight, chronicling a campaign against oil rigs in the Bahamas, or recording protests, rocket launches, tornadoes, or the behavior of whales, to name a few.

The exclusive clip above features photographer Anand Varma, who started out studying marine biology, intent on following in his father’s footsteps as a scientist, But after taking a job as a camera assistant, he fell in love with photography and has carved out his own niche at the interface of science and art. His latest project is a photographic series centered on metamorphosis—in this case, trying to capture the formation and hatching of a chicken embryo on camera.

That’s a daunting challenge, and as the opening scene reveals, Varma’s first attempt failed. “The Saran Wrap eggs are not doing very well at all,” he tells the camera after working well into the wee hours. Environmental conditions have to be tightly controlled but overnight both the main humidifier stopped working and the backup humidifier didn’t kick in. That made the embryos’ environment 18° F hotter than it should have been. But Varma perseveres and eventually succeeds, commenting that a new growing embryo after 12 days resembles “a little velociraptor foot.” The embryo is actually blinking inside its unshelled yolk.

Photographer premieres on the National Geographic Channel on March 18 and will be available for streaming on Disney+ and Hulu on March 19.

Listing image by YouTube/National Geographic

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010443

National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin is something of a modern-day Indiana Jones, traveling to remote locations all over the globe to take part in a variety of archaeological missions. His most recent expeditions are chronicled in the new NatGeo documentary series, Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Lin, premiering on Thanksgiving Day. The episode (“The Warrior King”) follows Lin as he navigates a sacred mountain and a flooded tomb underneath a pyramid in the Sudanese desert, hunting for the lost capital of the Kingdom of Kush.

A California native, Lin holds a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He subsequently founded UCSD’s Center for Human Frontiers, which focuses on harnessing technology to augment human potential. So it’s not surprising that he first made a name for himself by combining satellites, aerial remote sensing (drones), and Lidar mapping with more traditional ground exploration to hunt for the missing tomb of Genghis Khan in 2009.

The Valley of the Khans Project also successfully employed crowdsourcing (via more than 10,000 online volunteers) to help analyze the resulting satellite and aerial photography images, looking for unusual features across the vast landscape. That led to the confirmation of 55 archaeological sites in the region, a 2011 NatGeo documentary,  and a 2014 scientific paper detailing the benefits of so-called “collective reasoning” to archaeology.

Personal tragedy struck in 2016. Lin was severely injured when a four-wheel drive open-top vehicle he was riding in with a friend overturned, crushing his right leg under the roll bar. Doctors amputated his leg below the knee, but Lin experienced severe phantom limb pain that standard painkillers failed to control. He credits a single dose of psilocybin (in a carefully controlled setting) with helping him “remap” his brain. “I was in a good, safe setting with a partner who was ready to help me rewrite my story in a way that was focused on positivity,” Lin told GQ in 2021. However, “It’s not like psilocybin is this purely positive source. It has so much to do with the setting, the intentions, the community.”

Losing part of his leg didn’t keep Lin from continuing to pursue an active, exciting life, thanks to a high-tech prosthetic. He is still out in the field, searching for answers, while continuing to host numerous TV documentaries for National Geographic detailing his various expeditions, such as Lost Treasures of the Maya in 2018 and 2019’s Buried Secrets of the Bible. Lost Cities with Albert Lin debuted in 2019, featuring Lin’s efforts to locate the former headquarters of the Knights Templar in Acre, Israel, and the fabled city of El Dorado in the Columbian jungle, as well as exploring an archaeological site in the Peruvian Andes and the Black Mead mesolithic site near Stonehenge.

In addition to hunting for the lost capital of Kush, this latest installment of Lost Cities documents Lin as he searches for an ancient lost Maya city that was once home to the people who built the great pyramid city of Palenque; visits the mountains of Peru to search for the lost Chachapoya kingdom that predated the Incas; visits Scotland to learn more about the lost kingdom of barbarian insurgents known as the Picts; searches in Israel for the lost city of the Canaanites; and hunts for a forgotten Bronze Age Arabian civilization (the Land of Magan) in Oman.

