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Just like Windows, Android has a special Safe Mode you can use if your device isn’t behaving as it should—all third-party apps are disabled, enabling you to see if your woes are being caused by one of those apps or something more fundamental that’s going on with your system. Here’s how to find it. On…
Wow. Skateboard tricks are almost always an individual effort but in this video we see two guys, Mitchie Brusco and Italo Penarrubia, ride their skateboards down a huge ramp, jump in the air at the same time and then switch skateboards with each other while still suspended in the air. It’s totally awesome. SPLOID is…
Dear robots of the world, don’t for a second think you’re fooling us with adorable demonstrations of your crafting capabilities this holiday season. Because one second you’re making paper snowflakes, and the next you’re using those same scissors to usurp your human handlers. We’re on to you! The folks at RE2 Robotics should know better…
At $800 for the small version, Seaboard’s Roli keyboards—with their touch sensitive squishy keys that let musicians enhance their performances while they play—aren’t cheap. But taking advantage of the iPhone 6s’ 3D Touch feature, there’s now a free Roli app that provides a similar experience on your phone. NOISE 5D works on older iOS devices…
Battery life remains the bane of the technology world. But Sony has announced that it’s working on a new kind of lithium and sulfur energy storage that will provide 40 percent more life for a given battery volume, and should be ready as soon as 2020. Sony tells Nikkei that it’s working on a battery…
If you were hoping to upgrade your Lumia handset to Windows 10 Mobile this month as promised, hard luck. Microsoft has admitted that the OS update won’t be ready until early 2016. In a statement, Microsoft explained to ZDNet: “This November we introduced Windows 10 to phones including brand new features such as Continuum and…
When a programmer from Tennessee returned home off vacation, he found Comcast hassling him for using 120GB of data while he was away from home. But it turns out that a simple typo in Comcast’s records was what saw him copping the blame for someone else’s data habit. In a very thorough explanation posted to…
We all know that lithium-ion batteries can fail catastrophically. But other batteries can also burst into flame unprovoked, and a team of researchers is using real-time 3D imaging to understand exactly how. A team of engineers form University College London has been using X-ray imaging techniques to captures 3D views of what happens inside disposable…
Combining art and science comes naturally to Kate Nichols. The colors in her pieces don’t come from pigment, but from tiny silver nanoparticles suspended in the paint. She makes them herself, as artist-in residence in the University of California, Berkeley’s nanotechnology research group. A graduate of Kenyon College, Nichols left school in 2002 to apprentice…
Because real life is never as cool as the movies, we get hoverboards that don’t actually hover. But because real life can also be pretty damn fun, we get this totally bad ass “lightsaber” that uses a thin burning flame as its blade. It’s a firesaber, sure, but it looks like so much fun to…
Here’s a fun video of Roberta Mancino flying in a wing suit as she splits two buildings in Panama City, Panama. It’s cool to see her quickly adjust her flight path to avoid one of the buildings and to see her reaction as she does it too. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on…
A 19-year-old US citizen was arrested in Pennsylvania today for using the internet to recruit for ISIS. From within his parents’ house, Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz created a stockpile of weapons and spent his days chatting about buying women as slaves and killing US soliders, using Twitter handles like @MuslimBruh0. According to the DOJ’s unsealed…
What you’re seeing in this video is obviously a sperm cell, except it was made in a lab, not a testicle. It’s designed to show how passive elastic swimming can mimic, fairly well, the motions that allow sperm (or fish) to swim. The video above is from a 2013 paper entitled, “Passive elastic mechanism to…
I saw Star Wars in the movie theater in 1977, the summer before I turned six. Then I saw it again, and again, and again. Pace Joseph Campbell, the mythology of my childhood was structured around the movie, rather than vice versa. So my parents’ attic ended up with a lot of Star Wars toys…
Anheuser-Busch just revealed a “bold new look” for Bud Light, “The Prince of Beers.” As one Bud Light executive put it in a press release, “In 2016, we’ll put a more modern twist on Bud Light, from the way the brand looks to the way it acts.” Well, this is a twist alright. What do…
King Tut’s iconic burial mask was damaged in 2014 during a failed attempt to reattach the mask’s beard with glue. Now, after a $110,000 restoration, the iconic relic has been put back on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. To quickly recap, the Egyptian Museum admitted last year that members of its staff accidentally…
Have you been waiting in line for days to see the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens? Of course you haven’t. You bought your tickets online like a normal person. But there once was a time when buying tickets online wasn’t even possible. Below we have pictures of those poor chumps from the Olden…
Cops and spies alike are up in arms lately over companies like Apple using uncrackable encryption on their devices. But Blackberry, whose clickity keyboards can still be heard in the halls of many government bureaucracy, doesn’t think criminals deserve privacy. The struggling Canadian company’s CEO recently published a blog post with the bold headline, “The…
Here’s a beautiful flyby video of the Herbig-Haro object called HH 24 courtesy of the Hubble. We saw the absolutely striking still image earlier which shows a newborn star shooting out twin jets into space. To learn more about this awesome phenomenon, read here. The video combines a two-dimensional zoom and a three-dimensional flight to…
Long exposure photos can turn a flashlight in your hand into a brush that paints with light. Taking that idea one step further, the folks at Ascending Technologies strapped a color-changing light to a computer-controlled drone to create a series of massive holiday light paintings in the sky. The company’s AscTec Falcon 8 drone was…
