Tom Scott

At the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, under the football stadium of the University of Arizona, there's an enormous rotating furnace, keeping tonnes of glass heated as it forms the mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope. Here's a look inside!

There isn't one universal sign language for all: even British and American sign languages have very little in common. Here, with full subtitles, is someone actually qualified to explain why!

Solresol is a language, invented out of whole cloth by Jean-François Sudre in the 19th century, that used seven musical notes to create all the words that he thought you'd ever need. It did work: so why aren't we all speaking in notes right now?

William Lyon Mackenzie King was a sexually repressed, hypocritical, guilt-ridden, prostitute-visiting momma's boy who was exceptionally weird. He was also, perhaps, Canada's greatest prime minister. This week, Evan talks about legacy, and about how you don't need to be a good person to be a good politician.

London City Airport's getting a new control tower: but it's just going to be a large mast with 14 high-definition cameras on it. The actual tower will be 80 miles away, in the headquarters of NATS near Swanwick. It feels questionable: but is it?

I was going to tell a science fiction story about faceswapping, and mass blackmail. Then the news broke about unethical faceswapping videos, and software designed and marketed for creating them: and I realised the future had arrived faster than I thought. (This was originally a talk given at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail earlier this week, but I managed to mangle the audio recording settings, so I rerecorded it in a muddy park! It's not the same without the audience, but hopefully it's close enough.)

In Göttingen, Germany, there's a four-tonne steel ball that can be raised up a 14-metre tower -- and then dropped in less than two seconds, crashing back to earth. It makes tiny, artificial earthquakes: here's why.

In the Quadratestadt of Mannheim, Germany, the streets aren't named: instead, the blocks are. It's an exception to a rule that most people don't even think about — especially not mapping companies. (Thanks to João Correia for sending me this idea back in 2015!)

Human error has launched massive barrages of fireworks at the wrong time before. We're doing it deliberately!

I'd never heard of moiré effect beacons until I got an email asking me about them. It seemed like a really clever idea - but it was really hard to research. Or at least it was, until I stumbled upon one magic phrase that revealed its history. It turns out this thing's called an "Inogon leading mark" or "Inogon light" -- Inogon, not Inogen -- and it's a Swedish invention from the 1980s. But there's still a question: why is being used to mark an undersea cable, instead of guiding people home? (Full disclosure: there were some weird strobing effects from the light that only showed up when I got the footage into the edit, so the image you see here has been digitally stabilised so it appears the same way on screen as it does in person!)

Many people sent me this story: it covers my favourite topics of power grids and temporal anomalies. But when the mainstream press have already covered it, how could I add something more? The answer: by adding another pet topic, Unnecessary British Patriotism. And a teasmade.

The Red Arrows are the Royal Air Force's aerobatic display team - the best in the world. They fly Hawk T1 jets, powering through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, pulling high-G maneuvers with just a few metres between their wingtips. Here's how they do it: and part of it's a skill that you probably already know.

In Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, Florida, there's a mermaid show -- and there has been for 70 years. It's one of the United States' oldest roadside attractions, and it still does three shows a day. At least, provided the local wildlife doesn't get in the way.

US Car Number 1, the Ferdinand Magellan, sits in the Gold Coast Railway Museum in Miami. It's 120 tonnes of bulletproof, armoured railcar: a train carriage designed to move the President of the United States around the country in safety and style. At least, it was, until other transport came along to do a better job.

As far as I can find, no-one has actually made a International Standard Cup of Tea - ISO 3103 or BS 6008 - for the internet before. Lots of people have talked about it, but that's easy. Making one? That requires precision... and some specialist equipment.

At the Royal Air Force training centrifuge in Farnborough, pilots learn how to avoid G-LOC: g-induced loss of consciousness. Let's talk about g-force, about jerk, and about how to keep circulation flowing to your brain.

The title says it all, really. Thanks to Barry from My Virgin Kitchen - go see him cook and test three different garlic breads here: • 'Out of this world' Garlic bread ft T... - and to Steve from Random Aerospace, http://www.randomengineering.co.uk/Ra... ! Pull down the description for more details. This started as a conversation in a pub a few weeks ago, and turned into one of the more ridiculous videos I've ever done. We send home-made garlic bread skyward on a balloon; exposed it to the stratosphere, 35km up; successfully returned it to earth in a protective box; and then ate it. It tasted... cold.

