S1 · E1 — Fighting Cow Methane with Seaweed
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There were once 400 million beavers in North America until trapping nearly wiped them out. Miles O’Brien travels from a Wyoming ranch to a Minnesota lab tracing the rebound of these industrious rodents. Rancher Tom Chant is a “beaver believer” after seeing his dry and dusty creek turn lush once beaver dams moved in, proving nature’s original engineers may be the West’s best hope against drought.
Now playingIt’s a wispy red seaweed that can cut cattle methane by 50, 80, even 98%. Miles O’Brien travels from a Marin County, California, dairy to seaweed farms in Mexico, a UC Davis research barn, and an Australian burger joint to trace how one entrepreneur’s gut instinct and a handful of scientists are racing to scale a climate fix that fits in a cow’s lunch.
There were once 400 million beavers in North America until trapping nearly wiped them out. Miles O’Brien travels from a Wyoming ranch to a Minnesota lab tracing the rebound of these industrious rodents. Rancher Tom Chant is a “beaver believer” after seeing his dry and dusty creek turn lush once beaver dams moved in, proving nature’s original engineers may be the West’s best hope against drought.
Heat kills more Americans than hurricanes and wildfires combined, yet it remains the most invisible threat of climate change. Miles O’Brien travels from a Phoenix playground redesigned to fight scorching pavement, to an Australian shade lab, to a climate chamber where he’s put under the broiler, to meet scientists engineering how humans might adapt to a hotter world.
New Bedford, Massachusetts, made its fortune hunting whales for oil. Nearly two centuries later, Mayor Jon Mitchell is wagering the city’s comeback on offshore wind. Miles O’Brien flies out to the turbines, rides with fishermen wary of losing their scallop grounds, and examines the political storm, from whale die-off claims to Donald Trump’s stop-work orders, testing the future of wind power.
Kris Tompkins went from Patagonia CEO to conservation visionary, spending her fortune with late husband Doug to protect over 16 million acres in Chile and Argentina. Miles O’Brien joins her in Argentina’s Ibera wetlands as jaguars, extinct there for a century, are captured, collared, and released into the wild. It’s a bold experiment in reversing extinction that comes with risk, loss, and hope.
Thwaites Glacier is melting faster than any glacier on Earth, and its collapse could raise global sea levels by feet, not inches. Miles O’Brien sails to Antarctica aboard a Korean icebreaker with scientists drilling through 3,000 feet of ice to reach the water below and explore a radical idea: an underwater curtain that might buy the world some time before the “Doomsday Glacier” gives way.
Ali Rezai believes he can rewire the addicted brain without a scalpel. Using focused ultrasound aimed at the brain’s reward center, his West Virginia team has helped patients battling decades of heroin addiction and binge eating silence the cravings that once ruled their lives. Miles O’Brien meets the patients, families, and scientists chasing a treatment that sounds almost too good to be true.
When explorer Albert Lin’s phantom limb pain vanished after one dose of psilocybin, he sought the science behind it. Miles O’Brien, also an amputee living with phantom pain, joins a UC San Diego trial testing whether psychedelics can reopen the brain’s capacity to rewire itself. From octopus experiments to his own emotional psychedelic journey, O’Brien investigates a new frontier in pain medicine.
A century ago, seven states divided the Colorado River based on faulty math. Now, as climate change shrinks the snowpack that feeds it, the river delivers a third less water than it once did, and the states can't agree who should cut back. Miles O’Brien meets farmers fallowing fields, negotiators at odds, and an accidental sea, all caught in the reckoning over America’s most overallocated river.
Beneath our feet lies a nearly endless supply of clean energy. Miles O’Brien traces the unlikely rise of enhanced geothermal power, from a Cold War-era experiment at Los Alamos to Texas oil fields, where veteran frackers repurpose drilling technology to tap hot rock instead of crude. With billion-dollar startups and oil majors now betting on it, geothermal may finally be ready to reshape the grid.