“This last season put us right at the edge of life and death multiple times, and yet it felt like there was a deeper purpose,” Lin told Ars. “Every time we made a discovery, every time we found a body up high on the cliffs or the remains of some ancient city buried in the sands, it felt truly like we were on this important mission to try to unlock the secrets of who we are. So this is much more than a TV show for me.”

Ars spoke with Lin to learn more.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1985604

Weipa is a small coastal mining town in Queensland, located in northeastern Australia, particularly favored by sports fisherman because of its annual competition, the Weipa Fishing Classic. But in recent years, fishermen have reported an increasing number of incidents where local bull sharks are pulling off audacious underwater raids, literally waiting until a fish is hooked and chomping it off the line. Some fisherman estimate they can lose as much as 70 percent of their catch to the sharks, which seem to specifically target fishing boats.

(Some spoilers for the documentary below the gallery.)

It’s atypical behavior for bull sharks and it raises an interesting question: is this evidence that this species of shark—known (a bit unfairly) in the popular imagination for being aggressive “mindless killers”—are more intelligent than previously assumed? That’s one of the questions that shark biologists Johan Gustafson and Mariel Familiar Lopez set out to answer, and their initial field work has been documented for posterity in Bull Shark Bandits, part of National Geographic’s 2023 SHARKFEST programming. SHARKFEST is four full weeks of “explosive, hair-raising and celebratory shark programming that … showcase the captivating science, power and beauty of these magnificent animals,” per the official description. 

The fish-stealing behavior is technically known as depredation. Among other factors, Australian fish stocks have decreased by more than 30 percent over the last decade, and the sharks appear to be adapting accordingly and teaching the behavior to their fellow sharks.

“Many different species do it, including dolphins and orcas, high level predators, but shark depredation in particular is occurring all over Australia at the moment,” Gustafson told Ars. “In areas where there’s a higher fishing pressure, the behavior is occurring more often or more intensely. We call it habituation. They’ve learned a habit, they actually learn off each other, and they spread it around [the population].”

Bull sharks (Carcharhinus leucas) are found all over the world, usually preferring warm, shallow, coastal waters and freshwater rivers. They’re not a true freshwater species, but the females typically birth their pups upriver since such spots provide a more protective environment for nurseries. (Sharks don’t rear their young; baby sharks typically join the adult ocean population when they reach about eight years of age.) Bull sharks usually grow to an average of seven feet (for males) and eight feet long (for females), and their powerful bite can generate as much as 1330 pounds of force (5914 newtons).

Bull sharks are considered opportunistic feeders, meaning they eat in short burts and digest for longer periods during times of scarcity. Their diet favors bony fish and smaller sharks (including their fellow bull sharks), as well as turtles, birds, dolphins and crustaceans. They’re also fairly territorial and solitary, preferring to hunt alone or occasionally in pairs.

Their reputation for aggression has been fueled in part by media reports of bull shark attacks, including the 1916 Jersey Shore shark attacks that inspired Jaws—both the novel by Peter Benchley and the 1975 blockbuster film (although both actually featured a Great White shark). Bull sharks are indeed responsible for many shark attacks near coastal shores, and they have a ferocious bite.  But the reality is more nuanced. “I always tell people that every animal, every human or every dog, we all have different personalities,” Lopez told Ars. “So you might get a bull shark that is really aggressive, but you might get one that is not. Their main focus is always catching meals. But they’re not, like, ‘Oh, I’m going to be aggressive to every single thing that I see.'”

It wasn’t entirely clear from the various accounts if it really was bull sharks stealing the fish, since it all happens underwater. So the first order of business for Gustafson and Lopez was to verify the anecdotal reports and try to catch a bull shark in the act. They used a fishing line camera to capture a low-resolution shot of a bull shark stealing a hooked fish in just 20 seconds, but they needed to get into the water to capture more footage with a 360-degree drop camera. A shark cage was in order, but most metal cages are fairly noisy in terms of sound reflection. That’s fine with some regional sharks who are used to the cages, per Gustafson, but the Weiba bull shark population is more isolated and more likely to be spooked by the noise.

