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An international team of researchers just announced a simple, inexpensive way to spray graphene onto substrates at supersonic speeds. Besides sounding absolutely awesome, the method also offers a solution to a crippling weakness with the supermaterial. In effect, spray-on graphene is simply stronger. Despite being one of our most exciting supermaterials, graphene’s weaknesses are well-documented.…
Lookout has just released its new Theft Alerts product for iPhone and Android which not only allows you to remotely locate, lock, and wipe your purloined property but will also capture a photo of the thief and email it (as well as its exact GPS coords) back to you. This premium feature, however, comes with…
Problem: If you subscribe to the Ron Swanson school of thought on dogs — anything under 50lbs is actually a cat — yours won’t fit on a motorcycle. Solution: Get a sidecar! The bike you see here is the heavily-revised 2014 Ural Gear-Up, a slightly modernized take on a machine engineered by the Soviet military…
In the final weeks before his death, acclaimed graphic designer Massimo Vignelli received over 1000 letters from fans thanking him for his inspiration. Thanks to the New York Times, we can see a beautiful video of Vignelli reading a few of those letters. Overflowing mail crates can be seen crowding the floor of Vignelli’s bright…
In the last year, Samsung has released three different smartwatches in an apparent attempt to iterate and get out ahead of the pack with a viable product that’s actually useful. Today, we’re getting a look at Samsung’s master plan here: It wants to develop the central open platform for all the the data your wearables…
When I saw these psychedelic cupcakes I really thought they weren’t real—just regular cupcakes photoshopped to look like this. Upon closer inspection, I realized they were indeed real. Too bad that frosting is not made with lysergic acid diethylamide. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
It may feel like Google’s colorful lettering has been with us since the dawn of time, but it’s been a long, bumpy road getting there. When it comes to logo design, sometimes you have to face-plant before you can fly. And in Google’s case, there’s been plenty of face-planting. Though it would have been hard…
Amazon is currently offering the Verizon Moto G for just $70 with no contract. It won’t work with Verizon post-paid plans, but you can get it on the network with some prepaid data. Or, you could forego the cell plan altogether, and just use it on Wi-Fi as an iPod Touch-like Android device. Yes, it’s…
Think all your data is safe and sound in The Cloud? Maybe you shouldn’t be so sure. Yesterday, a system administrator at a cloud service data center accidentally rebooted every single server at once by accident. It’s a handy reminder that you’re only one idiot away from total data annihilation. The cock-up happened at Joyent’s…
When they’re standing out in a field, miles away from crowded urban centers, the sounds made by a wind turbine’s blades aren’t a big issue. But when they’re perched atop a downtown building, they create noise pollution that’s hard to ignore. A Rotterdam-based company might have found a solution, though, with a unique turbine design…
The sky is blue, water is wet, and the digital world is oriented landscape. But almost 30 years ago, that last truth wasn’t exactly self-evident. Back then, Apple and others were experimenting with vertically-oriented computers. And it made more sense than you might think. Next week, the auction house Bonhams is putting a rare Apple…
The last two minutes of Cosmos’ eleventh episode are perhaps the most inspiring in the entire series—or at least the most uplifting. The sequence gives us a glimpse of humanity in the next few thousands years—the first few minutes of the next Cosmic Calendar year*—in the most optimistic way imaginable. Looking at the news every…
Your very own Wall-E? It may not be too futuristic a prospect if Intel has anything to do with it. The company just showed off a DIY kit at the Code Conference that will let you 3D-print your very own robot for $1600. Have a 3D printer? Or at least access to one? You’re pretty…
Pocket, everyone’s favorite service that was formerly Read It Later, just announced a paid plan. For $5 a month or $45 a year, your Pocketed pages will persist forever in a searchable, tag-able, digital library. Like Evernote, but exclusively for things you probably won’t get around to reading.
As the post-conflict cleanup from the first Iraq War demonstrated, oil well fires are nearly impossible to put out without taking extraordinary measures. Luckily, this extreme measure is both super effective and totally badass. http://gizmodo.com/using-explosives-to-put-out-wildfires-is-actually-a-gre-1579732658/all It’s called The Big Wind. Designed by a team of Hungarian engineers originally as a means of mass decontamination for…
Just a few days after discovering a flaw that compromised millions of user accounts, a 19-year-old British college student found another flaw in Ebay’s website. It’s not as bad as the one that forced pretty much everybody to change their Ebay passwords. But it’s not good, either. The second vulnerability affects the way that Ebay…
Watch free climber James Kingston beat another London landmark plus the crane that sits on top of it. All this with absolutely no safety equipment, despite a 490-foot drop and a leap over a massive gap. James then hangs on with just one arm for a view that puts everything in perspective. SPLOID is a…
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center released this pretty neat animation back in 2012, which shows how light streaming up from inside the sun through its many layers. Did you know that the light that shines on our Earth takes some 40,000 years to travel through the sun’s layers? I did not, and now I am…
As of today, Amazon’s crusade against book publisher Hachette is no longer an open secret, it’s outright confirmed. Shipments are being delayed, prices are elevated, and some listings are unavailable altogether. But how extensive is the fallout? Here’s your comprehensive look at the carnage. Hachette and its subsidiaries obviously have too many books—the company claimed…
The Leap Motion controller has always looked awesome, but its performance didn’t quite live up to the promise. A software update is about to fix that, making every Leap Motion controller out there better in an instant. https://gizmodo.com/leap-motion-controller-review-waiting-for-the-future-t-817895912 The new V2 Tracking Beta rolling out to developers now adds a whole wealth of superpowers to…
