cross-device

Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Not Just Bikes explains why crossing streets is dangerous in the US and Canada, where roads are designed to move cars fast, and contrasts it with Dutch designs for pedestrians.

A short animated explanation of the power split device in Toyota-style hybrids, a planetary gearset that works as an eCVT. It shows how engine and motor power are combined.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

An animated introduction to geometric algebra, presented as a language that can describe most of physics. It was made with manim and covers multivectors and how they generalize familiar tools like cross products and quaternions.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

Johnny Harris investigates why McDonald's ice cream machines are so often broken, covering the Taylor machines, the repair restrictions on franchisees and the Kytch workaround device.

3Blue1Brown's visual walkthrough of the attention mechanism inside transformers, covering self-attention, multiple heads and cross-attention. It is chapter 6 of his deep learning series.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

Explains induced demand beyond roads, showing that it applies to transit, walking and cycling infrastructure too but with different consequences. It corrects common misunderstandings of the concept.

Ben Eater gives a detailed look at how an NPN bipolar junction transistor works and what it does. It is an eleven-minute explanation aimed at building real understanding of the device.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

Not Just Bikes shows how traffic calming is built into streets across the Netherlands, from city centres to villages. Street design naturally slows cars and makes roads safer.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

Veritasium explores compliant mechanisms, devices that move by flexing rather than using hinges and joints, with researchers at BYU. It covers advantages such as fewer parts and precision, including uses in nuclear weapon safety.

A short Not Just Bikes video on continuous sidewalks in the Netherlands, where the sidewalk runs unbroken across side streets so cars must visibly cross pedestrian space. It places them within Dutch sustainable safety and Vision Zero efforts.

PBS Space Time explains what happens as you approach and cross a black hole's event horizon, using Penrose diagrams and light cones as the tool for understanding spacetime there.

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

Dialect coach Erik Singer tours a range of accents across North America with linguists in Part 2 of WIRED's accent series. It covers regional distinctions such as Southern Mississippi, Miami and Utah English.

Linguist Geoff Lindsey explores vocal fry: what it is, who uses it, how it relates to glottal stops and accents, and why some people dislike it.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

Not Just Bikes explains the Dutch concept of autoluw, or nearly car-free, streets and how it is applied across the Netherlands, with examples from Toronto and Copenhagen. It also covers Amsterdam's move toward a nearly car-free city.

Dialect coach Erik Singer and several linguists tour distinct accents across English-speaking North America. It is the first part of a WIRED series on US accents.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths demonstrates MENACE, Donald Michie's 1961 machine made of matchboxes that learns to play noughts and crosses through reinforcement. He builds and trains a physical version.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

Veritasium rides a boat across the Los Angeles reservoir covered in 96 million black plastic balls. He explains why they were really introduced, which was not primarily to reduce evaporation.

A Wendover Productions video on how dollar store chains expanded across America and why they displace grocery stores in small towns. It covers their business model and supplier leverage.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the first Framework Laptop, a fully repairable and upgradeable machine. The reviewer expected a flimsy chunky device and was happily surprised.

ScienceClic visualizes what you would see falling into a black hole, from the approach and the accretion disc to crossing the horizon, in 15 minutes.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

A five-minute BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions are designed so cyclists and pedestrians can cross safely. It explains the layout choices that separate and protect them.

Nature video showing MIT researchers flying the first plane with no moving parts, powered by an ion drive that creates an ionic wind from high-powered electrodes. The 5m-wide craft flies across a sports hall.

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

Hugh Jeffreys tears down the iPhone 12 and assesses its repairability, focusing on how parts are serialized and tied to the device so swapping components between phones does not work.

Scott Manley tells the story of a computerized telemetry system built to sit at the heart of a nuclear test device in place of the plutonium pit, designed to transmit data in the microseconds before it was destroyed.