"_If you touch the????black point then your whatsapp will hang_", says the message that's being sent around, and it's right. It's a text rendering bug, the same as many others -- which isn't interesting. But the characters it's using, Unicode RTL and LTR marks, are worth knowing about.

Over the North Atlantic, there's no radar coverage: so how do air traffic controllers keep planes safe? The answer, at least in part, can be found at Nav Canada's Gander Area Control Centre in Newfoundland. The North Atlantic Tracks are like freeway lanes in the sky, if freeway lanes were stacked a thousand feet on top of each other.

In Quebec, Canada, there's a town called Asbestos. It's an alarming name, one that conjures up images of lung disease and mesothelioma. So why haven't they changed it? [Update, October 2020: they've changed it! It's now Val-Des-Sources. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925820... ] Dr Jessica van Horssen's book, "A Town Called Asbestos", was invaluable for my research. Its ISBN is 9780774828420, and it can be ordered from most libraries and bookstores.

Rue Canusa (or Canusa Avenue) is a street that's split in two by a border: the northern part is in Stanstead, Canada, and the southern part is in Derby Line, USA — and border crossings here aren't as easy as they used to be.

The St Lawrence Burns were a series of deliberate fires in the soon-to-be-demolished village of Aultsville, Ontario, which was due to be flooded to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway. The results changed the way buildings are constructed around the world, and saved lives.

If you're in Canada, you need good winter boots. But how do you know whether they're actually safe, or whether you'll fall over the first time you step on ice? This is WinterLab, part of the Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratories at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where they're testing winter shoes with science.

Giant Mine sits near Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Once it was a productive gold mine, but after the gold ran out, the mining company went bankrupt and left the government to clean up the mess: enough arsenic trioxide dust to kill everyone on Earth. The solution: freezing it, at least for now.

Until recently, Canada didn't have a road link to the Arctic Ocean. But last year, the all-weather Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway opened, which meant that finally the country was connected "from sea to sea to sea". I set out to drive it, but it didn't quite go how I planned.

In the far north of Canada sit the DEW Line stations: "Distant Early Warning". Built in the 1950s, these were the sites that would have sounded the alarm if the Soviet Union ever attacked North America. Or at least, they were until they went obsolete just a few years later.

In Dawson City, a small mining town in the Yukon, sits the Downtown Hotel. Inside there is a tradition that tourists have been trying out for decades: the Sourtoe Cocktail.

In the last few years, wildfires have been getting worse - and, oddly, it's because humans have been preventing them. From a helicopter above the forests of British Columbia, and from the Tree Ring Lab at UBC, let's talk about how we should just let some wildfires burn.

There are some stories in Canada that I'm not qualified to tell. Pull down the description to find out about them.

90s VHS video filters are in fashion right now, and most producers are using the same filter as everyone else. Why does the filter look like it does? To answer that question, I went to talk to the person that wrote it!

At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, there's a TRIGA nuclear reactor, used for research. You can stand next to it and watch the blue glow from the bottom of a deep swimming pool. I had to visit.

Over on the RAF Starrship channel, I'm talking about the history of radar: • A Brief History of Radar with Tom Sco... - but over here, we're testing a 90-year-old piece of technology that was meant to be part of Britain's air defence. The Sound Mirrors, on Romney Marsh, were built in the late 1920s as a way to amplify the sound from aircraft engines over the English Channel. We're flying a bit closer than that, with a drone.

The White Horse, in Uffington, is one of the oldest surviving works of art in Britain: carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire 3,000 years ago. Every year, it's rechalked by volunteers co-ordinated through the National Trust, a line of maintenance going back to before England had written history.

In Porthcurno, Cornwall, there's an old telegraph cable landing station. It's how Britain talked to the Empire -- and it's now a museum. But the technology here isn't quite as obsolete as you might think.

The first part of "How To Be Popular On The Internet*" is all about an old saying: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And if you do succeed... well, you're still going to need to do that.

I've put the North-o-Meter, and some other old UsVsTh3m games, up at https://www.tomscott.com/usvsth3m/ - I've disabled the sharing buttons, though. No-one needs them to go viral again. In the middle part of "How To Be Popular On The Internet*", it's time to talk about giving the people what they want, about getting noticed, and about the north-south divide.

