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What to do if you fall through the ice into a deadly cold lake

I don’t think the ice freezing the Northern Hemisphere now is going to start melting anytime soon, but I always wondered about this since I was a little kid and I first walked on frozen lakes in Sweden: what to do if you fall through the ice? SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…

A 3D Reconstruction of the World’s Oldest Face

You’re looking at a 3D facial reconstruction of a 410 million year-old armoured fish called Romundina. It’s one of the first creatures on this planet to feature a characteristic many modern animals take for granted — a face. Above: The internal structures of Romundina’s face show a mixture of features of both jawless and jawed…

How Your Body’s Unique Biosignatures Are Used for Surveillance

Not long ago, fingerprints were the cutting edge of biometric profiling. Today, the use of biosignatures to identify individuals has expanded to include everything from iris and facial scans right through to DNA profiling and even the unique shape of a person’s ass. Here’s what you need to know about how companies and governments are…

Microsoft Might Be Bringing Android Apps to Windows Phone

Unnamed insiders are telling The Verge’s Tom Warren that Microsoft is considering bringing Android apps to both Windows Phone and other Windows devices. Looks like the WP8 app ecosystem could get a lot better in the blink of an eye. Windows Phone 8 boasts some rad hardware. Now-Microsoft-owned Nokia in particular, constantly puts out uniquely…

A climate map showing every Winter Olympics ever!

Climatologists over at NOAA have mapped out the weather patterns hitting the host cities during the Winter Olympics since their beginning — and, big surprise, the Winter Olympics are heating up, with Sochi among the warmest of the last century. Here it is in more detail: The global rise in temperature could mean that the…

Insane Russians climb the 2132-foot Shanghai Tower barehanded

What the hell, you Russian kids, are you absolutely insane? What’s wrong with you! Check out these dudes climbing the 650-meter tall Shanghai Tower equipped with nothing but their hands and GoPro cameras. It’s crazy. “Today we will show you how to climb on second tallest building in the world. Shanghai Tower, China,” they say…

Watch Two Crazy People Climb the World’s Second Tallest Building

At this point, we’ve all seen the insane Russian dudes who dangle off of tall things. But that looks like child’s play when you see these Ukrainian guys scale the second tallest building in the world. Like, they literally go to the very top. The building in question is the spirally Shanghai Tower, and it…

Holy crap, look at this giant wave towering over an entire English town

According to the Met Office—UK’s national meteorological service—a hurricane-force superstorm similar to the catastrophic Great Storm of 1987 is about to obliterate Britain. Just look at this incredible wave towering above an entire town on the coast of Cornwall, England. It’s just the beginning. The Express says that “the Met Office has issued a rare…

We want someone to turn this fairytale concept art into a movie now

Artist Matt Rockefeller creates gorgeously colorful fantasy art, with just the perfect blend of cuteness, creepiness and wonder. We seriously wish someone would turn this amazing work into a movie right away. Rockefeller is currently studying illustration with a concentration in animation at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and we could easily see some…

NYC’s Touchscreen Subway Maps Are Finally Here, and They’re Amazing

New York subway riders first were promised futuristic touchscreen wayfinding maps a year ago. But the plan to install the futuristic infrastructure stalled as the design team took a step back to improve the hardware. Six months overdue, the first batch is finally live in Grand Central Station. They were worth the wait. Over the…

Inside the military lab where they freeze and cook entire airplanes

Welcome to the U.S. Air Force 46th Test Wing’s McKinley’s Climatic Laboratory at the Eglin Air Force Base, Florida. The Climatic Lab, which began testing in 1947, is the largest climate testing facility in the world, a real torture chamber for airplanes. In the laboratory, test engineers can create almost every kind of severe weather…

In the Purge 2 trailer, there’s nowhere to hide

You’ve already seen the home invasion horror movie The Purge. The premise was simple: In the future, America legalizes all crime for one night per year. The Purge 2 takes this wacky premise one step further — check it out. Instead of giving the characters a home base to defend, The Purge: Anarchy strands two…

VSCO Cam, one of our favorite mobile photo editing apps, just received a major update including more seamless integration of the VSCO Grid sharing platform, plus a bevy of UI and tool enhancements. Update now for iOS or Android!

Bees To Humans: We’ll Make Hives Out Of Your Plastic Trash

It’s hard to be a bee these days, what with the sinister—and still mysterious—Colony Collapse Disorder decimating millions of hives over the past decade. But a few highly resourceful Canadian species have started adapting new nesting techniques, using plain old everyday plastic garbage to build their homes. Rather than going for plants and organic matter…

10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Love and Sex

Regardless of your stance on Valentine’s Day, there’s no way to avoid being bombarded with romantic imagery. So you might as well take this as an opportunity to learn something new. With that in mind, here are ten things you probably didn’t know about sex, love and lust. Illustration from Saga, by Fiona Staples. Who…

How Much of Your Phone Is Actually Screen?

Sure, you think about how big a phone’s screen is all the time, but how much of a phone’s screen is actually screen? This handy visualization from Post PC shows exactly how your handset stacks up against the rest of the world in screen-to-bezel ratio. The results might surprise you. [@somospostpc via Reddit]

Donal Logue joins Gotham as Det. Harvey Bullock

And here’s the best casting news for Fox’s Batman-less Batman show so far: the extremely talented Donal Logue will play Detective Harvey Bullock, joining Ben McKenzie as Jim Gordon, and all these people. I don’t know if it’ll make up for a 12-year-old Bruce Wayne, as some rumors report, but it’s a start. Here Bullock’s…

Why did this non-existent town show up on maps of New York?

Up until the 1990s, many maps of New York situated the tiny town of Agloe just north of Roscoe in the Catskill Mountains. The problem? Agloe, New York, was almost entirely fictitious, although it briefly existed on paper. So how does a made-up town end up on a map? Simple: a mapmaker put it there.…

Every Doc and Marty in Back to the Future in one supercut

Dan Murrell’s supercut of every Doc and Marty in Back to the Future is a lot of fun—but I think it could have been perfect if it followed the events in the chronological order of the movies. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook

How to Make a More Readable Wikipedia

We love Wikipedia. The idea of a constantly updated knowledge base where everyone is welcome to read and contribute is staggering, and we dip into this great pool of content on an almost daily basis at 1910. However, having spent the last three years learning more about typography have made us aware of it’s limitations.…