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This Chocolate Teapot Can Hold Boiling Water Without Totally Melting

There is exactly one reason you would ever want to brew hot tea in a barely stable chocolate teapot: To prove that you could. And indeed, tea-loving Brits have enlisted a master chocolatier to do just that. Behold the power of (chocolate) science. In case you aren’t up on your British insults, a “chocolate teapot”…

Medieval Illustrations Of The Hellmouth Make Sunnydale Seem Tame

Open wide and say ahhhhhhh! In medieval Europe, Hellmouths were commonly depicted in illuminated Apocalypse manuscripts as hideous beasts, swallowing the souls of the damned, while the souls of the saved watched smugly from Heaven. The British Library has posted some of the most memorable images in their collection. The Rider on a Pale Horse,…

Make sure to watch this short till the very end because it’s brilliant

This short animation for Channel 4 is brilliant in many ways. It shows an overly developed world inhabited by millions of cute little creatures, with cute little jobs, and cute little bars. All is fine till the final twist—so unexpected that it blew my mind. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…

What’s the Best Visualization of the Internet You’ve Ever Seen?

All the cables and servers that make up the internet may be actual, physical things, but the data they send zipping all over the world is a bit harder to put into perspective. Many have tried—quite a few have failed—but every once in a while, creativity and genius combine to form the perfect picture of…

What’s Wrong with Alternative Medicine?

If unconventional therapies like acupuncture can make patients feel better by bringing them a vague sense of well being, why not let them? Some scientists say we shouldn’t. It’s safe to say that most everyone allows for some form of mysticism in their lives. If you’ll permit the oversimplification, one can imagine a spectrum of…

NASA’s Next-Generation Orion Space Capsule Is Ready for Riders

After a decade of development, NASA’s next-generation Orion crew module is finally complete! Now comes the hard part: ensuring that it actually works. Crews have just its completed construction at the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. They’re now in the process of transferring the Orion to a different…

These Alien Skyscrapers Will Rest on the Site of an Old Uranium Plant

The Pritzker Prize-winning starchitect Zaha Hadidjust released images of her latest design—three matching towers for Brisbane’s waterfront—and they look nothing short of alien. Which feels oddly appropriate, since the skyscrapers are also supposed to sit on potentially radioactive land. Hadid’s so-called Toowong development, a complex with 486 apartments and eight villas, is indeed planned to…

Good afternoon, Tokyo

Hey Tokyo! You going to bed yet or having some late drinks? If you are sleepless, here’s a beautiful tilt shift time-lapse of your crazy city, which really looks like the coolest model of a futuristic city in the planet. I’m off to get some pre-dinner tapas in Madrid and it’s midday in New York.…

Check Out DARPA’s Insanely Agile ‘Tank Of The Future’

DARPA’s Ground X-Vehicle Technology (GSV-T) program is an effort to revolutionize tank design. To that end, the advanced concepts research wing is considering designs that focus less on armor and more on mobility and speed. This wild concept video should give you a good idea of what the U.S. military is striving to achieve. A…

America’s First Floating Gun Battery Is Older than the USA

Nothing jumpstarts technological development like a good war. WWII gave us UAVs, WWI introduced tanks, and the French-Indian War produced a unique gun battery—more cannon flotilla than warship—the radeau. A radeau (French for “raft”) is basically just that—a basic, flat-bottomed, multi-purpose, floating platform. They were especially popular as buoyant battle stations in the American Colonial…

Nukes Are Cannibalizing The U.S. Defense Budget

The Cold War is over, but you wouldn’t know it looking at the current defense budget. The U.S. is spending hundreds of billions on new weapons systems to modernize its nuclear triad—and the Defense Department won’t be able to pay for it without deeper cuts in conventional forces. “It won’t happen tomorrow, but the Pentagon…

Apple Now Warns You If Your iCloud Is Accessed from the Web

Following last week’s celeb-photo-hacking-scandal, Apple has started sending email notifications that warn people that their iCloud accounts have been accessed from web. This is the first step to what we’ve been toldwill be a more secure iCloud future. Now when you login to your account from a web browser—or when somebody else does—you’ll get an…

11 Bird’s-Eye Views That Show How NYC Has Grown Over 350 Years

Exactly 350 years ago today, New York City became New York City. The city itself already existed, of course: As the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. But on September 8th, 1664, the British gave it its permanent moniker, which makes today its name-day. We’ve seenall manner of maps illustrating how NYC has grown over the…

HP Stream: A Windows Machine at a (Slightly High) Chromebook Price

Last month, HP gave us a good look at Microsoft’s upcoming Chromebook slayer, known as the HP Stream, after temporarily posting its specs on their own website. Now, HP is announcing the device in a more official capacity with models expected to be available in the U.S. as early as September 24. But it’s $100…

New clip from Star Wars: Rebels sees the team plan a Wookiee rescue

Star Wars: Rebels’ première isn’t far off now, and Disney would like you to know that with yet another clip from it. This one sees Ezra and the ragtag group of Rebels plan to liberate some Wookiee slaves from the Empire. It’s starting to feel like we’ve seen half of Rebels’ opening special Spark of…

8 Things We Can Do Now to Build a Space Colony This Century

Before humans start living in space on a regular basis, there’s a lot of basic science and political agendas that need to advance. We talked to scientists and experts about the fundamental things they think we should do right now, if we want to have a space colony in the next 100 years. Interstellar Mayflower,…

This Giant Sixth-Scale BTTF DeLorean Looks as Detailed as the Film Prop

Next to the lightsabers from Star Wars, the time-traveling DeLorean from the Back to the Future trilogy has to be one of the most recognizable film props ever created. Countless die-hard fans have even gone as far as to buy and modify real-life DeLoreans to look like the one seen in the films, but Sideshow…

Neal Stephenson Inspired Madeline Ashby To Write This Wild, Clever Tale

Tomorrow sees the publication of Hieroglyph, a book of optimistic science fiction spearheaded by Neal Stephenson’s famous call to arms . And we’ve got an exclusive excerpt from Madeline Ashby’s weird, bracing short story, in which she imagines a world without border fences. Top image: “Border City” by Daniel Leivick. You can read more about…

The M76 is the “weapon that earned the honor of being the first zombie apocalypse gun,” writes War is Boring, which looks at the peculiar history of the submachine gun that has been the firearm of choice in multiple films, including The Omega Man and The Dark Knight.

How to Keep Your Phone From Sending Your Photos to the Cloud

Automatic photo upload apps have freed us from a cumbersome world of USB cables and memory cards, and generally speaking it’s great to have your pictures sent to the Web automatically. Sometimes, however, it’s not so great. Even if you’re not a celebrity with nude pictures to hide, you might not want all of your…