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César Soares has shared yet another impressive build. I loved his old watermill, but this new build of Rapunzel’s Tower is beautiful and fits nicely in that Guilds of Historica style. The good news is we get a similar and great looking roof, but this time it is attached to a massive tower. I love…
Although there are large swaths of America which may only know his name as a track on a Daft Punk album, Giorgio Moroder is so very much more. The name and first song from his new album 74 Is the New 24 hints at that a bit, with a nod to his age (yep, 74)…
The saga of Apple’s disappearing sapphire screens seems to have finally offered some concrete answers. According to a recent article by the Wall Street Journal, the screens’ supplier, GT Advanced Technologies, wasn’t just mismanaged—the product they were putting out was pretty much unusable. Not that that’s entirely GT’s fault, of course. After all, Apple was…
Back in March, we learned Ikea had purchased an Illinois wind farm big enough to power all its US stores. Well, that was small potatoes. Today the company announced its largest investment in renewables ever: The acquisition of a much larger wind farm in Texas. The new farm will be built in Cameron County, Texas,…
Behold the F-22 Raptor (top two) and F-35 Lightning II (bottom two) flying together for the first time in history. Arguably the two most technologically advanced military jets in the world, the Lt. Col. Matt Renbarger—commander of the 58th Fighter Squadron—says they mix together like peanut butter and jelly: When the F-22 and F-35 come…
Any household with small roaming humans inevitably has to block its electrical sockets from tiny probing fingers. But most of the childproof measures out there—plastic plugs, sliding faceplates—can still be impregnated by determined hands. This outlet prototype wouldn’t supply any electricity to its sockets until a plug is inserted—and it could even tell the difference…
In an interview this afternoon at the Defense One Summit, DARPA director Arati Prabhakar explained the history and future of the agency. And Prabhakar wants it known that Google and other commercial enterprises are not their enemy. In fact, they’re more important that ever to DARPA’s national security goals, as private R&D spending has slowly…
Peruse the digital wares of the OSX or iOS stores, and you might notice a peculiar change: All of the apps previously labeled as “free” now say “get.” It’s a pretty small change that has no real impact on us users. “Get” apps are still free, and the apps themselves haven’t changed either. “Get” is…
Next time you go to download an app in the Mac or iOS App Store, you’ll notice that apps not requiring an upfront payment no longer say ‘Free.’ Instead, they sat ‘Get.’ Here’s why. You see, European regulators want to try and protect children—and perhaps more accurately, their parents—from expensive in-app purchases. It’s been enough…
Impressive video of professional ice climbers Klemen Premrl and Aljaz Anderle climbing icebergs in Greenland’s Disko Bay. Or, better said, trying to climb: They were very fragile and one started to collapse as they were going up. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
Tommy Williamson from BrickNerd has shared this funny stop-motion video of the epic battle between Batman and Superman. The background sets are incredibly good and the animation is so clever that it looks like CGI but it isn’t. This thing had to take a bunch of time to produce so, go enjoy it and share…
Here we go again. Just a few days after a former FBI agent argued that the new iOS 8 encryption would cause somebody to die, a Department of Justice boss upped the ante. At a meeting on October 1, Deputy Attorney General James Cole told a room full off Apple executives that iPhone encryption would…
Geckos are, objectively, way better at climbing stuff than people. Our big sweaty meathooks are no match for the wall-scaling optimized toe pads of a small lizard. That’s why a team at Stanford University is busy making gloves that simulate the sticky grip of the gecko. The Stanford team’s secret ingredient for truly adhesive gecko-inspired…
Builder lisqr has shared this extremely interesting office building he calls Pirate 100. Architecture builds are always interesting to me, but this one is especially cool because in the land of blocks, it is really rare that you get curved shapes. He accomplished this by utilizing the curved tracks for Lego trains as the base…
Portable Bluetooth speakers are awesome and convenient until, inevitably, you want to take yours somewhere and it’s out of batteries. This new speaker from Quirky is less likely to suffer this indignity because it charges wirelessly. On the surface, the $170 Ohm is a pretty standard Bluetooth speaker block that allows you to play music…
The inhabitants of three houses on a street in Knoxville, Tennessee, would have seemed perfectly average from the outside. Every morning, the showers came on. Every night, the lights and the TV. But there were never any humans living here—only robots pretending to act them. The robot home invasion, described in a blog post over…
Motorola has had a busy couple of months (like really busy), but they’ve still got one more little piece of hardware to push out to the masses. This is the Motorola Keylink, a $25 keychain that will help you find your misplaced keys or smartphone, Android and iPhone alike. This little device taps into the…
Don’t you hate it when someone claims to have a magical new technology, but won’t tell you how it works? When I saw that a super stealthy startup called Magic Leap had raised $542 million to make animals appear out of thin air, I resolved to find out exactly what was going on. Here’s what…
Stanley Kubrick was a genius of suspense and drama, but maybe one of the lesser explored facets of his filmmaking is his use of color. Thankfully, Rishi Kaneria crammed some of the auteur’s most beautiful crimson scenes into a single 1:25 cut. The supercut includes scenes from Spartacus, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The…
Seven years ago, an MIT professor named Rosalind Picard developed a wristband called iCalm to help autistic kids manage stress by measuring electrodermal activity on the skin. Today, Picard and her team want to put their device in your hands. What happened in between is a fascinating story about the role of accidental discoveries in…
