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5 Important Places That Were Saved This Year 

In the grand tradition of giving you the bad news first, yesterday we looked at the bummer that is the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s biggest losses of 2014. Now comes the good news: Five historic places that will live to fight another day. The following sites range from the places where the atom bomb…

Thanos Becomes Santa In Marvel Superhero’s Holiday Short

What do the heroes of the Marvel Universe really want for Christmas? Find out as the Mad Titan himself takes on the mantle of Santa Claus in this neat little animated short from Marvel. I’m a sucker for companies that use their own action figures for goofy little animated shorts – I had no idea…

First Glimpses Of Some Returning Favorites In Game Of Thrones Season 5

There’s a wild rumor about Marvel’s plan to replace Tony Stark as Iron Man. New artwork gives a better look at some key Star Wars characters. Find out how Gotham will explore the backstory of Robin’s family, and how Agents of SHIELD will reveal May’s past. Check out a ton of Kingsman featurettes. Spoilers now!…

These pictures prove that there’s nothing original in the way we dress

Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom spend 20 years traveling to megapolis like Paris, New York or Shanghai to document the influence of globalization in the way people dress. His series People of the Twenty-First Century show clear patterns of taste and behavior that repeat across nationalities, races, and cultures. Hans Eijkelboom is a conceptual artist and…

The opening shot of Touch of Evil is a must-watch filmmaking masterpiece

Long takes are pure joy for the eye and can put your brain into a trance. This one—the Orson Welles’ cut from the opening scene of Touch of Evil—is one of the very best in filmmaking history, one of my favorites, and an absolute must-watch scene. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook…

Every River in the U.S., Colored According to the Way It Flows

There are over 250,000 rivers in the U.S., some subtly serene, others tremendously tumultuous. But in this visualization you can see them all—and the color shows which way their waters flow. Created by Andrew Hill from Vizzuality, it uses data from the US Geological Survey and the CartoDB software platform. Zoomed out, the thing admittedly…

New trailer for Star Citizen shows our space dreams come true

Star Citizen’s new trailer claims all the footage is taken from the in-game engine, no pre-renderings, but it is so amazing, so detailed and beautiful, so impossibly complex, that I just can’t believe it. If it is really this way, I will buy a PC, an Oculus Rift, and disappear forever from the face of…

Sony Wants Twitter to Remove Tweets With Leaked Content or It’ll Sue

Sony’s quest to stamp out traces of leaked email across the web continues, with the company now threatening to sue Twitter if the social network doesn’t ban accounts that are sharing information from the leaks. In a letter obtained by Motherboard, sent from Sony lawyer David Boies to Twitter’s general counsel Vijaya Gadde, it’s stated…

Cool frontal shot really makes the F-35 look like a sci-fi starfighter

OK, F-35 Lightning II, OK. You look amazingly futuristic in this full frontal shot. That’s some Robotech-level shit right there. You win. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

Guys use a Portal gun to do some impossible basketball trick shots

If I had a Portal gun like these guys, I don’t think using it for basketball trick shots would have been on the top of my to do list. But after watching this video, I may have to change my mind. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

The Lyrics That Define Each Decade, Visualized

Ever wondered what kind of lyrics define an era? In this visualization, David Taylor looked for words in Billboard song titles that appeared during a given decade more than other decades and then charted them. The results are pretty interesting. The chart shows the top five words most unique to that decade, stretching all the…

Stop Picking On Crows: Study Reveals the Birds Aren’t Evil Predators

We are huge fans of crows here, and now a new meta-analysis of 42 studies reveals that corvids don’t have a negative impact on prey species. So South Africa’s campaign to poison crows appears to be misguided. Image: Crow (disambiguation) by Kevin Cole/flickr/CC By 2.0 Dr. Arjun Amar, an ornithologist at the Percy FitzPatrick Institute…

Here’s a Festive Crossword Puzzle About 2014’s IP and Copyright News

Over the last 12 months, IP spectators saw a lot of action in the arena of copyright and related law. We would tell you all about it, but that would be cheating. Download a printable PDF here, or play an unofficial interactive version hosted on GitHub by The Dod. Or just print off this page!…

New blackhole hunter takes first photo—and it is absolutely stunning

NuSTAR—NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, the most sensitive high energy X-ray telescope ever invented—has taken its first picture of the Sun ever and it looks absolutely amazing. Like the prettiest Christmas tree ornament. NuSTAR’s image is laid over another picture by Solar Dynamics Observatory. According to NASA: Green shows energies between 2 and 3 kiloelectron…

Apple’s First Ever Automated OS X Update Will Patch a Critical Flaw

Apple has pushed out out its first-ever automated security update to Macs. The patch will fix a security flaw that could see hackers gain remote access to computers. The update first started rolling out on Monday. It fixes a component of the OS which relates to network time protocol (NTP), which is used for synchronizing…

An Unusually Strong Winter Storm Produced Beautiful Ice Formations

This is just one of a series of photos taken by Marko Korošec of Mount Javornik, part of a mountain range in eastern Slovenia. Ten days of snow, high winds, and freezing fog produced layers of rime ice over everything up the mountain, including 3-foot ice spikes. See the rest of Korošec’s photos on his…

Google now shows song lyrics with search results (for some songs). Christmas karaoke, anyone?

North Korea Is Partially Back Online

Yesterday, North Korea’s internet went dark, with security researchers claiming that internet was down entirely across the entire country. Now, the country’s connection seems to be at least partially restored. https://gizmodo.com/north-koreas-internet-is-totally-screwed-right-now-1674118374 A team from Dyn Research tell the BBC that Internet services were partly restored after a total outages of 9 hours and 31 minutes.…

Guy in a lawn chair gets lifted by giant balloons like in the movie Up

Every person who has seen the movie Up and also enjoys dreaming about fanciful things every now and again has thought about flying away in balloons like Carl Fredricksen. Professional daredevil and crazy person Erik Roner just did it. He bought tanks of helium to pump up giant balloons to make him fly. All it…

Star Trek‘s New Director Is Fast and Furious’ Justin Lin

Deadline‘s reporting (and The Hollywood Reporter’s confirmed) that Paramount’s found its replacement for Roberto Orci: Justin Lin, best known for a bunch of the Fast and Furious movies. Oh, and Community’s “Modern Warfare.” Lin’s name was on the list of five candidates that emerged after rumors that Edgar Wright was being eyed died down. He…