So Gustafson and Lopez turned to underwater cinematographer Colin Thrupp, who constructed a novel noise-cancelling shark cage out of polyethylene pipe with the joints welded via electro-fusion welding. The plastic absorbs sound more than a metal cage, and the black color also means less reflective shine. The cage served its purpose; the bull sharks were initially cautious but the camera ultimately caught six or seven of them swimming nearby as a pack—unusual behavior for a such a solitary and territorial species. “Part of our hypothesis is that this is a population of bull sharks that don’t really migrate that much, because they’ve got warm water conditions all year round, it’s a nice tropical area,” said Lopez. “That is maybe one of the factors [providing] opportunity for socialization. They might be getting a bit of toleration between each other because they’re getting an easy meal.”

The footage also showed a bull shark approaching the hooked fish slowly at first, waiting for it to get tired of struggling, and then biting off the fish’s tail end and propeller, before swinging back around to gulp down the rest. This is a calm, intelligent hunting strategy, per Gustafson and Lopez, the antithesis of the stereotypical mindless aggression usually associated with bull sharks. In fact, it’s strikingly similar to how killer whales—known for their intelligence—hunt, employing a surgically precise approach to save energy. “Being a top predator means you invest a lot of energy in all those catches,” said Lopez. “If that doesn’t come with a reward, you’ll have less energy for the next chase. So they have to be very intelligent [to determine] ‘Where do I put my energy in all this?’ Sometimes, when they’re not sure, they do these test bites.”

The plastic cage didn’t perform perfectly, however, starting to bounce around and buckle as swells developed and underwater turbulence increased. The communications link to the surface also went out, resulting in some tense moments until the cage was brought back to the surface.  “We were in that cage and it was gloomy and the current was huge,” Gustafson recalled. “Then we saw a cable tie  fly past us and thought, ‘Oh, that’s not good,’ because they’re actually what’s holding the cage [mesh] together. Then another one went by. Then the cage started to deform. It was like being in a [trash] compactor.”

Gustafson and Lopez also managed to tag several sharks with acoustic transmitters to track their movements. Since they had spotted a juvenile shark among the adults, they also  located the most likely bull shark nursery in a nearby river, taking a biopsy from one baby shark for DNA analysis. Once Thrupp had repaired and strengthened the plastic shark cage, they deployed it a second time to take biopsies of two other sharks for comparison, using harpoon-like tools.

The results showed that the juvenile they biopsied upriver was half-related to the female bull shark they biopsied back in the ocean, while the third sampled shark was related to both of them. So all three sharks likely share an ancenstor between them. This is yet more evidence that the population at Weiba isn’t moving around much, because there is more opportunity for interbreeding, particularly since shark litters typically have multiple fathers, per Gustafson.

The next step includes gathering more DNA samples from the Weiba bull shark population to expand the genetic analysis, as well as tagging and tracking more bull sharks to get a sense of their movement patterns in order to determine how the top end of the gulf ecosystem (Weiba) connects to the western and eastern sides of the continent. “Do they go all the way down to Perth on the west or right down to Sydney?” said Gustafson. “Turtles tend to come back to the same beach where they were born. We think these bull sharks are starting to do the same sort of a thing. But we don’t know if they’re coming back to the same river that they were born in, or into the same area that they were born in.”

More data should also give them a better idea of the size of the bull shark population in Weiba, since the popular perception among fishermen is that there must be hundreds or thousands of them. And as fishermen keep losing their catches, there is a greater risk of more anger being directed at the bull sharks, leading to decreased support for their conservation and more calls for culling the population. (The species is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List.)

“The more you spend time in the water, the probability that you will encounter a shark becomes greater,” said Lopez. “But that is just because you’re spending more time in the water fishing. It doesn’t mean there are more sharks lurking in the waters and being aggressive. It’s important to do these documentaries because you’ll never change the mind of people if you just say sharks are not bad. You need to include them in a little bit of the science, explain it. For projects like this, we go up there and spend time at the pubs talking to the fishermen. We’ve even got some fishermen helping us take samples.”

