Two new TV shows have managed to capture my attention enough that I set aside a calendar reminder to alert me when they are on. Aside from the usual shows that only turn a TV for (Mythbuster, How Things Are Made, Modern Marvels, and Engineering an Empire) these two are truly shows I go out of my way to see. Both manage to capture subjects that I always enjoy learning about. How our world around us evolved and where we are going in the future.

With Next World, we see the problems we face and potential we have with developing technologies. Few people think about this, but the subject is something that I hear about now and then. The more years that pass, however, the more I see this happening. Future conflicts and wars will be fought over simple things like water. In the future, 2/3 rds of the population will not have adequate water resources. On the flip side, humans are on the verge of producing new 'super' humans, who, thanks to break through genetic research,  will become vastly smarter, stronger, faster, and live far longer than we do now. We will travel around in cars that are nano machines linked together to form some of the strongest materials ever made. These are only a few examples, but the show attempts to show both the positive and negative possibilities that we are facing as a future civilization.

Evolve covers details on the Law of Evolution that I didn't even know from my own reading. Subjects that show how detailed the scientific evidence is and the depths that scientists have gone in discovering evidence to back up their findings. Some prime examples include evidence to back up the idea that our planet had a much higher concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere millions of years ago. This allowed many of the larger species we don't see today to exist. Namely, huge insects that simply could not exist today. To test this concept, scientists used modern insects with short life spans in a high concentration of oxygen to see if their size increased over a few generations. Sure enough, the fruit flies that were used in the experiment increased in average size with higher levels of oxygen.