Episode list

If you travel to Greenwich, stand on the famous Prime Meridian Line -- which is marked with a physical line and a sculpture at the Royal Observatory -- and look at your GPS, it won't read 0° longitude. It'll be slightly out. Who's right? And why?

It's been all over the British news today: developer Paul Price found a bug in photo-crap-maker Moonpig's site, one that might have exposed three million users' personal information. It was a perfect storm of tech incompetence: here's how to avoid doing it yourself.

Despite its reputation as being a Traffic Circle of Hell, Swindon's Magic Roundabout -- like the couple of other "ring junctions" in the UK -- is a triumph of road design. Here's why it works so well.

In the 1970s, at the height of the space race, British Rail -- the government organisation that ran all the UK railways -- patented a flying saucer. How? Why? And could it ever have worked?

Yes, there are more than seven; but they include a few colours that most people can't see, too. We're going to trace a two-minute course through Isaac Newton, cataracts, Claude Monet, and the wonders of evolution.

For those of us who grew up in the age of CGI, green screen is just "a thing that computers do". But how did effects like this work before the age of pixels? With the help of some suitably shiny graphics, here's a quick summary.

Comic Relief raises millions every year to fight poverty around the world. This year, they're asking you to make your face funny for money -- so here I am, in the wind tunnels at the University of Southampton, ready to find out what it's like to stand in a hurricane.

Thanks to the Transport Research Laboratory for letting me have a test ride on one of the Meridian Shuttles they're testing on the Greenwich Peninsula.

This isn't going to give you all the details of how to program a quantum computer: but it'll at least explain what you're doing in the simulator.

The idea of a "public road network" is a relatively modern one. After all, the US Interstate System was only finished in 1991, and UK motorways aren't that much older. What if history had taken a different turn? Let's talk about turnpikes, toll roads, and perhaps even zeppelins.

What if you could have a perfect filter for the web? Anything you'd regret seeing or reading: it's gone before you even see it. Welcome to the Bubble.

I took a trip to the University of Bristol, to have a look inside a nanomaterials lab, and to be surprised at a combination of massively expensive equipment and very basic tools.

Back in the Caledonian orogeny, 400 million years ago, two bits of the Earth's crust began to collide. The result, a long time later, was the Central Pangaean Mountains: and now, you can find their remnants all over the globe.

Don't worry: unlike last time I did a video like this, I'm not actually going to attempt to do any of these. I swore off politics a long time ago. Purdah also applies to civil servants, who basically can't do anything public for weeks. All the government departments' Twitter and Facebook accounts will be going very quiet.

In the foothills of the Dolomites, an hour or so north of Venice, lies Ai Pioppi, a restaurant that's home to an astonishing, giant, human-powered, kinetic-art theme park playground. It was designed and made by a man called Bruno over forty years, and it's free for folks who eat at the restaurant. I'll be honest: I sort of thought it was a myth. The idea of unattended, huge kinetic ride-on sculptures was surely false? There was some evidence: a very artfully-shot documentary, and some shaky tourist footage, but I couldn't quite believe that something this potentially dangerous could still exist. So on Easter weekend, when it was quiet, Paul and I took a road trip to try it. And it's real. It's very, very real. Watch as we try and take a somersault on the Bicycle of Death.

This weekend, the Royal Navy was offering public tours of HMS Defender, one of their new-generation Type 45 destroyers. It's an astonishing ship: about 8,000 tonnes of steel and high-tech equipment designed to defend an entire fleet against air and missile attack. There's another type of attack it's more vulnerable against, though: the sea mine. And by luck, there was a good example of mine defence docked a little way upriver.

In a fjord near Stavanger, in southern Norway, is Preikestolen: Pulpit Rock. It's known as one of the world's scariest tourist attractions, for good reason -- but despite the millions that visit it, it's pretty safe. At least, for current human values of safe. Let's talk about risk, immortality, and what it means to be human.

The Delta Works, to the west of the Netherlands, are one of the modern wonders of the world. But there's other, lesser-known infrastructure there too: including the Rozenburg Wind Wall, on the Caland Canal, which turns a dangerous, windy stretch of canal into a much more navigable bit of water. It's a triumph of humanity over nature, and it's astonishing.

Machine translation's a useful tool, don't get me wrong. But if you actually try to use it for regular conversation, it'll fall down really quickly. Why? What makes it so difficult?

On stage at Thinking Digital 2015, I talk about angry people, livestreaming, and how nothing seems to have changed recently.

In Spijkenisse, in the Netherlands, are a set of small bridges that most of Europe should recognise instantly: because they're the fictional ones from their banknotes, made real as a wonderful piece of public art and infrastructure.

One comma can make a lot of difference. Language is ambiguous -- but in some very specific ways. Here's how.

There are all sorts of theories about why a string of weird, mostly-Arabic text can crash your iPhone. I've hunted through them, summarised the ones that seemed plausible, and the first part of this is a run-down of what's going on. The second part: well, I'm going to take a punt at explaining why Arabic, in particular, causes this bug -- and hopefully we'll see if I'm right or wrong soon.