Bull Shark Bandits is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, premiering on NatGeo WILD on July 25, 2023.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1953520

It’s almost Earth Day, and to mark the occasion, National Geographic and Disney+ have released a new documentary series called Secrets of the Elephants. The four-part series is a sequel of sorts to the remarkable 2021 documentary Secrets of the Whales, which was narrated by Sigourney Weaver and produced by James Cameron.

NatGeo and Disney+ hope to recapture some of that same magic with Secrets of the Elephants. Cameron once again produced, with Natalie Portman stepping in for narration duty. Per the official premise, “The series travels the world—from the Savannahs of Africa to the urban landscapes of Asia—to discover the strategic thinking, complex emotions, and sophisticated language of elephants, shaping a unique and dynamic culture.”

Each episode focuses on an elephant population in a different environment—the desert, the rainforest, Asia, and the African Savannah—and highlights the unique changes taking place in each environment and the ways the elephants have adapted to survive there. For instance, a female desert elephant gives birth in a harsh environment ravaged by drought, taking a refreshing shower in the afterbirth—the first time this behavior has been caught on camera. (Mud baths are more common, providing a natural form of sunscreen for desert elephants.)

Elephants in the African rainforest are much more elusive; they’re terrified of humans due to years of poaching for their tusks, which are denser than those of other elephants. (The ivory is easier to carve and hence more desirable.) Savannah elephants must navigate the treacherously steep Chilojo Cliffs in Zimbabwe to get to life-saving water. The cameras captured them testing the solidity of the soil with each step—another documentary first. In Kenya, we meet a Savannah elephant named Long’uro, who lost his trunk in a hyena attack.

One of the featured scientists is Paula Kahumbu, a conservationist and CEO of WildlifeDirect; she is known for her efforts to stop the illegal trade in elephant ivory, among other contributions. Kahumbu grew up in Kenya and developed an interest in research and conservation early on. In graduate school, famed paleoanthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey sent her to Amboseli in Kenya, the site of the world’s longest-running research project on elephants. She spent two weeks interning with two Masai women who were research assistants to conservationist Cynthia Moss, director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, driving around in a Land Rover to take a “roll call” of the local elephant population.

“My initial thought was, ‘Oh, it’s going to be one of those really boring research projects where you just add data sheets and data sheets,'” Kahumbu told Ars. “But it was these amazing women from the local community who knew every individual elephant by name. They could tell from their personalities who was who. The elephants would hear their voices and walk to the car. It was like friends meeting old friends, and that is what won me over. I just fell in love with elephants.”

Ars spoke with Kahumbu to learn more.

Ars Technica: One of the themes of Secrets of the Elephants is how environment shapes behavior. Therefore, drastic changes to the environment trigger necessary adaptations and behavior. Each featured species of elephant in the documentary series seems to have adapted different behaviors. Were you surprised by this? 

Paula Kahumbu: Yes, it’s a funny thing because we know elephants are super intelligent, and we know that they’ve thrived on this planet for as long as they have because of their incredible adaptability. But it’s something else to see it happening before your eyes and to know that they have not just solved problems, they’ve passed on that knowledge—they’ve created a whole culture.

For example, when elephants were working their way down a steep escarpment in Zimbabwe, you could watch their progress and be amazed. But then you look closely, and you see them using their trunk to punch the ground in front of them as they walk to tell if it’s firm enough to put their foot down. It’s quite awe-inspiring. It was also quite shocking to observe them completely silent in the rainforest. You don’t hear a thing, and you might just see the glint of a tusk to know it’s there. In Borneo, they’re noisy because they’re just so excited. They’ve learned that the sound of a certain threshing machine means there’s lots of food, and they rally each other. It was almost like they were on a sugar high.

