Tom Scott

The Bajau people of Borneo can hold their breath longer than almost anyone else on the planet. How? Why? And how can the rest of us learn to hold our breath for longer? Rohin from Medlife Crisis explains.

You've got a painting and two nails. Can you use both nails to hang the painting so that if either nail is removed, the painting falls? That's the puzzle: in this week's guest video, Jade's going to solve it with maths.

Inside his homemade, hermetically-sealed, airtight biodome, Kurtis Baute is already out of breath and surrounded by more carbon dioxide than he should be. And that's going to affect a lot of things -- including how smart he is.

We're all used to seeing MRI scans of brains. But how do they work? Can you really "see" brain activity, or read someone's mind? Alie and Micah from Neuro Transmissions went to get scanned -- and ended up having some fun with 3D printing, too.

High-frequency traders have a few tactics on stock exchanges: but simply put, they gather price information faster than anyone else, sometimes even faster than the markets themselves, and use that to make a tiny profit many, many, many times. There are all sorts of solutions: but it turns out there's a simpler one that involves physics.

Pitch correction: it can make terrible singers sound decent, brilliant singer sound mediocre, or Cher sound like a robot. But how does it work? And is it possible to explain that without actually trying to understand Fourier transforms?

Measuring time is a complicated thing. Computers, banks, and stock markets in Denmark all use UTC, the international standard: but according to the law, they shouldn't. UPDATE, March 2023: The law has now been changed! https://www.ft.dk/samling/20222/lovforslag/l19/20222_l19_som_vedtaget.htm

We built a car that you drive with real-life video game lag, and used it for an ill-advised, mostly-unscientific experiment about motion sickness. In case it wasn't obvious: we did this in a private area away from public roads and other traffic, and I insisted on more safety checks than William and Michael would normally have. Don't try this unless you're doing the same!

Welcome to the Game Garage! A series of three new, experimental quizzes and games. Thanks today to Evan Edinger - / naveregnide - and Luke Cutforth - / lukecutforth - for being the guinea pigs for Game 1: Weight For It. Sure, we could have spent a fortune on a massive studio, huge props and a giant seesaw: or we could get a garage, some GoPros, and some boxes of sand.

St Peter's Seminary sits in woodland about an hour west of Glasgow, near a village called Cardross. If you like Brutalist architecture, then it's a beautiful ruin: if not, then perhaps your view isn't so kind. It's a historic, religious building: but it's also a money sink that can't be demolished.

Today in the Game Garage, it's not about what you know: it's about what you can do. Pull down the description for the full cast and links to everyone's channels!

UPDATE: In 2019, the Fascination Parlor was hit by storms, and the building didn't survive. The games have been stored, and hopefully it'll reopen somewhere at some point! • On Nantasket Beach in the seaside town of Hull, Massachusetts, sits the last play-for-cash Fascination Parlor in the world. It's a century-old arcade game, made of relays that click and buzz. There are a few other parlors left in the world: but this is the only one where you're playing for actual money.

The final episode in this run of the Game Garage gives us a Proper Quiz: complete with all-or-nothing questions and a prize of FIVE THOUSAND PENCE. That's pence. It's £50. We didn't have that big a budget.

The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums is a collection of pigments, binders, and other art materials for researchers to use as standards: so they can tell originals from restorations from forgeries. It's not open to the public, because it's a working research library -- and because some of the pigments in there are rare, historic, or really shouldn't be handled by anyone untrained.

The Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt Device (MART) is used for spatial orientation experiments: it's a chair balanced on a metaphorical knife-edge, powered by precise and fast motors. And my job was to not fall over.

In the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University, there's the Artificial Gravity Facility: otherwise known as the rotating room. No-one's invented futuristic gravity plating yet, but if you want to test how humans would cope with artificial gravity, this is the best way.

When I was a kid, I played the demo version of Need for Speed II a lot. Just the demo: it came free on a CD with a monthly computer magazine. Every detail of that one demo track was stored in my head, long-dormant... until I ended up in Vancouver, and memories started surfacing in very odd ways.

Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of New Zealand, is known for being where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean, where two oceans collide. The truth, though, is a little more complicated than that.

Gibbs Farm, in New Zealand, is an enormous private sculpture collection. Its most famous piece is Horizons, by Neil Dawson - and it looks like a cartoon tissue somehow painted onto the landscape. To see it in person, though, will take a bit of effort.

The Ports of Auckland are automating their straddle carriers, which might not seem like much: until you phrase it as "hundred-tonne autonomous robots guided by nanosecond-precision tracking".

Kerosene Creek is a natural hot spring near Rotorua, on the North Island of New Zealand. And there have been official warnings for years: don't put your head under water. It turns out that "brain-eating amoebas", naegleria fowleri, are a real, if rare, thing.

At the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the team at Mars Bioimaging are using detector equipment originally developed for the Large Hadron Collider, and putting it to a very different use: medical imaging that allows 3D, false-color images inside the human body.

Mount Taranaki, on the North Island of New Zealand, is a large-scale circle that's visible from space: a stratovolcano with six miles of forest around it. But that didn't happen naturally. Oh, and there's a good chance that, in the next fifty years or so, it might explode.

