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Sailor Moon Crystal is back for a new story arc, and after a pretty disastrous ending to a sloppy first half-season, I was less than optimistic going into the new ‘Black Moon’ arc – but so far at least, a shake up of the story might have been a good thing for our Sailor Senshi.…
Built and designed in the 1960s after the A-12 Oxcart, the SR-71 Blackbird is still the fastest, most vanguardist air-breathing airplane in the history of aviation. These once classified photos reveal how Lockheed built both birds in secret, in California. They look taken at the Rebel base in Hoth. “Everything had to be invented” The…
Damn, science. Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China have created a see through eggshell to keep track of how an embryo grows over time. The material is made from a soft, silicon-based organic polymer that maintains the shape of a real eggshell but is completely transparent. What you’re looking at is what is happening…
This music video directed by Christophe Thockler for Victoria+Jean’s song Firecracker reminds me a little bit of staring inside a kaleidoscope. Only if the inside of that kaleidoscope was filled with mini-drones in the shape of marbles that move around as if they were controlled by one hive mind. My imagination aside, it’s pretty cool.…
The ocean is vast. We cannot patrol all of it. But now environmental groups are getting into the satellite game, watching for illegal fishing boats from the skies. It’s just one more example of how high-quality, real-time satellite imagery can change our relationship to the world around us. NPR has a storyabout Pew Charitable Trust’s…
Anthony Bourdain has a new show of sorts that explores the craftsmanship of certain items and the people behind them and the first episode focuses on Borough Furnace, a small metal casting workshop that makes handcrafted cast iron skillets. You see a bit of the process of how they turn recycled iron into cookware. It’s…
DARPA’s Airborne Launch Assist Space Accessis not a new idea. In fact, they have been working on it for some time. Now the Pentagon’s research arm have a neat concept video to show us how they are planning to put stuff in low earth orbit. You know, like satellites and other secret darpish things. SPLOID…
When I started college, my family bought me a Mondaine Swiss Railway watch based on actual Swiss Railway clocks. I loved it. How could you beat a classic? Now, a new addition to the MoMA Design Store from Uniform Wares has shown me the way—in the form of a timepiece designed to look like Bauhaus-inspired…
“Jupiter Ascending isn’t just a mediocre film. It’s also self-indulgent, and in love with its own excesses,” says Charlie Jane Anders for io9. One of the excesses is the glorious eye candy, which seems to be a constant mental overload. You can thank the genius of George Hull and his baroque concept art for that.…
DARPA’s ATLAS is an impressive feat of robotics engineering, but despite representing the bleeding edge of automatons, it’s slow and clumsy when it comes to doing anything on its own. A better way to make a robot as skilled as a human is to simply put a human in complete control of it, manipulating it…
I’ve seen this cutting operation with smaller glass panes, but I would have never imagined that it could work so nicely at such a big scale without the glass shattering in a million pieces. I can watch these dudes doing this job for hours. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
There’s a danger that once you’ve replied to a thread in Gmail it can sink lower and lower down your priority list and eventually get forgotten about altogether. If you want to make sure that you’re following up important messages when they don’t get a response, then this popular browser extension is one way to…
It’s the age old question that has seen nerds gesticulate wildly at each other for decades – Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer. Bat’leth vs. Lightsaber. Vader vs. Kirk. But it turns out there are only winners (that’s us) when Star Wars and Star Trek go toe-to-toe in this very silly, very fun trailer mashup. The trailer…
About a decade ago, a friend of mine had a year of magical drinking. He’d been through a rough patch, moved home to Southern California, and taken up residency at a local tequila bar. Not really much of a drinker, he’d usually just read and people watch. A single drink would last him the afternoon.…
Sneaker freaks have their fingers crossed that Nike will be able to deliver power laces in time for when Back to the Future II predicted we’d all be wearing them. But what about the rest of our clothing? Who wants to be bothered zipping up a jacket when your shoes automatically lace themselves? So Adam…
In retrospect, history’s march into the future looks like a smooth catenary arch towards the present. But some technologies don’t make it. Sometimes, grand visions of the future only last for a few years—or maybe a few decades. Today, it’s hard to imagine how exciting the 1890s were: The first electrical grids sputtered to life.…
Just a few days ago, Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the country, revealed that it had been the victim of a massive security breach, potentially exposing the highly sensitive data of up to 80 million customers. And things just got worse. Now, both current and former customersare being hit with phishing emailsdesigned to look…
For nearly 50 years, Gore-Tex has defined rainwear. But now, thanks to an innovative new process that builds water resistance straight into any item of clothing, Voormi is aiming to end that domination. Here’s why their material keeps you so dry.
For nearly 50 years, Gore-Tex has defined rainwear. But now, thanks to an innovative new process that builds water resistance straight into any item of clothing, Voormi is aiming to end that domination. Here’s how their technology works. Voormi’s “Core Construction” isn’t a new material or even a new type of rain jacket. It’s a…
QMX’s line of Artisan replicas has been pretty fantastic so far – they’ve given us incredible models of the likes of Firefly’s Serenity or Wrath of Khan’s Reliant. But then there’s… well, there’s this. This replica of part of the Firefly-class’ Hull is 1:3 scaled, so it’s around 32″ wide and about 24″ high, and…