I’m so used to East African elephants and their environment. I studied elephants in forests in Kenya, and I’ve seen how they changed their behavior, their family structure. But this was an extreme level of adaptation.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1933362

Deep in the Amazon jungle, magnificent rocky tabletop towers rise abruptly from the foliage, often cloaked in thick clouds. They’re called “tepuis” (“house of the gods”), and their plateaus, or mesas, are completely isolated from the forest below. That makes them a tantalizing potential source for exotic new species. National Geographic is marking Earth Day with the release of a new documentary, The Last Tepui, featuring renowned biologist Bruce Means teaming up with elite climber Alex Honnold and a veteran NatGeo team to become the first people to summit one of these remote structures.

(Some spoilers below.)

Anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary Free Solo will be familiar with Honnold. He emerged seemingly out of nowhere in 2007 with a free solo climb of Astroman and the Rostrum in Yosemite National Park and soon became a dominant force in climbing. Free Solo documented Honnold’s quest to become the first to complete a free solo climb of El Capitan—not without controversy, given the very real risk of Honnold dying in the attempt. (Spoiler alert: He survived, completing the climb in 3 hours and 56 minutes.)

Means is less of a household name, but he is very much a giant in the biological sciences, having spent much of his storied career hunting for new species all over the world. Means had been on 33 expeditions to this tepui-rich region, but he had never managed to reach the top of one, given the challenge of climbing what NatGeo explorer and expedition leader Mark Synott (Lost on Everest) describes as “crazy towers in the jungle.” This expedition would be a “first ascent” for one tepui in particular, as well as what would likely be the 80-year-old Means’ last trip to the jungle.

Like the Galapagos Islands, these 60 tepuis (sometimes called “islands in the sky”) are rich in biodiversity, with many plants and animals not found anywhere else in the world. Most are made of sheer blocks of Precambrian quartz arenite sandstone, remnants of a large sandstone plateau that once covered the granite floor of this region. One of the most famous is Mount Roraima (aka Roraima Tepui)—an inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel The Lost World, about the discovery of a stunning prehistoric world thriving in isolation on top of the tepui.

Sinkholes sometimes form on the mesas, becoming as large as 1,000 feet in diameter and 1,000 feet deep. Ecologically, they are “islands within islands” and boast many species unique to that particularly sinkhole. So tepuis are hot spots of biodiversity. But even getting to the base of these structures can pose a major challenge, as the NatGeo team in The Last Tepui discovered.

Directed by Taylor Rees, the documentary follows Means, Honnold, Synott, and the rest of the crew as they hike through the dense vegetation of the jungle, with their guides hacking through the foliage to blaze a trail. The climbing sequence is genuinely suspenseful, and Honnold’s mastery is on full display. The documentary features the kind of stunning panoramic views one would expect from National Geographic, and the climbing team even managed to conduct an interview with Good Morning America from their precarious Ledge Camp—all thanks to the wonders of 21st-century technology.

All that hardship and nail-biting suspense paid off scientifically: DNA analysis confirmed six new species among the specimens collected during the trip. Perhaps the best part of the documentary is Means himself, whose love for science and the region is palpable throughout. “This is my Shangri-La,” he tells the camera while wading through a shallow river. “I’ll be leaving the planet sometime, and I’ll miss it.”

Ars sat down with Honnold and Rees to learn more.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1848743

In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months on the Antarctic ice after their ship, Endurance, was crushed by pack ice and sank into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Today, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic announced the discovery of this famous shipwreck, nearly 107 years later, 3,008 meters down, roughly four miles (6.4 km) south of the ship’s last recorded position.

The shipwreck is in pristine condition partly because of the lack of wood-eating microbes in those waters. In fact, the Endurance22 expedition’s exploration director, Mensun Bound, told The New York Times that the shipwreck is the finest example he’s ever seen; Endurance is “in a brilliant state of preservation.” The expedition has released the first images of the wreck—the first time anyone has laid eyes on Endurance since its sinking a century ago. Bound et al. included shots of the stern (with “ENDURANCE” clearly visible), the rear deck and ship’s wheel, and parts of the deck and hull.

