Episode list

Nasty Critters - Rattlesnakes and Scorpions; Dead Men's Tales - Forensic Dentistry; All that Glitters - Canadian Diamond prospecting; Looping the Loop - Rodeo; Model Planet - Biosphere 2

The featured segment of this episode is "Robo Flyers" where Alan Alda travels to the Georgia Institute of Technology to film the International Aerial Robotics Competition and to interview its creator, Prof. Robert C. Michelson. Alda and Prof. Michelson interview the various collegiate teams that have created fully autonomous aerial robots designed to find a specific object, pick it up, and fly it to another location where it will be dropped off-- all without any human intervention. A team from Germany (Technische Universitaet Berlin) attempts the mission with a lighter-than-air vehicle, while all other teams use robots with propeller-driven propulsion ranging from "tail-sitter" (University of Texas at Arlington) aircraft to helicopter designs (Stanford University). In all, fourteen universities entered the International Aerial Robotics Competition, including: California Polytechnic State University from San Luis Obispo, California, United States; three teams from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, United States; LeTourneau University from Longview, Texas, United States; Massachusetts Institute of Technology from Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States; Southern College of Technology in Marietta, Georgia, United States; Stanford University from Stanford, California, United States; Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) from Zürich, Switzerland; United States Naval Academy from Annapolis, Maryland, United States; Univeristy of Texas at Arlington from Arlington, Texas, United States; University of British Columbia from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; University of Dayton from Dayton, Ohio, United States; University of Ottawa from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; University of Southern California from Los Angeles, California, United States; and the Technische Universitaet Berlin (Technological University of Berlin) from Berlin, Germany. One of the aforementioned universities actually completes the mission during this episode.