All episodes

The Great Scenic Railway, at Luna Park in Melbourne, Australia, is the second oldest rollercoaster in the world: and it's one of only a few which still uses a manual brake.

"Sentinel chickens" are an early-warning system against some nasty mosquito-borne diseases. I visited a flock in New South Wales, Australia.

The common wisdom is that, once an invasive species is truly established, it can't be eradicated — but I talked to the team from Predator Free Wellington, who think they can do just that

Hideyasu Ito runs the Micro Hovercraft Laboratory, and I got to meet him and ride his incredible four-bubble hovercraft.

Agroscope is a Swiss government-backed agricultural research lab. It's got a lot of other resarch projects too, but it also keeps a backup of the Swiss cheese bacterial cultures... just in käse

At the University of California San Diego, there's the Shake Table: an earthquake simulator with the heaviest payload capacity in the world.

The Catesby Tunnel, in the UK, is an old Victorian railway tunnel that has a new use: a secretive car testing facility, like a wind tunnel but in reverse. So rather than just show it to the world, I thought l'd answer a question: if you stick a camera on the outside of your car, how much does the drag cost you?

The first few moments of an explosion can't be simulated yet. But there's a team at the University of Sheffield working on it.

Well before the first climbing frame was patented as "jungle gym", mathematician Charles Hinton thought they might be able to teach kids four-dimensional thinking.

Near Dayton, Ohio there's a lookalike of the Wright Brothers' Model B: a 1910 aircraft with no cockpit. It's a modern plane with a very old design, and I went for a ride.

At the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana, you can get a product certified as bear-resistant... by actual bears.

An unexpected update to the Bear test video

This was so much more complex than I thought.

The British Library is one of the six legal deposit libraries for the UK - and the only one that doesn't pick and choose, or have to ask for copies. That's a lot of books to store, and the internet's only making it worse. This video has a correction: it turns out the formal interview requirement for a reader pass has been dropped. However, you'll still need to get a pass, and you're not allowed to take books out of the reading rooms!

AMZ Racing's "mythen" holds the world record for electric vehicle acceleration: 0-100km/h in 0.956 seconds. And they let me drive it.

There's a world in which everyone boards planes with "mobile lounges", PTVs, or Plane-Mates... but this is not that world.

The moonlight towers of Austin, Texas, are the last urban municipal lighting towers in the world: because before every street was wired to the grid, how else would you light up a city?

There's a good reason for it.

Britain's power grid is turning inside-out, which means pylons are about to become a lot more controversial in Britain. At the National Grid Training Centre, I climbed one.