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(Silver Spring, MD) – Pumpkins. Good for carving, making pies, baking seeds, and a flurry of other fall favorites. But a catapulting pumpkin competition? Now that’s an unusual job for this orange gourd-like squash! For 22 memorable years, the Delaware-based —“World Championship Punkin Chunkin” has hit the skies. This year, Science Channel is honoring the backyard engineers who turn pumpkins into projectiles with an inside look at the high flying, far-flung action of the 2008 championship. PUNKIN CHUNKIN premieres Thursday, November 27 at 9 PM (ET/PT) on Science Channel and Science Channel HD as the culmination of the network’s first Demolition Day Marathon.

PUNKIN CHUNKIN covers every angle of the intense competition from growing special, aerodynamic pumpkins and determining the perfect pumpkin’s mass to the mechanics of the air cannon and the physics of catapults. Viewers will not only get an in-depth look at the history and rules of the struggle for pumpkin launching supremacy, but will learn the engineering science behind the competition from Dr. Frank Wilczek, the 2004 Nobel Prize winner in Physics. After all, reaching the holy grail of chunking–launching a pumpkin one mile–requires factoring in wind speed, pitch and the hurler’s elevation in addition to the pumpkin’s mass, shape, size and stiffness.

Part awesome science experiment, part genuine Americana, this one hour special, hosted by comedian Brad Sherwood (Whose Line is it Anyway?), documents the ingenuity of the biggest, loudest, greatest pumpkin hurling competition in the world. Sherwood will follow select teams as they journey from machine design to testing their equipment to the competition’s climactic finale, where every team hopes to reach the one mile mark.

“We’ve often said that Science Channel celebrates the stunning breakthroughs, the eureka moments and the hilarious miscalculations that encompass the enormous breadth of science,” said Clark Bunting, president and general manager, Discovery’s Emerging Networks. “With healthy doses of engineering, physics, imagination and pure fun, this competition perfectly embodies the new Science Channel.”

Since 1986, Sussex County, Delaware has been home to the annual Punkin Chunkin World Championships–a three-day festival where hardcore engineers and backyard tinkerers trailer their gigantic, homebuilt contraptions with one common goal: to launch eight to ten pound pumpkins as far as mechanically possible. The competition is divided into seven categories defined by the type of machine used–motorized, centrifugal spinners, and the mighty air cannons. Bringing the sport of pumpkin hurling to ever greater distances of chunkin, the heated competitions have created a current world record of 4,438 feet, just 800 feet short of a mile. Could this be the year that one team hits the coveted one-mile mark and is crowned the greatest chunkers ever?

Throughout Science Channel’s Demolition Day Marathon, Brad Sherwood will count down to the PUNKIN CHUNKIN premiere with interstitials featuring behind-the-scenes antics and little known facts including: unique uses for all the chunked pumpkin goo, the secrets of growing ballistic pumpkins, and, of course, fantastic performances of the Punkin Chunkin anthem.

Online at ScienceChannel.com, visitors will be able to see behind-the-scenes footage of the competition, a video tour of the trebuchet (a medieval catapult design), and receive a timeline of the event. To learn more about the brains behind the brawn, the website will also feature profiles and interviews with PUNKIN CHUNKIN and, should the urge to catapult pumpkins strike, visitors will learn how they, too, can compete in this awesome sport.

Let the games begin!

PUNKIN CHUNKIN is produced by Hotchkiss Industries. Jon Hotchkiss is executive producer for Hotchkiss Industries and Michael Sorensen is executive producer for Science Channel.

About Brad Sherwood:

Brad Sherwood is a regular cast member on ABC’s Whose Line Is It Anyway? as well as the British version on Comedy Central. His credits include: The Drew Carey Show, The Green Screen Show, The Smartest Guy In Town, VH-1’s I Love The 70s, 80s & 90s and more than 100 appearances in sketches on The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. More info can be found online at bradsherwood.com.

About Discovery Communications

Discovery Communications is the world’s number-one nonfiction media company reaching more than 1.5 billion cumulative subscribers in over 170 countries. Discovery empowers people to explore their world and satisfy their curiosity through 100-plus worldwide networks, led by Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Science Channel, Planet Green, Investigation Discovery and HD Theater, as well as leading consumer and educational products and services, and a diversified portfolio of digital media services including How Stuff Works Discovery Communications is owned by Discovery Holding Company (NASDAQ: DISCA, DISCB), Advance/Newhouse Communications and John S. Hendricks, Discovery's founder and chairman. For more information, please visit Discovery Communications.