Bill Nye the Science Guy

1993
Bill Nye the Science Guy

Seasons & Episodes

  • 5
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  • 2
  • 1

EP1 Forensics Sep 19, 1997

Forensic scientists try to find out the who, what, when, where, and why of events in the past – crimes. Most forensic scientists work in police labs. They collect evidence from the scene of a crime and analyze the evidence in a lab. Forensic scientists look for clues that will help them solve a crime. Fingerprints, footprints, hair, blood, and traces of gunpowder can be helpful evidence. Forensic scientists use all sorts of scientific instruments to analyze even the smallest bit of hair or the tiniest chip of paint. By scientifically testing evidence from the crime scene, and by knowing about evidence from past cases, forensic scientists can piece together what happened, to figure out who did what, and to help police catch a criminal.

EP2 Space Exploration Sep 26, 1997

Space is hard to explore, because it’s really, really big. Most things in space are so far away that people we build special equipment just to see them. We use telescopes to magnify far-away solar systems, planets, and stars. Rockets send astronauts past the Earth’s atmosphere. Space probes with special cameras send back pictures of planets for scientists to study. Astronauts perform experiments in orbit around the Earth. We do all these things and more to learn more about our universe.

EP3 Genes Oct 17, 1997

The color of your eyes, the shape of your nose, and the straightness (or curliness) of your hair depend on your genes. Not jeans the pants, but genes, the long strands of chemicals in your cells. Genes are like a blueprint for your body, and your cells follow the blueprint to build you. All living things have genes in their cells. You get your genes from your parents – half from your mom and half from your dad. Your parents got their genes from their parents, your grandparents. Living things pass down their genes from generation to generation. Genes from a mother’s egg cell mix with genes from a father’s sperm cell to make a complete set of plans for a baby. Baby humans, baby dogs, and baby plants all grow up to look like their parents because of genes.

EP4 Architecture Oct 24, 1997

Towers, teepees, castles, and condominiums – some kind of planning goes into all buildings, no matter how big or small. Architects are people who design buildings, and the areas around buildings. Usually architects draw on a computer or a big desk (a drawing board). The plans show the dimensions of all parts of a building. Architects try to design with the purpose of the building in mind, but even buildings used for the same thing can look very different.

EP5 Farming Oct 31, 1997

Before food gets into your kitchen, before it even gets to the store, it’s on a farm. Almost everything we eat is grown on a farm, an area of land used to raise animals and plants. Farming nowadays can get pretty complicated. Farmers are scientists – agricultural scientists. Farmers work hard to keep their farms healthy. Soil is stirred up to get oxygen to the microorganisms that live in between the grains and to plant roots – that’s called tilling the soil to aerate it. Plants need to be protected from pests with either chemical pesticides or biological pesticides. Animals like bats and friendly insects eat other pest insects (chomp,chomp). Animals are milked, corralled, fed, sheared, slaughtered or cleaned-up after.

EP6 Life Cycles Nov 14, 1997

My, how you’ve grown! The popular exclamation from your Auntie may be no great revelation, but growing bigger is a part of life. In fact, it’s part of the whole cycle, or pattern, of human life that began with your birth. The different stages in life are called life cycles. Humans aren’t the only ones with life cycles. At first, you might think that you have nothing in common with a cactus in the desert, or a fish in the sea, or the mold in your gym shoe, but you do. You’re all alive. You all have or will experience birth, growth, reproduction, aging, and eventually, death.

EP7 Do-It-Yourself Science Nov 21, 1997

Do-it-yourself science involves a question, observations, a hypothesis, and experimentation. You have probably come up with questions after you noticed something unusual. For instance, why do fingers get all pruny and wrinkled when I sit in the tub? The observation – shriveled fingertips – is the first step. Do-it-yourself science requires an eye for details surrounding your observations. Collecting related information helps you get to the next step, what scientists call a hypothesis, or “educated” guess. After weighing all the evidence, you hypothesize that your fingers get pruny because of the hot water in the tub. Once you have a hypothesis, it’s time for the fun part – testing it out.