Yes, plenty of folks already know about the most complicated borders in Europe, in Baarle-Nassau (the Netherlands) and Baarle-Hertog (Belgium). But why did we end up with this particular system? Why do we have nations in the first place? Most historians would say it goes back to something called the Peace of Westphalia, many years ago.

Kids learn languages really easily, don't they? There's this thing in your brain that just works it out -- but it switches off when you're an adult. Right? Well, maybe. But it's not that simple.

There aren't many paternoster lifts left in the world: they're inaccessible, tough to maintain and a bit more dangerous than a regular lift. But some of them still exist: so if you're ever nearby, do stop by the University of Sheffield's Arts Tower and have a ride up and down. Just don't go over the top.

Some languages have longer words than others -- but that's not just a simple choice. There's a lot of different ways to mix up morphemes, even if they all mean the same thing in the end.

In a disused quarry at Harpur Hill, near Buxton, there's a bright blue lagoon. It looks like a perfect place to cool off in summer. And it is, if you enjoy skin irritation and fungal infections. But the strange thing is: I arrived expecting to find it black, not blue.

"Word Count" is going to count plenty of things that aren't words too -- and it doesn't get to a more fundamental question: what actually is a word?

There's a strange avenue of trees in Richmond Park, ten miles from St Paul's Cathedral; and an odd, wedge-shaped skyscraper in the city. At the New London Model, at the NLA Galleries at the Building Centre, I explain both of these. London is going vertical: but there are quite a few places where tall buildings aren't allowed, and here's why.

You might have heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: it's called the "doomsday vault", the backup of last resort for if the apocalypse happens. Except - well, perhaps that's a bit too dramatic.

There's a leap second tonight. And while there's not the Y2K-scale of disaster being predicted for it, there are probably going to be a few problems. Here's why computers have trouble with something that should, in theory, be pretty simple.

In Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, there's a sundial that works 24 hours a day. Sort of. When it's sunny. Which it wasn't. Basically, don't rely on this for telling the time.

I had an enormous amount of B-roll footage of Svalbard that I couldn't use, and the internet had a lot of questions about how to get there. Time to solve both those problems in one go.

Welcome to Svalbard, a group of islands in the High Arctic, north of Norway; the one place on the planet where carrying a gun is a legal requirement, and for a very good reason.

Robert Llewellyn is lovely. He agreed to drive me at 135mph for this video, and I was in a remote controlled car that he drove over on his channel.

With many, many thanks to all the team at DP World London Gateway. This isn't a sponsored video: they just went above and beyond to make sure this looked good, and I'm so grateful to them.

The biggest uninterrupted indoor space on the planet, Tropical Islands Resort sits on an old airfield in Germany. How on earth could anyone afford to build something that big and then use it as a waterpark? Well, the story's a bit more complicated than that.

Deep in rural Ukraine sits what was once the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. Now, it's the site of the worst nuclear disaster in human history: and one that still needs to be contained, thirty years later. How do you deal with something that'll be this toxic for so long into the future?

In the abandoned theme park of Pripyat, I have a banana. For scale. Let's talk about the Banana Equivalent Dose.

Here's the behind-the-scenes video from Chernobyl week, where Paul and I answer how we got here, and what it's like -- while you see all the B-roll footage that I couldn't fit into the regular videos.

This is the Duga-3 array, inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It's an incredible piece of Soviet engineering, capable of sending radar pulses so powerful they could see over the horizon. Which, when you think about it, is more complicated than it might initially appear.

There are only a few transporter bridges still working in the world. What are they for? Why weren't there more of them? And why don't we build them any more? Those answers and more, from an unsettlingly high position fifty metres above the River Usk.

Hovercraft were the future. So what went wrong? I had a brief stop on the Isle of Wight last week, and had one chance to get this video. Turns out hovercraft are loud, and you shouldn't stand too close behind one.

For a few weeks every year, the road through the abandoned village of Imber, in the middle of the military firing range of Salisbury Plain, is open to the public. How can the government seize and evacuate an entire village? And would it be possible now?

A guide for the newly empowered, courtesy of the Superhero Help Academic Foundation Trust, Education Division. Sure, you could jump a few places and fight crime: or you could take over the world.

Time to learn about graveyard spirals, while trying not to be in one. I was so far outside my comfort zone for this.

Thanks to the Environment Agency for letting me film.

On a windy day in Gloucestershire, I find one of the few parts of the once top-secret GPSS aviation fuel pipeline (now called CLH-PS after privatisation) that pokes above ground, and explore the balance between secrecy and safety.

How do you train sailors to save a sinking ship? Sure, you can teach them the theory, but there's no replacement for having to hammer softwood wedges into deck and bulkhead splits that are spraying cold, high-pressure water in your face. At HMS Excellent in Portsmouth sits Hazard, a Royal Navy Damage Repair Instructional Unit (DRIU). Every Navy recruit who's going out to sea will have to go through something like this -- and on a much harder level than we did. But then, they'll have had months of training and teamwork beforehand.