A survival story

Endurance set sail from Plymouth on August 6, 1914, with Shackleton joining his crew in Buenos Aires. By the time they reached the Weddell Sea in January 1915, accumulating pack ice and strong gales slowed progress to a crawl. Endurance became completely icebound on January 24, and by mid-February, Shackleton ordered the boilers to be shut off so that the ship would drift with the ice until the weather warmed sufficiently for the pack to break up. It would be a long wait. For 10 months, the crew endured the freezing conditions. In August, ice floes pressed into the ship with such force that the ship’s decks buckled.

The ship’s structure nonetheless remained intact, but by October 25, Shackleton realized Endurance was doomed. He and his men opted to camp out on the ice some two miles (3.2 km) away, taking as many supplies as they could with them. Compacted ice and snow continued to fill the ship until a pressure wave hit on November 13, crushing the bow and splitting the main mast—all of which was captured on camera by crew photographer Frank Hurley. Another pressure wave hit in late afternoon November 21, lifting the ship’s stern. The ice floes parted just long enough for Endurance to finally sink into the ocean, before closing again to erase any trace of the wreckage.

When the sea ice finally disintegrated in April 1916, the crew launched lifeboats and managed to reach Elephant Island five days later. Shackleton and five of his men set off for South Georgia the next month to get help—a treacherous 720-mile journey by open boat. A storm blew them off course, and they ended up landing on the unoccupied southern shore. So Shackleton left three men behind while he and a companion navigated dangerous mountain terrain to reach the whaling station at Stromness on May 2. A relief ship collected the other three men and finally arrived back on Elephant Island in August. Miraculously, Shackleton’s crew was still alive.

Shackleton died several years later during the Quest expedition to Antarctica, which set sail in 1921. He never reached the expedition’s planned destination, falling ill in late December just as the ship was about to leave Rio. He had begun drinking heavily to “deaden the pain,” despite not usually allowing alcohol while at sea. The Quest reached South Georgia on January 4, 1922, and Shackleton made his final diary entry before retiring to bed.

By 2 am, he was complaining of back pains and requesting painkillers. Ship physician Alexander Macklin suggested Shackleton might try leading a more normal life. Shackleton asked what Macklin thought he should give up. “Chiefly alcohol, boss, I don’t think it agrees with you,” the physician replied. Then Shackleton “had a very severe paroxysm” and died. The official recorded cause of death was coronary thrombosis.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1839766

The first dot-com boom set the stage for a lot of the world we experience today. IPOs and insane valuations, tech companies without an obvious business model, the vague aroma of scams, all of it centered on Silicon Valley. Two crashes later, most of the big players are dead, merged, or dismembered. Yet some of the ideas—massive online social networks, Web browsers as a software platform—have come to pass. So how did we get from the first boom to here?

National Geographic’s upcoming six-episode series, Valley of the Boom, doesn’t trace out the entire history from the ’90s to the present. Instead, it follows three very distinct companies from that first boom to bust, using a mix of interviews with key players, documentary footage, and some extremely well-acted scenes to fill in details. It sounds like a recipe for chaos, but there are definitely some lessons about the Valley and tech companies here in a package that’s fantastically entertaining.

Order from chaos

Lots of documentaries contain acted scenes—early human hunters silently crafting spears or obscure actors playing out historic scenes in period dress. With its series Mars, National Geographic tried to do something a bit different, using current-day interviews and documentary footage about the prospects of traveling to Mars but mixing them with extended dramatic scenes in which a fictional crew went through the process of setting up a home on Mars.

Valley of the Boom takes that a step further. Yes, there’s plenty of actual historic footage from the boom years available, and it’s lightly sprinkled throughout the series. The people behind it have also lined up some phenomenal interviews, including Netscape’s Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale, founders of a smaller company called TheGlobe.com, and build engineers at Netscape and Microsoft. Ars’ own Dan Goodin, who wrote the definitive history of one of the companies profiled, also makes extensive appearances thanks to an extended interview that recapitulates that history, which we’ve managed to obtain a clip of.

