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The future of autonomous robots is inching ever-forward–look no further than this combination of drone and autonomous quadruped that has me both freaked out and scratching my head. A new video illustrates a new concept for robo-drones. Remember BigDog, the unnervingly agile quadruped Terminator robot? Well, here we’ve got a smaller version of this type…
It’s been nearly three weeks since Force Friday came along and ravaged the wallets of Star Wars fans (myself included). Hot Toys nearly delivered a killing blow with the announcement of their first Force Awakens figures that day, but now they’re here to finish your wallet off once and for all with some gorgeous new…
It’s the tech industry’s latest ploy to keep you from ever setting foot in a supermarket again: meal delivery service Blue Apron just announced a new program that ships bottles of wine to your home. Blue Apron, which recently achieved unicorn status and is now worth $2 billion, already ships packages of pre-washed seasonal ingredients…
What. A. View. The nose of the B-25 bomber offers up such a fantastic view that it’s probably the perfect place to be for a sunset because not only do you get to see the entire world in a clear bubble, you get to see the old rickety steering wheel of a plane used since…
The way we teach sex education in the United States is such a crazy-quilt of curricula that it’s hard to know what’s being taught to our high school students, or how accurately. And when we lack that kind of data, we can easily make some pretty terrible mistakes. Take, for example, Hannah Smothers’ article in…
Europe’s “right to be forgotten” rules have been around for a while, but they pretty much just applied to Europeans who wanted to hide embarrassing or incorrect content about them. Now a French court says that Google needs to go a step further and apply the rules to all of its domains. In the past,…
Sometimes a simple smile or frown is enough to convey the emotion of a sentence. But for those times when you need a more specific emoji, Tom Scott has transformed the 1,000+ keys on 14 combined keyboards into one monstrous contraption to help you quickly access those expressive little pictographs. To make them easier to…
Apple’s electric vehicle project, once a blurry rumor, is coming into increasingly clear focus. A major scoop from the Wall Street Journal today gives us details about the car’s team, manufacturing, and a ship date–of 2019. The sources of the Wall Street Journal’s Daisuke Wakabayashi are anonymous—he citied “people familiar with the matter”—but Wakabayashi has…
If I had a chat with my future self it would go something like this: I’d ask him if I achieved all my hopes and dreams and he’d be totally bitter and would absolutely complain about how lazy I’ve been and all opportunities I’ve missed. The hero of this film has that kind of chat…
Skype has been working to get its service back up and running for many users since about 4 AM Eastern Time. Most of those impacted by the network issue are having difficulty logging in on mobile and desktop apps. At 11AM, the company said that it had identified the problem and is working on a…
A cleverly-named security company has a clever idea. Zerodium will pay you $1 million if you find a zero-day exploit in iOS 9. Then, if history is any indicator, it will turn around and sell that intelligence to a despotic regime like the NSA. Chaouki Bekrar, the founder of Zerodium, is infamous for founding the…
A Peruvian man suspected of six brutal slayings in Japan may be the younger brother of Peru’s most prolific serial murderer, a diagnosed schizophrenic known as the “Apostle of Death” because he claimed God urged him to kill. In 2006, Pablo Nakada Ludeña was captured after shooting at least 17 people (he claimed 25 total…
After a last minute delay last week due to an unforeseen bug, WatchOS 2 is now available for Apple Watch. The new version brings a lot of must-have upgrades including new watch faces, third-party complications, and support for third-party apps. Basically, this is what the Apple Watch should have been at launch. To download the…
A new book alleges that British Prime Minister David Cameron put “a private part of his anatomy into a dead pig’s mouth” as part of a university initiation ritual. This is what the social internet was made for. The gossip that launched a bevy of hashtags and an ongoing flood of hilarious tweets comes from…
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Litecoin enjoy a brisk pace of trading activity. But what does all that cyber wheeling and dealing look like? Better yet, what does it sound like? A new art installation in Moscow takes all that raw data and transforms it into musical notes, making melody out of global finance. Silk is…
The battlefield can be one of the most useful places for robots. And now, the US Marines are testing out Spot, a robo dog built by Boston Dynamics to see how helpful the ‘bot could be in combat. Remember Big Dog, also from Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics? Well, Spot is a tinier, more agile…
There are more than a few childhood rhymes that involve the destruction of a school; it’s a fantasy that most kids have every time recess comes to an end. So, naturally, someone has made a game that lets kids take a miniature wrecking ball to a school they just built. There aren’t exactly a lot…
Travelers to southeast Asia frequently marvel at the showman-like skill with which street vendors prepare a drink known as teh tarik (“pulled tea”). They might not realize those same vendors are intuitive physicists at heart. Teh tarik is the national beverage of Malaysia, a mixture of black tea and condensed or evaporated milk, whipped into…
Here’s beautiful footage of lava flowing from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano. The hot red burning orange lava oozes its way across the ground and basically swallows everything in its path in a fiery inevitability. It’s quite mesmerizing to see from up close. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Up until recently, the London Underground was difficult to navigate because of its beautifully-drawn yet horribly inaccurate map. But there’s a new map in town—actually, the London Underground’s been using a more accurate map for a while now and just not sharing it. The engineer Harry Beck created London’s minimal (and very inaccurate) map 82…
