Wave Lengths premiers

A quarterly 30-minute tv show on science at the University of Arizona, "Wave Lengths," premiered on public tv last night here in Tucson, right after "Nova." A tough act to follow, but Wave Lengths held its own.

Vicki Chandler, director of the UA BIO5 Institute, serves as host and clearly is having way too much fun to classify this as work.

The inaugural show introduced Vicki and how she found a career in science, then covered six research projects at UA with short interviews and video clips:

• Super Green Rice
  
• Hubble’s Successor
  
• Mosquito Control
  
• Skin Cancer Prevention
• Valley Fever Cure
  
• The Genographic Project

No geosciences in the first episode, but I'm sure they'll get to it soon. The UA bench in geosciences, hydrology, planetary science, and others, is world class with lots of fascinating research to showcase. In fact "Nova scienceNOW" will feature the Mars Phoenix Lander mission tonight on PBS.

The one thing I found disconcerting in the program was that after each segment, they posted a "Did you know?" question that had nothing to do with anything else on the show. I really expected something about rice after that segment. The same for each other segment and each time I expected a follow up to the prior segment.

I expect the production crew will be finding their voice more clearly as time goes on, but they did a superb job out of the blocks on this first episode.