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This Is the Future of Heavy Work, and It Looks Awesome

Always fancied riveting one-handed like a super-hero factory worker, some kind of 21st century John Henry? No problem! Lockheed Martin’s Fortis exoskeleton–introduced in 2014–allows any worker to handle heavy hand tools while standing or kneeling. And it looks like the future. The suit enables workers to be more productive with less fatigue or strain, and…

Video: Who would win in a fight between Batman and Darth Vader?

I know this sounds like one of these questions you typically ask when you are high, and, most probably, the guys at Machinima Prime were stoned when they came up with it. I’m just glad they decided to actually make this video the next morning. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or…

China’s Answer to Google Is Building This Stealthy Smart Bike

While Google busies itself with building cars that can drive themselves, China’s equivalent—the monstrous Baidu—is building this super-cool smart bike. Not as complex perhaps, but a damn sight more realizable. The new bicycle—called Dubike—isn’t motorized, but it is packed with tech that powers itself through your pedalling. Loaded with sensors, it detects heart rate, cadence…

The El Nino That Was So Severe, It Stunted the Growth of Children

In 1997-1998, there was a particularly severe El Niño. Seventeen years later, researches have produced evidence that the areas in Peru most affected by the weather event also ended up with shorter children. Professor William Checkley of Johns Hopkins and his team visited 59 villages in the Tumbes region of Peru, which had received 16…

Report: Foxconn Is Building a Display Plant to Make Sapphire Glass

Foxconn is said to be gearing up to produce sapphire glass—the tough screen covering many were expecting to see in the iPhone 6—in a newly purchased plant. According to Focus Taiwan, the China Economic Weekly reports that Foxconn has signed an agreement to begin building a “display factory” on a site right next to its…

Chernobyl never looked more post-apocalypic than in this new drone film

Filmmaker Danny Cook went earlier this year to Pripyat—an abandoned city near Chernobyl, Ukraine—and captured this new amazing footage. It’s the closest that, hopefully, you will ever see to a post-apocalyptic city, 28 years after the catastrophe that has killed about 200,000 people since then. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or…

Censoring the Web Isn’t the Solution to Terrorism—It’s the Problem

In politics, as with Internet memes, ideas don’t spread because they are good—they spread because they are good at spreading. One of the most virulent ideas in Internet regulation in recent years has been the idea that if a social problem manifests on the Web, the best thing that you can do to address that…

This supercomputer simulation of magnetic field loops on the sun reveal in unprecedented detail how solar winds for and swirl. The colors represent magnetic field strength from weak (blue) to strong (red). [NASA]

How Do You Make Money From Free Software?

Free software—truly free software—is undoubtedly a good thing. But given the rest of the world still uses that pesky stuff called money, how on Earth do you make a living from spending your time giving away software for nothing? In this video Matt Lee, the Technical Lead at Creative Commons, explains how he’s spent ten…

Two men have been arrested for uploading an copy of Expendables 3 to the Internet weeks before it was released. Rather than the usual civil suit and monetary penalties, London detectives in the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit arrested the men suspected of illegally getting the film from a cloud-based storage system. [Deadline]

What Caused These Rings of Ice to Form Around Rocks?

Redditor odstane posted photos of a frozen pond, where the freeze pattern around rocks make the whole thing look like a topographical map. Or a rock garden. Either way, it’s a bit of a stunning mystery. In the comments to the original post, people have been guessing as to what caused this phenomenon. Rentalov, running…

Bloomberg: Sony Is Making a Watch Entirely Out of E-Paper

Keen not to be outdone by Apple, perhaps, Sony is said to be making a new watch whose surfaces are entirely made from e-paper. It will, according to Bloomberg, “emphasize style, rather than trying to outdo more technological offerings.” The news wire reports that the watch’s face and wrist band will be manufactured using a…

In another desperate bid to get rid of its handsets, Amazon has cut the price of its Fire Phone to $200 for an unlocked device (it still comes with a free year of Prime).

Here’s a Perfect Recreation of a 300 Fight Done By Some Random Guys

A group of guys decided to, using nothing but some gym equipment and a slow-mo setting, recreate a battle from 300. We have to admit, it looks pretty amazing. Here’s the original to compare these guys to: [via Tastefully Offensive]

Puppy in a teddy bear costume walking on a treadmill is a real life Ewok

Meet Munchkin the Shih Tzu. Or as I like to call her when she’s wearing her teddy bear costume, a real life Ewok from Star Wars. Or maybe she’s just a real life teddy bear. Whatever she is, she’s super cute and when I watch her walk, I can’t help but smile. I usually think…

Ridley Scott Won’t Be Directing Blade Runner 2 After All

Tucked into a long profile on Ridley Scott and his upcoming Exodus: Gods and Kings is confirmation of something we kind of suspected all along: Scott’s not going to direct the Blade Runner sequel, although he will produce. We also now know more about how Harrison Ford’s return will be done. This has been coming…

Watch two hours of deleted scenes from the original Star Wars Trilogy

If you’re looking for two hours of deleted scenes and alternate footage from the original Star Wars Trilogy and hoping that they’d be masterfully edited together documentary-style, well, here you go. Garrett Gilchrist put together all this Star Wars footage you probably never seen before in Star Wars: Deleted Magic. There’s a lot of great…

The Perseus Galaxy Cluster Reveals Something Astonishing in X-Rays

This image of the Perseus galaxy cluster shows something extraordinary. In X-ray light, you can see the superheated gas which bathes the thousands of galaxies in the cluster. And in the shape of the gas, scientists found evidence of turbulence on a cosmic scale. Image: NASA/CXC/Stanford/I.Zhuravleva et al According to a release from the Chandra…

On The Originals, You Can Choose Your Family… But The Choices Suck

It’s a cliché to say that you get to choose your family when you’re an adult, no matter how you may feel about the family you grew up with. But as The Originals has been showing in its typically soap-operatic fashion, you don’t necessarily get the best options to choose among. Spoilers ahead… In last…

Why It’s Time To Get Excited About Our Favorite Former Planet

It will be Pluto like we’ve never seen it before: early next month, NASA’s New Horizon’s spacecraft will emerge from its slumber as it prepares for what will surely be a historic flyby of the dwarf planet. New Horizons will emerge from its 99-day hibernation on December 6. It’s six-month encounter with the dwarf planet…