This week's picks
4 videos our team picked as worth your time. Paste any of them into YouTube Collector for the full transcript, a chaptered summary, and search across everything you save.
The Insane Real Engineering of the Nazi Enigma Machine
How the Enigma machine actually worked, rotor by rotor, and how the codebreakers at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing among them, found the flaws that broke it. (Published 21 Sep 2026)
Reading the Pharaoh's private mail with Irving Finkel | The Amarna Letters | Curator's Corner Ep100
The British Museum's Irving Finkel reads the Amarna letters, clay tablets kings sent to the pharaohs 3,400 years ago, full of family flattery, politics and requests for gold. (Published 25 Sep 2026)
The Ambassadors: Great Art Explained
Holbein's The Ambassadors, the Tudor painting with a stretched skull across the floor that only becomes a skull when you look from the side, and what everything else in it means. (Published 1 Sep 2026)
A star so close to the Milky Way's black hole it feels its spin
Astrophysicist Dr. Becky Smethurst on a faint star that passes closer to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy than Uranus is to the Sun, and how it could let us measure the black hole's spin. (Published 1 Oct 2026)