EP8 Atoms & Molecules Nov 28, 1997

Atoms are reeeeally small. They are so small that you can’t see them with just your eye. It takes as many as 10 million of them side-by-side to measure a single millimeter. In fact, atoms are the smallest pieces of “stuff” that are still considered “stuff.” If you take something and break it into tiny pieces, and then break it into tinier pieces, and keep going, the smallest part you’d be left with (and still have the same substance that you started with) is an atom. Atoms are the building blocks of all matter. Everything is made of only 109 different kinds of atoms, called elements. 92 of these elements occur naturally, but the rest of them – ones like Technetium and Promethium have only been found in distant stars and Californium and Einsteinium – are only made in laboratories. A molecule is born any time two or more atoms combine together. English

EP9 Ocean Exploration Dec 05, 1997

Ocean exploration is a tricky, risky business since humans can’t naturally survive under the ocean. Ocean explorers are constantly inventing new tools to help them dive deep into the sea. Over the last few hundred years or so, and especially in the last few decades, we humans have come up with all kinds of new ways to study the ocean. Even so, the ocean remains largely unexplored. It’s huge, cold, salty, and deep. Ocean exploration helps us understand our planet, and may help us solve the mystery of how life started on Earth.

EP10 Lakes & Ponds Feb 21, 1998

What do you get when you have a big hole in the ground and some water? Lakes and ponds. All lakes and ponds have one thing in common – they happen when a basin, or hole, forms, and then fills with water. A glacier may grind a long gulch, volcanoes and earthquakes may make a sinkhole, or engineers may build a dam – they can be human or beaver.

EP11 Smell Feb 28, 1998

How do noses work? Objects give off tiny amounts of tiny molecules into the air. When just a few of these molecules get up your nose, they dissolve in the mucus up there. Some molecules come into contact with special receptors on what’s called your “olfactory membranes.” Each nostril has a membrane, and each membrane is only about the size of a postage stamp. The membranes hold millions of receptor cells, each of which are ready to send messages to the brain about the molecules that go up your nose.

EP12 Caves Apr 25, 1998

Caves come in all different shapes and sizes depending on how they were formed. Spelunkers (people who explore caves) have plenty of descriptive names for caves and the natural rocky features that form within them – soda straws, fried eggs, popcorn and draperies are just a few. Caves can be as simple as one straight passage with a few stalactites overhead, or as complex as a labyrinth, with many stalagmite-carpeted rooms.

EP13 Fluids May 02, 1998

Fluids are cool; they ooze and swoosh. Whatever container you put a fluid in, that fluid will take the same shape. Milk poured into a pitcher forms to the shape of the pitcher. If you pour it into a glass, it takes the shape of the glass. You just can’t do that with a boulder. But with the right container, you could pour liquid rock from below the Earth’s crust. Fluids still act like fluids, even halfway to the center of the Earth.

EP14 Erosion May 09, 1998

Dirt, sand, and rock from the Earth’s surface gets blown, sliced, torn, swallowed and distributed all over the world. What was yesterday’s hill is tomorrow’s flat plain. The planet looks a lot different than it did when it formed four and a half billion years ago. The force of erosion, the slow wearing away of the land, has never ceased.

EP15 Comets & Meteors May 16, 1998

Outer space is full of stuff. We’re not just talking about planets and moons. There are some bits and pieces, too small to be noticed most of the time that float around and occasionally run into all those planets and moons. Comets and meteors are the big bits of dirt, rock and ice that inhabit our Universe. More than just high-speed space chunks, comets and meteors carry important information about the history of our Universe.

EP16 Storms May 23, 1998

Storms are big, loud, and often accompanied by rain, snow, sleet, or hail. Where do these wild, dangerous, and necessary tornadoes, hurricanes, and thunderstorms come from? Storms happen when huge different air masses collide. Along the border of these air masses, water vapor condenses into clouds, strong winds form, and the clouds rub against each other with the ground often becoming electrically charged waiting to send lightning bolts across the sky. What starts out as a placid summer day turns into two air masses boxing it out 10,000 meters up.

EP17 Measurement May 30, 1998

Did you know that the Concorde moves 300,000 times faster than a land snail? Or that a giant redwood can be as tall as a 35-story apartment building? The only reason we can make these comparisons is because people have measured these things. We don’t compare jets and snails every day, but we do rely on measurement constantly. When you take your temperature, you find out how it compares to the temperature of someone who is healthy. When you bake brownies, you’ll need to measure the ingredients first to make sure they turn out tasty. Using measurement, we can make useful comparisons of distance, time, mass, and temperature.

EP18 Patterns Jun 06, 1998

Every time you look at something, hear something, touch something, smell something, or taste something, your brain collects a little information about the world around you. You may even have a scrapbook to store memories of some of that information. There’s a lot out there though. How do people sort out the valuable information from the not-so-valuable?

EP19 Science of Music Jun 13, 1998

Music is the art and science of expressing ideas and feelings through sound. A sad song can say more about how someone feels than most words, and a familiar song can make crowds clap together and feel like one happy family. Whatever the emotion, music seems to have a way to communicate it. The music we listen to today is the result of years of experimentation with sounds. As people figured out what they liked best, they invented instruments that could play their favorite tones and developed popular rhythms, or patterns of beats. Each note of music, and every tone of each instrument is a sound wave. Some sound waves sound great together. Some not so good. Getting the exact soundwaves in the pattern you want – now that’s science.