On a rainy Scottish island called Jura, it's time to talk about the Manual, about long-term sustainable success, and about not having just that one catchphrase. The term "viral" has fallen out of fashion in the last few years, which is why this series wasn't called "going viral". And in truth, that's not what you want to do. Post Audio by Emi Paternostro, http://proximitysound.com Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond were better known as the KLF (or the Timelords, or the JAMs, or...). Their Manual is out of print, but I'm sure that won't stop enterprising people from tracking down versions of it, or footage of their burn. The music for this series has been an instrumental version of "Game of Taking Chances" by Johannes Hager feat. Josefin Backrud, from Epidemic Sound

The Global Vehicle Target is the new standard for testing autonomous driving and crash test systems. To cameras and radar, it looks like a car: but if you hit it, it'll fly apart. So if your emergency braking doesn't quite work... well, this is what happens.

For years, moderators of online forums and chat rooms have wielded a metaphorical "banhammer" to deal with anyone who steps out of line. Now it's real. Well, a bit more real, anyway.

Back in the 1920s, wingwalking claimed lives. Daredevils would move around on the top of a plane's wings, in mid-flight, often without any harness or any safety line. Maybe they'd be able to clip onto something during takeoff and landing, but maybe not. There are still a few of those true daredevil wingwalkers out there in the world, but in the 21st century... it's usually a bit different.

In the 1830s, two French brothers, François and Joseph Blanc, pulled off the first telecoms scam in history. The optical telegraph, a line of semaphore towers stretching from hilltop to hilltop, was for government use only: but something as simple as the law wasn't going to get in their way.

That's right, we're kicking Season 2 of the Basics off with a technical episode about a somewhat-obsolete technology! IT'S PARTY TIME. Wait, no, not party time. IT'S CODE TIME. Close enough. Let's talk about seven-segment displays, and about the longest word you can write with them.

There's a reason music videos look strange. I could just talk about framerate, cuts and continuity... or I could get an actual music video director. And a leaf blower.

Ogham is an old Irish script made by carving notches into stones. It fell out of use more than a millennium ago - but it's an interesting exception to a linguistics and computer-science rule that I'd never even realised existed. Let's talk about the Ogham Space Mark.

Every month or so, somewhere in London, a manhole explodes. It's so common that it doesn't make the news unless it's spectacular or someone gets injured. Here's why, complete with gratuitous pyrotechnics.

Dinorwig Power Station, otherwise known as Electric Mountain, is a pumped-storage hydro station in Llanberis, Wales. And yes: it's Britain's largest battery. Here's how it works, and why some of the things you think you know about TV pickups might not be so true any more.

Sometimes, numbers on sites like YouTube and Twitter jump up and down; subscriber counts lag, like-counts bounce all over the place. Why is it so hard for computers to count? To answer that, we need to talk about threading, eventual consistency, and caching. Thanks to my proofreading team, and to Tomek on camera!

Technically, the Inchindown oil tanks in Invergordon, Scotland, have the world's longest reverberation, but that makes a much worse title. We tested them with a loud noise and some very sensitive microphones.

[See pinned comment for an important update.] In a field near Elberton, Georgia, USA, sit a set of mysterious standing stones: mysterious not because they're ancient, but because they were funded by someone anonymous in 1980, perhaps as a message to any survivors of the end of the world.

The Tree That Owns Itself in Athens, Georgia is well known. The other Tree That Owns Itself in Eufaula, Alabama, really isn't. It's the same story in a different place. Why?

In the last week of December, 2028, humanity forgot about more than a century of pop culture. You've probably never thought about it, and never found it strange — but the reason is an artificial intelligence called Earworm.

Some American cities use buses, or trams, or trains. Peachtree City, Georgia, has a different solution: it's not quite public transit, but a hundred miles of golf cart tracks helps to keep cars off the road.

From January, every citizen of England and Wales will have a new social credit score. Advice from the Department for Community and Culture. [This video is fiction. See the pinned comment.]

This is the story of one of the best, and also one of the worst, text messages I've ever received. It's about harm, about consequences, and about the responsibilities that designers, coders and hackers have to make sure we treat other people with care.

WASSUP KINGDOM, it is time to GET JACK BACK for last week. Callum has Jack's backup and it's time for some FUN

The tourist guides promote it as Georgia's Little Grand Canyon: but this is a scar on the Earth, caused by humans either not understanding or not caring about geology. Is it natural? Or man-made? Or both?

The Multi Axis Trainer, or MAT, is an icon of space exploration and astronaut training. But other than spinning round kids at Space Camp: what's it actually used for?