But Dan’s interview isn’t his only appearance in the program—an alternate version of Dan, played by actor Jacob Richter, also shows up. That’s because Valley of the Boom involves extensive acted scenes, in this case portraying events of the past—not literal attempts to recreate them but scenes that help advance the history and give viewers a feel for what it might have been like to be a fly on the wall for some of the events (as you can also see in this clip).

But calling them acted scenes seriously undersells what’s on offer here. There’s also a rap battle and a number that wouldn’t be out of place in a broadway musical. The series’ version of Jim Barksdale metaphorically dies as Microsoft literally cuts off his air supply. A grammar-school-age math wiz is brought in to explain who gets what piles of money on IPO day—and how some people can end up millionaires while still having been shafted in the grand scheme of things.

It probably sounds like chaos, and there are parts (like the rap battle) where it’s undoubtedly a bit silly. But it actually holds together remarkably well, and in many ways, it makes the stories more compelling and easier to digest. A lot of credit has to go to Lamorne Morris, who plays a never-having-existed banker who acts as a narrator, scene setter, and general MC. Bradley Whitford, known for his work on The West Wing, does a fine job of being Jim Barksdale, but the show is stolen by Steve Zahn, who has bulked up to portray a fugitive con man with messianic delusions who somehow ended up being in charge of a multimillion dollar company founded on vaporware.

Learning through example

The film structures its history around three companies. One of them is obviously Netscape, which was the grandfather of the boom and a Valley high-flyer until it suffered from a mixture of questionable business decisions and Microsoft viewing it as a threat. The film is unabashedly pro-Netscape, but the arrogance that comes across in interviews with an Internet Explorer team member makes the pro-Netscape bias understandable.

Also present is TheGlobe.com, an early social network that wasn’t actually in the Valley (it based itself in New York City) but rode the tech boom to an outrageous IPO anyway. Its two founders are incredibly personal in interviews, so much so that the actors don’t seem to fully capture their charm. It nicely captures the who-needs-a-business-plan-growth-at-all-costs mentality that drove the boom.

And then there’s Pixelon, the company that supposedly had revolutionary video streaming technology but was actually using off-the-shelf mpeg compression (and during one demo used a well-disguised version of a Windows Media Player codec). While its founder is now out of prison, he apparently declined to be interviewed for this project, leading to a heavy reliance on Dan Goodin to fill in the historical blanks. Dan’s great, but nothing in the program can compete with Steve Zahn’s portrayal of the delusional grifter who took Pixelon’s venture funding and blew most of it on a giant party in Vegas.

The three examples—a true success story, a near miss, and a complete fraud—nicely capture the spectrum of what was going on in Silicon Valley during the boom years. I lived in nearby Berkeley at the start of the boom and returned for frequent visits as it picked up steam. There was a certain surreality to the mixture of complete insanity driven by paper millionaires and the fact that a subset of the paper millionaires actually cared deeply about what they were doing and really did hope to change the world.

If it takes a rap battle breaking out in a boardroom to convey that surreality, I’m ok with that. If you’re also willing to suspend that much disbelief, Valley of the Boom makes for a compelling watch and a glimpse into the chaos that helped make the world we’re living in (and, indirectly, allowed me to have a job writing this).

The first episode airs Sunday night on the National Geographic channel, and some of the content is available to stream on the program’s website.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1439823

If you work or live in a city, it’s easy to forget how powerful and delicate nature is. Even if you do get quality outdoor time on a regular basis, it’s hard to hold in your mind how this dichotomy of strength and vulnerability expands across the globe, connected by systems of air, water, and sunlight that tie the whole planet into a single complex system.

But the National Geographic Channel has just the antidote to our collective myopia. A 10-episode series called One Strange Rock debuts tonight at 10ET/9CT, and if you get that channel, it’s worth checking out. The series is a detailed look at some of the Earth’s macro- and micro-scale bio-systems that keep our tiny planet alive. It’s a lot like Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos, but strictly with an Earth focus.

