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F-16s flying over Greenland look like snowspeeders over Hoth

Enjoy this cool video of some Royal Danish Air Force’s F-16s flying low level over Greenland. I imagine the pilots wearing rebel helmets looking for Imperial AT-AT walkers. Pew pew. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook

Google’s Testing Self-Driving Cars In a Matrix-Style Simulation

Somewhere in the Googleplex, Google has a digital simulation of the entire Californian road system to test its self-driving cars. This, says Google, allows it to perform “decades worth of testing” in just hours. Indeed, Google has such confidence in its system that is now lobbying the California’s government to certify these self-driving vehicles based…

This video of the evolution of Nike shoes since 1971 is pretty damn cool

Polish design and creative studio Hello Mono made this cool video that shows four decades of Nike shoes evolution. While watching it I found myself trying to spot all the Nike sneakers I ever owned. All of them were from the company’s first decade. HELLO MONO is an initiative of Creative and Art Director Wojtek…

Reuters: iPhone 6 Display Redesign Could Limit Availability

Whether it’s made of sapphire or not the display of the next iPhone is rumored to be causing some trouble.Reuters reports that Apple suppliers are “scrambling to get enough screens ready” for the new phone as a last-minute redesign has disrupted production. https://gizmodo.com/whats-sapphire-glass-and-why-would-apple-want-it-in-yo-1603457905 The newswire explains that two supply chain sources have told it that…

Wait, is that… human bones on Mars? Not quite, conspiracy theorists: in fact it’s just a rock that happens to look a little bit like a femur thigh bone. It was snapped by the Mars rover Curiosity using its MastCam. [NASA]

White House Cybersecurity Leader: Technical Know-How’s a Distraction

In much the same way that the best heart surgeons have never studied medicine and Supreme Court judges have never really read the law, Michael Daniel, the White House’s cybersecurity co-ordinator thinks that “being too down in the weeds at the technical level could actually be a little bit of a distraction” in his position.…

Bad Guys Can Make Your Phone Automatically Dial Expensive Numbers

Here’s yet another way that bad guys can use your smartphone to do nasty things. A Copenhagen-based developer has just discovered a simple way to automatically make your phone dial expensive numbers. Let’s say you’re browsing the web in Safari on your iPhone and see a number. Safari presents the number to you as a…

Deliciously explosive tropical fruits

German design studio Foreal made these cool series of tropical fruits exploding with a mix of photography, CGI and hand drawing. They called it Tropical Blast. A self-initiated illustration project focused on mixing different visual styles into a fresh and new form of expression. CGI, photography and accurate hand drawn elements coming together, composing an…

A Guide To Surviving Your First Burning Man

It’s been almost a year since my first trip to Black Rock City and I’m pretty sure that I’m no longer carrying any playa dust on my body. As that magical week approaches, I’ve been seeing first hand and virtually all the chatter and preparation my fellow Burners are going through for their trip “home”.…

One of the best live medleys in the history of rock ‘n’ roll

Sometimes you don’t need striking imagery to make a great music video. You just need David Bowie and the camera of a documentarist like D. A. Pennebaker, who filmed Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture. This scene in particular is one of the best medleys in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The only problem when…

This Sneaker Is an Homage to an Eames Chair

This sleek-looking Nike trainer isn’t real (yet), but it ought be. Because while it looks like a piece of footwear from the future, it is in fact a homage to furniture from the past. The brainchild of French designer Ora-Ïto, the shoe pays tribute to Modernist furniture designers Charles and Ray Eames—and in particular their…

The Modern-Day Loop of Infinite Self-Distraction

When you’re sat at your computer gazing at its screen it’s easy to get bored and start looking at a smaller screen until you get bored and start looking at a computer screen and then get bored and… This is the modern-day infinite loop of self-distraction. But, as Randall Munroe points out, there’s nothing particularly…

Google’s Voice Search App Will Now Understand Five Languages At Once

When it came to choosing a language to do a voice search with in the Google Search app, you were spoiled for choice. You could speak over 50 languages — anything from Arabic to Italian — and Google would still understand you. The problem was, you could only choose one language at a time. Until…

Looks like the rumor mill was right. Windows 9 will finally be unveiled to the public on September 30 at a press event. Not only will Microsoft highlight the new features in the next version of Windows codenamed “Threshold” — virtual desktops! Cortana! A new Start menu! No more Charms! — it will also release…

Into The Amazon: What To Do When Attacked By A Poo Bat

In part three of this series, Laurel actually gets into the Amazon, taking a swim after a reported lack of caiman sightings. That was after finding dozens of the world’s most venomous spiders and prior to a close encounter with ayahuasca. The spider above my head is as big as my hand, squatting on an…

Twitter Might Start Attaching Promoted Media To Your Hashtags

Seriously, what’s up with Twitter trying to actively piss us off? Since last week, it has been stuffing our timelines with tweets from people we don’t follow. And now, it might just use a hashtag in your tweet to attach promotional content to your message. A promotion for Selfie, ABC’s new TV comedy that premieres…

Seeing F1 cars race in thermal vision is so freaking cool

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that racing F1 cars is pretty much insanity. The ridiculous speeds, the punishing G-forces and not to mention the beasts of a machine they call cars. But when you look at a F1 car under thermal vision, you’ll never forget how scary it is: they’re driving fire breathing monsters. FLIR…

Here Are The First Images Of The Moto X+1

Behold the “X+1”, the sequel to Motorola’s critically acclaimed Moto X. These press images were leaked by retiring leaker @evleaks aka Evan Blass as a “retirement gift” and confirm the poorly-lit images we saw on Android Police last month. The X+1 seems to sport dual camera flashes, a wooden back option, and front-facing speakers like…

Video replaces the sounds in Game of Thrones with old video game sounds

If you think there’s too much violence and sex and awful human behavior in Game of Thrones, you’ll enjoy this light hearted remix where all the sounds of the show are replaced with old school video game noises. If you like Game of Thrones already, you’ll like the video because it’s more Game of Thrones.…

How an alien race may transform barren worlds into living paradises

It starts ominously. A robot spacecraft flies into a planet’s atmosphere and embeds itself into the ground. Scouts are sent off to test the planet’s resources and presumably suck the planet dry. I’ve seen this movie about robot uprisings and the hijacking of Earth too many times. Luckily, this short isn’t one of them. Directed…