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...

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. A...

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 p...

In the 1830s, two French brothers, François and Joseph Blanc, pulled off the first telecoms scam in history. The optical telegraph, a line of semapho...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ca...

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. N...

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 succee...

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 techn...

The White Horse, in Uffington, is one of the oldest surviving works of art in Britain: carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire 3000 years ago. Every yea...

Over on the RAF Starrship channel, I'm talking about the history of radar: https://youtu.be/VDC_RCh0ws8 - but over here, we're testing a 90-year-old p...

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 bot...

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? ...

There are some stories in Canada that I'm not qualified to tell. Pull down the description to find out about them. YOUTUBE LINKS: * Residential School...

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 fore...

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:...

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 al...

This is it: one of these teams is going home with the trophy. It'll come down to knowledge, wits, and a bit of sideways thinking. This is the Lateral ...