EP20 Motion Jun 20, 1998

Things can appear to be moving, when they really aren’t. Sometimes an object might seem to be at rest, even when it is in motion. It’s all relative. Relative motion, that is. How things appear to move depends on how you, or any observer, happens to be moving. So, if you’re on a bus looking out a window into another bus, and your bus begins to back up slowly, you may think the other bus is moving forward, when really it’s not moving at all. That’s motion in motion. It happens all around us all the time.
8.2| 0h30m| TV-Y| en| More Info
Released: 10 September 1993 Ended
Producted By: KCTS Television
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: https://billnye.com/
Synopsis

It's "Mr. Wizard" for a different decade. Bill Nye is the Science Guy, a host who's hooked on experimenting and explaining. Picking one topic per show (like the human heart or electricity), Nye gets creative with teaching kids and adults alike the nuances of science.

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Cast

Bill Nye

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Reviews

Electrified_Voltage During my childhood in the 1990s, "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" was one of the many shows I watched on TVO. I enjoyed it at the time, and I think I learned some pretty interesting things. I was also sometimes shown episodes of the show back in grade school, and later, in the early 2000s, I was shown episodes in my high school science classes, some of which I could still remember from years before! The show was hosted by Bill Nye, both a scientist and a comedian! Each episode would focus on a certain scientific subject. Bill would talk to viewers about this subject, using a lot of humour and demonstrations. The show featured many different sequences, all having something to do with the topic of the episode, including comedy clips, along with a music video for a parody of a popular song, with new lyrics to fit the subject. Guests were sometimes featured in the series as well.When I was shown episodes of this show in high school, I found that I didn't enjoy them so much anymore. However, that's just me, I'm certainly not saying that only kids would enjoy it. I'm sure some of the other students in those science classes with me liked the episodes they were shown! For many kids, "Bill Nye, the Science Guy" was educational with its science lessons, as well entertaining with its humour! It could also do the same for certain high school students, and maybe others. In conclusion, Bill and the others behind this show deserve a lot of praise!
Seth Nelson From 1988 until very early 1995, my family and I used to live in the Seattle area (yuck!!!!!). That was the setting of the very great educational Disney/PBS program, "Bill Nye, the Science Guy!!!!!" Our host, Bill Nye, showed us everything about experiments and science in a cool and fun way!!!!! It always started off at the "Nye Laboratories" door, then we go on to "The (insert many words here) of Science!!!!!" (fanfare) And here, Nye showed us how a different science is possible. We also learned many other great things from his lab to out in the world!!!!! We also talk with real life "scientists," do fun experiments in our kitchen, plus there's some funny skits that tied in with, well, SCIENCE!!!!! After all of that, we wrap up the day's episode with a music video, also explaining science.I remember I was at a mall in Seattle in December, 1993, and I actually met Bill Nye at a book signing!!!!! BTW, my family still has the book today: "Bill Nye the Science Guy's Big Book of Science!!!!!," published by Addison-Wesley, in 1993."Bill Nye, the Science Guy" was a terrific science show and probably the most academic work the Disney company has ever made in its "Golden Age." I only wish the show were on TV today, and along with my top-class private education, made me understand the universe a whole lot better. (Try THAT with "WILL OF THE BUTCHER" or whatever that bad time traveling DCOS is, LOL) Oh, and did I mention: SCIENCE RULES!!!!!10 stars, indeed!!!!!
endangeredsp Uhhh... just a note... Bill is NOT dead. :-) I guess it does seem that the man is dead, they took his show of the tube. But he's not dead. This show was the best. If they ever decide to put this on DVD for an affordable price, you have GOT to get this and show it to your children, their children, and their children's children. :-) Science rules. Love this guy. I hope they bring the show back to television. Sign the online petition to lower the price of the dvds. Do a google search for bill nye and the key word, petition. The petition will be sent to Disney to get them to lower the price.
Mr. Snl This is a great show and i hope it sticks around for a long time. It teaches kids many different things about science and uses things that they find enjoyable and fun to watch. For example, on the dinosaurs episode, they had two kids put their bare feet in paint to make footprints on paper...kids love to get their bare feet very messy! On the momentum episode, they had pies thrown at Bill's face. I don't know anyone who doesn't like getting a pie in the face! Kids like to walk around in bare feet also, and in one episode, these two guys were in their bare feet and they fell over in their chairs so you could see their bare feet. It was great. I really like how this show relates to kids. Kids love it and I hope it's around for a long time!