Some pre- and post-production magic

One of One Strange Rock‘s interesting twists is that a lot of this ecology lesson comes from former astronauts, including Chris Hadfield, Mae Jemison, Peggy Whitson, Jerry Linenger, and more. Though it may not seem like an obvious choice to everyone, telling the story of life on Earth through the voices of the only people who have left Earth works perfectly.

The astronaut narration was a bit of serendipity, according to Executive Producer Jane Root. (Root, for context, is the former president of the Discovery Channel and has since founded her own studio, Nutopia, which specializes in TV-documentaries.) As the team was working on how to build this series, someone asked if there would be a narrator. “It was a huge breakthrough to use astronauts,” she said. “[During pre-production], someone we were working with had the idea of astronauts, and she said, ‘I had this idea, it might be mad but…’”

Everyone behind the scenes of One Strange Rock loved the suggestion, however. And as a viewer, it really does skillfully change the show’s trajectory.

The first episode, called “Gasp,” goes in depth on how massive dust storms from Africa fertilize the Amazon, and how that fertilization helps trees produce oxygen and pull water up into the atmosphere. Subsequent episodes—”Storm” and “Shield”—address how the Earth was made and how Earth’s magnetic field protects life, respectively.

The topics are interesting themselves, but I can not stress enough how perhaps the biggest strength of this series is its visual style. Darren Aronofsky and his longtime collaborator Ari Handel were executive producers on this project, and the visual style that you see in movies they’ve worked on together (like The Fountain, Black Swan, and The Wrestler) is just as present in One Strange Rock. Combined with National Geographic’s reputation for high-quality photojournalism, the first three episodes of One Strange Rock are stunning and worth your time even on mute (although don’t do that: again, you want to hear the astronauts speak).

Each episode takes you around the world, viewing parts of the Earth through biology, chemistry, astronomy, and human culture. The series does a great job of interviewing local researchers in the field, not just relying on staged interviews from a musty office at UC Berkeley. One Strange Rock also keeps its episodes moving: you never quite feel like you’re “done” with a topic, because every new scene unfolds with a new perspective.

Among my critiques, I would say that the main narrator, Will Smith (notable defender of Earth from Independence Day), had a jokey delivery that sometimes grated. By episode three, I felt like he started hitting the tone of the show a bit better, so perhaps the later episodes are more fluid. But in episodes one and two, his quips and jokes were jarring compared to the rest of the show, which tends to come off more deliberate and even a bit more serious (though it’s by no means overly dense). Most likely, Smith’s delivery does well with kids, and this is a family-friendly show, so maybe my mildly annoyed reaction wouldn’t be shared by parents who want to watch something from Aronofsky without scarring their child for life (I saw Requiem for a Dream as an adult and it still scarred me for life).

Whether you have kids or not, this show will probably teach you something about how the Earth works, or at least it will show you beautiful images of what you already know. I asked Root about how Nutopia fact-checks these kinds of TV documentaries, and she said that they have a “huge number” of people who fact-check each show. “We write very detailed annotations… we try to always go to several sources not just one source,” Root explained.

One thing you may notice in the first three episodes if you’re a reader of Ars is that, for as much as One Strange Rock focuses on the science of Earth systems, there’s not a lot of focus on climate change. In episode three it’s mentioned, but the topic doesn’t get a lot of playtime, at least in the first three episodes Ars has viewed. Root says that for the purposes of this show, that’s deliberate. Root said that approach stems from when she worked with David Attenborough on Planet Earth, where they took the position that before you can address the problems we’ve created on Earth, “you have to fall in love with it.”

“What you want to do is have something that has… joy, and levity and excitement,” Root added. “We wanted it [One Strange Rock] to be about the astoundingness and beauty of the Earth.”

Nitpicks aside, if falling in love with Earth again is what the producers of One Strange Rock wanted from me, mission accomplished. To those of you who have been stunned in the past by a series like Planet Earth yet finished that wanting even more focused environmental info, set your DVR.

One Strange Rock debuts tonight on the National Geographic Channel with episodes two and three scheduled to air on the following Mondays.

Listing image by National Geographic

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1282117