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Kurz Gesagt’s latest video explainer points his easily understood animation gun towards the evilness of banks and how they’ve transformed over time from a simple idea (helping people trade goods) into what they are now (big behemoth bullies who make money for themselves). It’s not all bad though, Gesagt also shows how things have changed…
Look, I don’t like rain as much as the next person. I’m sure my mom wasn’t a big fan either, and the rest of my ancestors probably weren’t wild about water falling from the sky. But nowhere along the line did any of them develop skin that forces water droplets to explosively launch off. A…
Here is Michal Kollbek harnessing his inner mountain goat and riding the White Line in Sedona, Arizona. It looks like a flat surface—that is, the wrong kind of flat surface that’s next to you like a wall and not under you like the road— he’s riding on and him not slipping down the steep slide…
23andMe made a name for itself selling DNA test kits, but today it announced a radical new direction: The company will start mining its huge database of DNA sequences to create new drugs. The science of how they could do that is fascinating—but it raises a lot of futuristic ethical questions too. Image by fotohunter…
The Fast & Furious movie franchise is consistently the most fun anyone can have in a movie theater because the stuff they do is completely ridiculous and borderline insane. Like do you remember that scene from the Furious 7 trailer where they dropped cars from an airplane? That wasn’t CGI, that actually happened. We’ve seen…
Did you know that the United States Postal Service has its own police force? It’s true. While the U.S. Postal Inspection Service is typically tasked with looking into mailbox vandalism and mail fraud, an investigation in Denver reveals that they’re also installing hidden cameras at post offices and spying on Americans. This postal surveillance program…
Yoga is supposed to bring peace and spiritual balance and relaxation so obviously it makes complete sense to do it on top of cliffs and on the edge of cliffs and on really thin but really tall rocks, right? The people doing this extreme yoga look completely at ease throughout this stunt but I totally…
I’m writing this in an email draft right now. I love Gmail’s auto-saving drafts a lot. Putting stuff in drafts makes it easily accessible and searchable. I know I’m not alone in compulsively saving things in “drafts” that aren’t emails. What’s the strangest thing you’ve got saved? For years I’ve used this repository to keep…
Our friend Anna Péter, from the food blog Malackaraj, continues to delight my virtual taste buds with another gross-looking Hungarian plate. This one is a maggot-like pasta called tojásos nokedly, a plate that you eat with a lettuce salad called fejes saláta. Apparently, it’s one of Hungary’s most iconic plates. SPLOID is delicious brain candy.…
There’s something about this film that strikes me as strange. According to the film archive company British Pathé, it shows beach bathers in England in 1898. Supposedly, people of the time were scandalized by their “wanton display of bare flesh.” But I get the feeling that it’s all a big joke. And a more recent…
Photoshop recently celebrated a pretty big birthday—a whole quarter century of cropping, manipulating, and perfecting pictures from crappy creations to creative masterpieces. But take a collection of current Creative Cloud experts and inflict Photoshop 1.0 on them, and the results are disastrously entertaining. That’s exactly what CreativeLivedid, asking modern-day designers to take a quick jaunt…
I’m pretty sure every Cheetos eater on Earth who has ever played a video game has wished that they could play themselves as a character inside a video game. This excellently edited and riotously fun video from Keren Banget makes that dream come true, he “put” his real human self inside a fighting game to…
Against vast whiteness of Antarctica, Blood Falls bleeds a deep dramatic red. The color comes from iron-rich ancient seawater trapped under the ice for 2 million years. For the first time, scientists have been able to take a sample from deep under the ice. The five-story tall Blood Falls was first discovered in 1911. In…
We’ve known that a new set of diverse/sickly cartoon friendshas been on its way for a while now. But thanks to the new iOS 8.3 beta download, that day is finally here. You can officially send your friend a tiny, jaundiced, disembodied head. To get the slightly less racist set of emojis for your very…
Want to have fun in the snow outside a ski resort? Then avalanches are going to be a huge risk. 35 people were killed by them in the US last winter alone. But, with a little preparation, a few gadgets and some basic knowhow, they can be survivable. Before skiing out of bounds into the…
Hello my CyberHeads! Who wants to go to Six Flags? Not me. This episode has instilled a very deep and likely wholly unreasonable fear of Hacked Rollercoaster Murder in my heart. Just kidding, this episode’s villainy so conspicuously lacked any gossamer tether to human motivation that I think I actually feel safer now. Before launching…
Carl Sagan is arguably science’s biggest rockstar—the ultimate champion for logic and reason. Which makes it all the more painful to find out that his son is a vehement 9/11 truther. In a recent interview for a radio show called 9/11 Free Fall (already off to a great start), Jeremy Sagan—the younger son of Sagan…
If you dropped a little coin on some extra-fancy kitchen counter tops, the last thing you want to do is hack them to pieces with a knife while cutting meats and veggies. But who wants a boring old slab of timber to cut on when Etsy seller CuttingBoredom will make you a beautiful walnut, maple,…
I’m a sucker for happy stories, I make no excuses. So, when I saw Alex—a seven-year-old boy who was born with a partially developed arm and loves superheroes—meeting with Tony Stark himself—played by Robert Downey Jr—my heart started to melt. Then I saw Alex in awe with his new bionic arm, I was like… Here’s…
Some child advocates are clamoring for Mattel to halt production of a new “smart” Barbie that can have conversations with your kid. The Barbie’s powered by voice recognition artificial intelligence that’s becoming increasingly prevalent in our everyday gadgets, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t freak people out. Especially when kids are involved. At last month’s…
