Today in History

On this day in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world's first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown. The healthy baby was delivered shortly before midnight by caesarean section and weighed in at five pounds, 12 ounces.

Before giving birth to Louise, Lesley Brown had suffered years of infertility due to blocked fallopian tubes. In November 1977, she underwent the then-experimental IVF procedure. A mature egg was removed from one of her ovaries and combined in a laboratory dish with her husband’s sperm to form an embryo. The embryo then was implanted into her uterus a few days later. Her IVF doctors, British gynecologist Patrick Steptoe and scientist Robert Edwards, had begun their pioneering collaboration a decade earlier. Once the media learned of the pregnancy, the Browns faced intense public scrutiny. Louise’s birth made headlines around the world and raised various legal and ethical questions.

The Browns had a second daughter, Natalie, several years later, also through IVF. In May 1999, Natalie became the first IVF baby to give birth to a child of her own. The child’s conception was natural, easing some concerns that female IVF babies would be unable to get pregnant naturally. In December 2006, Louise Brown, the original "test tube baby," gave birth to a boy, Cameron John Mullinder, who also was conceived naturally.

Today, IVF is considered a mainstream medical treatment for infertility. Hundreds of thousands of children around the world have been conceived through the procedure, in some cases with donor eggs and sperm.

Host Daniel H. Wilson traces the evolution of power tools since they were invented by the Egyptians 3,000 years ago. Learn about power tools that slice mountains in half, and new nanotechnology that enable them to literally "split hairs." Discover how these tools are being used in sports, medicine and art.

There are locations all over the globe -- like the Bermuda Triangle -- where the Earth's energies result in a preponderance of mysterious activity. The team travels to Sedona, Arizona, long known for strange phenomena, to interview witnesses to unexplained sightings of lights and objects in the skies. Here they explore the concept of vortexes, which are places on the Earth's surface where lines of energy meet. They link these spots to the Sedona sightings and other incidents, like the Hudson Valley UFO flap of the 1980s. Later, Tim and Jeff consult an astrophysicist who suggests that inter-dimensional travel via Vortexes may be entirely possible under Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

In a carnivorous world, a butcher is a necessary link in the food chain, carving a carcass of unsavory flesh into mouthwatering cuts. We trace the grisly trade's evolution--from yesteryear's butcher-on-every-corner to today's industrial butcher working on a "disassembly" line. We tour the infamous remains of the Chicago Stockyards, where Upton Sinclair, Clarence Birdseye, and refrigeration changed butchering forever; witness high-speed butchering; and travel to a non-stop sausage factory. And if you're still squeamish, a USDA inspector offers the lowdown on HACCP--the country's new system of checks and balances on everything from quality grading to E. coli, Salmonella, and Mad Cow Disease. Finally, we visit the last bastion of old-school butchering--the rural custom butcher, who slaughters, eviscerates, skins, and cuts to his customer's wishes.

There are locations all over the globe -- like the Bermuda Triangle -- where the Earth's energies result in a preponderance of mysterious activity. The team travels to Sedona, Arizona, long known for strange phenomena, to interview witnesses to unexplained sightings of lights and objects in the skies. Here they explore the concept of vortexes, which are places on the Earth's surface where lines of energy meet. They link these spots to the Sedona sightings and other incidents, like the Hudson Valley UFO flap of the 1980s. Later, Tim and Jeff consult an astrophysicist who suggests that inter-dimensional travel via Vortexes may be entirely possible under Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

In a carnivorous world, a butcher is a necessary link in the food chain, carving a carcass of unsavory flesh into mouthwatering cuts. We trace the grisly trade's evolution--from yesteryear's butcher-on-every-corner to today's industrial butcher working on a "disassembly" line. We tour the infamous remains of the Chicago Stockyards, where Upton Sinclair, Clarence Birdseye, and refrigeration changed butchering forever; witness high-speed butchering; and travel to a non-stop sausage factory. And if you're still squeamish, a USDA inspector offers the lowdown on HACCP--the country's new system of checks and balances on everything from quality grading to E. coli, Salmonella, and Mad Cow Disease. Finally, we visit the last bastion of old-school butchering--the rural custom butcher, who slaughters, eviscerates, skins, and cuts to his customer's wishes.