http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – The corporate behind-the-scenes workings of Walt Disney World are interesting, to say the least. They’ve got their own private city.

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. Thanks to Dr Simon Clark for helping proofread my script: https://www.youtube.com/SimonOxfPhys – any errors are mine, not his! Current

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – 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

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

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott Or: what happens when you privatise Big Brother.

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. More about the Artificial Gravity Facility: https://www.brandeis.edu/graybiel/facilities/srr.html More about the

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Why do we say “Ye Olde”? Why is “Menzies” pronounced “Mingis”? To find out, we have to go back into history. Filmed at YouTube Space, London, and directed by Matt Gray (http://mattg.co.uk – @unnamedculprit)

http://techdif.co.uk – This week, Gary works on his impressions, we delve into some European history, and Chris pops a button.

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Oneironauts are “dream travellers”: folks who say they can become aware of, and control, their dreams. But how do you tell if you’re dreaming? Well, there’s this one weird trick…

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

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. My thanks to Ronnie

Go see William Osman’s video about building the car! – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZK_fnS62Lk and thanks to Michael Reeves for being a guinea pig: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtHaxi4GTYDpJgMSGy7AeSw/ 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

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. Edited by Michelle Martin (@mrsmmartin) Thanks to Thor Nielsen for the suggestion! I’m at http://tomscott.com on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as tomscottgo

I thought about saying “secret patterns” or “mysterious patterns” in the title, but that’d be a lie: they’re just mostly unknown! So let’s talk about tactile paving, about design, about accessibility, and about those bumpy bits that you stand on when you’re crossing a British street. // Thanks to Richard Holmes and the team from

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

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? Thanks to Moriah and all the team at Space Camp! You can find out more about their programs for kids and for adults at https://www.spacecamp.com/ Edited

This week, TV star Noel Edmonds endorsed the “EMP Pad”. He said it could help with cancer — and the company behind that claim denied it right away. Here’s why. (Pull down the description for a full bibliography!) I’m at http://tomscott.com on Instagram and Snapchat as tomscottgo on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott

(EDIT: Of all the things not to fact-check! It’s UTC, not UCT. Which is short for Coordinated Universal Time, because reasons. Well, that’s embarrassing.) http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – 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

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – 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.

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – It should never have happened. Defending against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks is Web Security 101. And yet, today, there was a self-retweeting tweet that hit a heck of a lot of people – anyone using Tweetdeck, Twitter’s “professional” client. How did it work? Time to break down the code. (Remember the

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – 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.

If you’re sitting on a boat in Lake Constance, are you in three countries at once? Or just in one? Does it even matter? Because strangely, it turns out there are parts of the world where no-one really minds when international borders are not just ignored, but are completely undefined. SOURCES: Smith, B. (2001). Fiat

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. Matt’s musical experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzMVJkTjKNc Behind the scenes on the Matt and Tom channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4qplnaPjbk Thanks to Allan, Alan and Preston for all their

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. You can buy a professional tea tasting set from