If you invent a new theme park or amusement ride, how do you test it to make sure it's safe? There's no Federal Bureau of Zip Lines. I visited one of the companies that does just that sort of testing - and, now, inventing.

Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, has the Guinness World Record for "steepest paved road over a continuous distance of more than ten metres". Which is enough to bring in quite a few tourists. What's the history? And what counts as "steepest street"?

Near Hindon, on the South Island of New Zealand, there's one of only two remaining one-lane road-rail bridges in the country. No barriers, no lights, no sirens: if you're driving across this, you need to make sure to listen out for the train horn.

Olds Engineering, a traditional workshop and foundry, sits in Maryborough, Australia. It's not the sort of place you'd expect to find a new industrial invention in the 21st century: and yet the Olds Elevator, patented by Peter Olds, is just that.

The Byron Bay Railroad Company runs the world's first 100% solar-powered train. It wouldn't work everywhere - but in the bright sunshine of Australia, it might just be the right tool for the job.

I went to a place called Coober Pedy to tell a story about water.

If you believe the hype, then the Metropolitan Area Underground Discharge Channel stops Tokyo flooding. It doesn't. But it is one colossal part of a huge network of flood defences that protect a city that would otherwise be... well, very wet.

This isn't going to be a click-a-button and follow-along series that gives you the same result as everything else. We're not even going to talk about code. This is everything you didn't know you needed to know about building an app.

Language changes over time, and that's fine. Time for a dose of descriptivism, as the Language Files return. Pull down the description for the references!

A decade ago, engineers found the Humber Bridge had the same problem as many of the world's suspension bridges: unexpectedly fast corrosion. Here's how they fixed it, and how they're checking that it's staying fixed. Thanks to all the team at the Humber Bridge board, at Cleveland Bridge, and Visit Hull and East Yorkshire, all of whom spent a lot of time and effort getting me up to the towers!

The fetch-execute cycle is the basis of everything your computer or phone does. This is literally The Basics.

"Hello!" "Thank you!" "You're welcome!" These are all phatic expressions, and people can argue about them.

Time to tell a story about idempotency, computer science, and the Night of the Multiple Orders.

Aerosparx are a British aerobatics team that perform displays with fireworks attached to their wings. This is how they do it.

We're back! New games, same garage.

What those boxes are for, and why you might not have to click them soon.

This game turned out a lot more stressful than we thought it would.

The International Phonetic Alphabet: one sound for each symbol, and one symbol for each sound. Except for the sounds we can't make.

I'll say this about this week's Game Garage: we definitely had fun.

On a coastline that's steadily sinking under the waves, the Wax Lake Delta is rising: which is a wonderful thing for researchers.Historically, every time humans try and mess with the Mississippi, there have been unintended consequences: and even though we can now model it fairly well, there are still surprises.

The Berkeley Pit, in Butte, Montana, was once the richest hill on Earth: the Anaconda Copper Mine. Now: it's not all that rich, and it's not much of a hill. Instead, it's a toxic pit filled with sulfuric acid.

If you've been a subscriber for a while, you probably know where this one is going. Although you may still be surprised about where I ended up going... Montana's Giant Springs State Park, and Lake Sumiainen in Finland, have very short rivers. Finding the shortest in the world, though: that could be trickier.

Onkalo, on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, is planned to be the first geologic storage facility for high-level nuclear waste: eventually sealed for 100,000 years. I got to see inside.

I got an email asking if I wanted to be driven around the most famous racetrack in Britain by an autonomous racing car. I wasn't going to refuse that offer.

Oodi, the new Helsinki Library, has robots to help reshelve books. They get a lot of press attention. But they're not the important part of the library: here's why.

Next to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a giant set of ridges and furrows cut into the landscape. Yes, it's art: but it also stops some local residents from being exposed to jet noise.

I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. • Get ██ days of ███ VPN free at ██████.com/honest

"Build some models" seems obvious: but this is a story of ingenuity, of using natural resources well, and of a country that humans dragged from the sea.

In Stockholm, there's a diagonal wind tunnel, used for one very specific purpose: learning to fly a wingsuit. I tried. I almost managed it.

It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. At the Cooper Union Foundation Building in New York, there's the world's first elevator shaft: constructed four years before the safety elevator was invented. • Thanks to Prof. O'Donnell and all the team at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

At the National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, the US government once stored 32 billion cubic feet of helium. There have been breathless news articles recently saying the world's running out: but it's still possible to buy party balloons. What's going on?

"Priming" is the idea that the words you read can change the way you act. And yes, there are papers that show an effect: but we also need to talk about the Replication Crisis.

We still shouldn't be using electronic voting. Here's why.

In Wichita Falls, Texas, the Newby-McMahon Building stands 480 inches tall. Not 480 feet: 480 inches. There's a story of a smooth-talking scammer that sounds almost too good to be true. But is it?

Gestures are a really important part of language. But how do we use them, and why?

Weird calendar edge-cases and computer bugs. It's an old-school video. • The Fasthosts Techie Test competition is now closed!