Avalanches, earthquakes, hurricanes, bombings--all mean human tragedy unless rescuers respond within a moment's notice of disaster. Here are the latest advances in rescue technology, including: a Searchcam system that locates buried victims, and the Jaws of Life that can extricate a person from a crushed car in seconds.

Emergency room medicine has only been a recognized specialty since 1989, and it took close to two millennia to get to this point. We'll examine advances that led to the modern emergency room--from the Byzantine's establishment of the first hospitals around 1050 A.D. to today's telemedicine. the prognosis for its future looks good.

Any fire raging out of control is a hazard, but when compounded with obstacles of extreme conditions, such as an oil well blowout or acres of forest ablaze, firefighters face new elements of danger. Meet a WWII London firefighter, "Hell Fighters" who squelch oil well infernos, and smokejumpers who parachute into forest fires.

Fire! A blessing and curse to mankind. We'll review efforts to control this force from ancient Rome to today's thermal imaging cameras with special focus on U.S. history. We'll see how major fires in Chicago and San Francisco altered city planning, and relive the disasters at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and Coconut Grove.

Meet crime fighters who take on fiery killers. In Houston, visit the site of a suspicious fire with Fire Marshall Lalo Torres as he turns ashes into evidence. Former A.T.F. head Richard Garner explains motives behind the recent church fires. And at the California Criminalists Institute, John DeHaan trains special arson dogs.

Don't look now--but there's a lot more to your walls than you'd ever imagine. Take a penetrating look inside something we consider utterly mundane, and uncover a surprising and sometimes shocking world. A computer-managed home in Colorado showcases the high tech gadgetry destined to inhabit every wall in the future. At the headquarters of Orkin in Atlanta, a network of walls with cutouts and Plexiglas windows reveal how pests and creepy crawlies of all kinds can congregate in huge numbers inside our homes. In Washington, scientists at Underwriters Labs play with fire in the name of research, investigating how our walls can keep us safe--or expose us to a fiery death. And in Los Angeles, a security company demonstrates innovative new technology that can "see" through walls--detecting motion, heat, breathing, and even heartbeats.

From Sherlock Holmes' examination of the physical evidence at a crime scene to today's DNA technology, we review the history of crime detection through the use of forensic science.

Delves into the little-known, hugely important, multi-billion-dollar industry of product testing--where wrinkles get ironed out and goods are stripped of marketing and hype to see if they work. Meet product testers who serve as truth squads in an eccentric world of machines devised to "sneeze" at tissue paper and "sleep" on mattresses.