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It’s hard to believe how effortlessly and elegantly this crocodile goes out of the water. It looks like he’s actually swimming vertically into the air, as if he weren’t aware of the laws of physics and the differences of density between liquid and gas. Impressive animal (that freaks the hell out of me.) SPLOID is…
I love this Sunday’s Simpsons couch gag because it’s really dark comedy—like life itself. Take a look. Instead of going through his usual going-back-home-after-work routine, Homer goes through all his existence in The Game of Life, always ending the wrong spots. The Game of Life is a classic board game created in 1860 by Milton…
Francois Dourlen is a photographer who also has a clever running gag for the Internet to enjoy: he splices in movie and TV shows from his iPhone to make them look as if they’re happening in real life. It’s not always as obvious as Pam Anderson running on the beach either, sometimes it’s as ridiculous…
The ominous black square on the surface of the sun isn’t a portal to another dimension. It’s a coronal hole, a depressingly mundane name for a patch of cooler and darker corona. While the usual bright glow is hot, bright plasma captured by the magnetic field, a coronal hole is a gap in the magnetic…
Reddit user metricmapsore made this great visualization showing how our country is divided and found that more than half of the entire US population—54% that is—live on the edges of the map. It makes sense, that’s where the biggest cities are and thus, that’s where the people are. Why would anyone live anywhere else! It’d…
Holy crap. The John Hancock Tower in Chicago rolled out a snazzy scary new attraction for people who visit the top of the skyscraper: windows that tilt down to give you a better view of the ground beneath you. It’s like a roller coaster ride for those afraid of heights (that would be me). Just…
That stupid bird—it could be a mosquito, a fly, the hot wind, plans I don’t want to follow up on, a lost remote, commercials, pop up ads, a computer fan running, whatever—that keeps bothering me when all I want to do is nothing and not move and never think is the absolute worst. These two…
What kind of work would the legendary landscape painters of the 19th century be making if they were alive today? Look no further than the painter Philip Govedare, who depicts 21st century landscapes transformed by mining, dredging, and human civilization in general. The Seattle-based Govedare’s work is an uncanny mix of fact and fiction: He…
Despite a plea from one of its commissioners and much of the public to delay the decision, the FCC will forge ahead with its widely criticized plan for net neutrality—though the plan hardly seems neutral. Chairman Tom Wheeler explained the logic in a letter to over 150 tech companies, begging them to trust the agency…
We often think of solar-powered devices as pretty new. But we’ve been harnessing the sun since long before the first practical solar cell was introduced back in 1954. For instance, in these solar-powered contraptions from a 1937 Popular Science film — including the amazing fridge that turned sunbeams into ice cubes in just two hours!…
There you have it folks, the work week is done. Throw on your sunglasses and ride your smartphone off into a glorious sunset with these, our favorite apps of the week. Multi-Platform Updates Google Maps This week’s update to the ubiquitous nav app brought a whole host of nice additions. Now, turn-by-turn navigation tells you…
It’s Friday, and the end of a loooong week. Everyone at Gizmodo is getting revved up for the Home of the Future, and I forgot to assign someone to post an Open Thread! What is going on in your life? What are you forgetting? Is it “to call your mom on Sunday”? It better not…
Moms! They gave you life, cared for you, taught you right from wrong, and most importantly, they loved you (unless they didn’t). But now that you’ve abandoned them to move on to bigger and better basements, moms need to fill that hole in their heart any way they know how. It’s time to talk about…
Between 1936 and 1943, the Works Progress Administration produced about 2,000 posters to publicize everything from civic events to national parks. They’re gorgeous. So gorgeous that graphic designer Steven Thomas used them as inspiration for his latest project: See America. With 10 vintage-style posters, Thomas tips his hat to a golden age of design as…
Remember Camera and Poke, two of Facebook’s standalone apps? No? Apparently, you’re not alone. In fact, so few people remembered to use the apps that the apps existed at all that Facebook saw fit to kill them once and for all. Rest in peace, Poke and Camera. We hardly knew ye—like, at all.
A report from the Evening Standard makes a bonkers claim today: That London will be a backup if Rio can’t get its act together for the Summer 2016 Olympics. The International Olympic Committee denies it. But that’s a hell of a mixed message—just last week, an IOC Vice President said that Rio’s preparations are “the…
Historic illustrations of dinosaurs are reflections of the science of their times. This makes them less accurate, but engaging in the manner of careful line-drawings capturing a worldview from a time gone past. This is the Iguanodon as seen by scientists throughout time. Iguanodon was first identified in 1825 by Gideon Mantell, which means that…
The other week, Kelsey brightened your Friday afternoon with the tale of three cities that are each symbolized by a trademark booze: Chicago’s Malört, NYC’s iconic Manhattan cocktail, and London gin. Which made me wonder: what about states? America’s states have an entire curiosity cabinet of official symbols, from official state butterflies (the Monarch, for…
This two-year-old kid was taken to a wrestling show and, for the first time in his life, experienced fireworks. His expression of awe is genuine and yet not very different from the one I have every time I see them. Fireworks are awesome, no question about it. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…
Using advanced image processing and physics algorithms, MIT scientists have analyzed hundreds of high-speed sequences of sneezes to obtain an accurate 3D model of fluid clouds and droplet trajectories with some frightening results. They found that smaller droplets travel really far because the cloud keeps them afloat. It’s surprising how far they can go, they…
