Discovery announces schedule for Shark Week
The 21st annual Shark Week is coming this summer to Discovery. Les Stroud (Survivorman) and Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs) will join Adam Savage and Jamie Hyman (MythBusters) and many more experts on excursions to Bahamas, South Africa, the Arctic, Australia and a whole lot of places in between. This year they will spotlight lesser-known and unusual sharks, address myths about sharks, and educate the public on the conservation of sharks.
Shark Week will air July 27 to August 2nd. Sunday through Friday programming will run from 7 p.m. till midnight ET/PT. And on Saturday programming will run from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. ET/PT.
Find out what show I’m looking forward to and what other shows Discovery has planned after the jump.
Personally, I’m psyched for the Dirty Jobs: Shark Special. I love Dirty Jobs to begin with; Mike Rowe is such an engaging and funny host. I can’t wait to see him get thrown in a shark cage. According to the press release, “Mike Rowe travels to a place many wouldn’t associate with sharks - the edge of the Arctic Circle - in search of the mysterious Greenland shark. A slow-moving, cold water shark, scientists hope that by learning more about it they can better understand the rapid ecological changes affecting that part of the world.” Sounds interesting right? I like how Discovery is making the connection between interest in sharks and conservation. The Dirty Jobs: Shark Special premieres on July 29th from 9-10 p.m. ET/PT.
Here are the other shows. Anything look interesting to you?
MythBusters: Shark Special: “Shark Week kicks off with this two-hour premiere on Sunday, July 27th from 9-11 p.m. ET/PT. Using their signature sci-tech style of explosive experimentation, the MythBusters hit the deep blue from California to the Bahamas to investigate myths about sharks, including: Are sharks repelled by magnets? Do dogs attract sharks? Do the vibrations caused by a flapping injured fish attract sharks? Does chili powder repel sharks? And hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman create the ultimate Shark Week build – a 16-foot-long robo-shark!”
Surviving Sharks: “Premiering Monday, July 28th from 9-10 p.m. ET/PT, Survivorman’s Les Stroud hosts this look at how best to play it safe in the water, while testing popular theories of how to survive shark encounters.”
Day of the Shark (working title): “This special, premiering Monday, July 28th from 10-11 p.m. ET/PT, chronicles six recent shark attacks that took place at different times of day, to determine if day or night is safer for swimming.”
How Not To Become Shark Bait: “On Tuesday, July 29th from 10-11 p.m. ET/PT, a thrillseeking team with a purpose - escapologist Jonathan Goodwin, adrenaline junkie Yul Kwon, marine biologist Jeremiah Sullivan and scientist Dr. Marty Jopson - test shark attraction theories with lemon,On tiger and reef sharks, focusing on the sensory perception of sharks including colors, vibrations, smells and other attractors. In the process, viewers learn strategies for staying safe when in the water.”
Mysteries of the Shark Coast: “On Australia’s northeastern coast, home to more species of sharks than anywhere else in the world, the sharks are disappearing. A cross-discipline team of marine biologist Richard Fitzpatrick, filmmaker Mike deGruy, lead scientist for the Nature Conservancy, M. Sanjayan, Ph.D, and adventurer Celine Cousteau, band together to find out why, in this two-hour special premiering Thursday, July 31 from 9-11 p.m. ET/PT.”
Ted Allen to host new show for Food Network
It sounds like the Food Network has finally come up with a show that will compliment Alton Brown’s Peabody-award winner Good Eats. The foodiest member of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Ted Allen, has signed to host Food Detectives, a new Food Network series. Starting Tuesday, July 29th at 9 o’clock ET, the half-hour show will begin illuminating the world about the stuff we eat. They will be “pulling back the curtain and revealing the answers to some of the most puzzling food mysteries.”
Actually, the concept is kind of like a Mythbusters for food. Ted will host the show and folks from Popular Science Magazine will provide the expertise. For instance, does an apple a day keep the doctor away? What about baked beans, do they really give you gas? If not, what’s Beano going to do with all those commercials and product?
I know, some of this seems similar to Good Eats, especially the science part, but Alton has always been about making the food and eating the food, not just dissecting it to the molecular level.
For Food Network, landing Ted Allen is a coup of sorts. Ted’s been aligned with Bravo thanks to Queer Eye as well as his involvement with Top Chef. However, he’s also been a judge on Iron Chef America, so there has been a previous connection. “We’ve wanted to work with Ted for years on a series of his own and we’ve found a great fit,” said Food Network’s Bob Tuschman. (He’s the grey-haired guy on The Next Food Network Star.)
Ted’s response was just as positive: “I’m so excited to be working with Food Network on this new series. …I know that viewers are going to be totally engaged with the information we are discovering on Food Detectives.”
Food Detectives will aim to be interactive as well as instructive, urging viewers to send in their questions about the food mysteries that have them perplexed.
[via Futon Critic]
MythBusters fans want to bust the E-reader
Something tells me this isn’t going to happen, but you can be sure plenty of us would tune in if it did.
Over on Discovery’s MythBusters forums — where fans regularly congregate to discuss previous episodes, disagree with Adam and Jamie’s conclusions and offer suggestions for future myth-busting — someone has made the suggestion that the MB’s take on the task of not only obtaining but also fully testing the capabilities of one of Scientology’s most exclusive devices: the E-meter.
If you go by what Wikipedia tells you, the E-meter measures the “’mental mass and energy’ of the subject’s mind.” What the Church of Scientology does with the information from the reading, you can either go by what’s released already in the wilds of the interweb or, if you’re a Scientologist yourself, you probably already know.
While a bunch of folks on the forum and over on Digg think this is a great idea for MythBusters, I can’t quite figure out what the heck they’d do to disprove anything it supposedly does, no matter how ludicrous it seems to some. Is there really some way to concretely disprove or even prove something like this?
Mythbusters set to bust moon landing hoax myths
Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel will be airing a special about the “hoax” of the original Moon landing. I guess they’re going to determine if the 1969 Apollo mission happened or not.
The team of Kari, Grant, and Tori went to the Marshall Space Flight Center to use a vacuum chamber. While there, they will be recreating Dave Scott’s famous hammer and feather drop from the Apollo 15 mission.
They’ll also be dealing with the hoax claim that dry lunar regolith can’t hold a footprint, and how the flag can wave in a vacuum. They will be trying to reproduce a lunar surface in a studio somewhere.
I firmly believe that the Moon landing happened, but I also love watching wacky conspiracy theories. I loved the movie JFK, so I think I might try to catch this one. The air date has not been finalized for the episode.