Tech news, analysis, culture, business, security, and more
Artist Jim Campbell has made a career out of tinkering with LED arrays. His newest work, a series of glowing, undulating installations, are a playful mix of circuitry, motion, and pure light that will captivate any onlooker. Campbell is currently showing his latest work at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in NYC. The show consists of…
Recently, the residents of Stafford received a bit of a shock when they realized that their amiable, beloved mayor was actually—not. As it turns out, their devout leader was just some dude with a fake Twitter account and a fancy-looking mayoral chain. God bless the internet. Discovered by The Daily Mail, James Billington, the faux-mayor…
Long before Samsung’s Galaxy Gear entered the picture with its colorful LCD display, Tissot introduced a touchscreen watch to help alleviate button clutter. It was far from what we would now consider ‘smart’, but it made accessing the T-Touch’s various functions a lot easier. And while the latest version still doesn’t connect to your smartphone,…
The NASA IceBridge mission has been going on for 4 years, measuring ice thickness using LiDAR. Along with the usual assortment of stunning ice-photography, last week had a delightful surprise: a giant inflatable polar bear. The inflatable mascot took shelter in the mission’s hangar to dry out on the morning of March 19th. How large…
This particular car charger has a built-in MicroUSB cord, in addition to a 2.4A USB port, making it perfect for couples and families with a mix of iOS and Android devices. Anker 24W Car Charger | $9 | Promo Code ANK24WCC $200 Toys R Us Gift Card | $180 You don’t have to break into…
The backyard shack is a fantasy of every hobbyist. If you are a hobbyist with some scrilla, however, you can make your dream a reality—which is exactly what these homeowners/pianists in Japan did, by building an awesome sound-proof shack for their pianos. Designed by Ni&Co Architects, Piano House is home to an upright and a…
The official Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie trailer is out. You can see how the new turtles look—gritty and gigantic—in detail, as well as Megan Fox and Will Arnett. Will Michael Bay destroy your childhood dreams once again, like he did with Transformers? SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
As fun as a jetski be when you get on the water, they can also be a bit of a pain to haul around if you don’t pay for a permanent dock. So a bunch of designers in Wisconsin created the BomBoard, a lightweight and highly portable personal watercraft that can be easily disassembled and…
It’s coming up on a year since the original release of Microsoft Office for iOS, but in all that time there’s been no iPad-specific version to be found. And now it’s here (for free, to try) as of two o’clock this afternoon, as a gift from Microsoft’s new cloud-guru CEO Satya Nadella. https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-office-for-ios-complete-video-walkthrough-an-513400475 Just like…
For Evan Blum, it started as a hobby when he was young. His father, an architect specializing in reuse, exposed him to the world of architectural antiques—and it wasn’t long before Evan’s own collection had outgrown the space he lived in. Today, 41 years later, it’s how he makes his living. I walked into The…
Plants that eat metal sound like a biological impossibility. But these hungry little guys exist, sucking tiny bits of toxic metal from the soil. They don’t just clean the Earth, either—they can actually mine bits of gold and nickel for use by humans. It’s called phytomining, and it’s the subject of a fascinating story in…
The new MyPassport Pro from Western Digital is the world’s first bus-powered portable hard drive to offer two disks with RAID capability for blazing fast, grab-and-go storage. Available in a 2-terabyte model for $300, or a 4-terabyte model for $430, the MyPassport Pro offers speeds up to 233 MB/s. That should be a boon to…
I don’t want to jinx this but it seems the sun may be here to stay at last. NASA seems to agree, because they have released this compilation video of all the winter storms as seen from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s GOES-East satellite. I hate you winter. You won’t be missed. SPLOID is…
Today is 3.27, so it must be time to celebrate the Lévy constant! The Lévy constant describes the asymptotic behaviour of the denominators of convergent continued fractions. Continued fractions are those numbers created by an iterative process of writing out a number as the sum of it’s integer part and the reciprocal of another number,…
At 5:36 p.m. on March 27, 1964, a 9.2-magnitude earthquake erupted 78 miles east of Anchorage, Alaska. The earthquake remains the most powerful earthquake to strike North America, and the second-largest earthquake ever measured. In addition to more than three minutes of shaking, the earthquake unleashed unimaginable devastation to Alaska’s landscape, including tsunamis, liquefaction, ground…
Just in case the RQ-9 Reaper wasn’t effective enough as it is, the DoD is considering adding a hyper-accurate, collateral damage-minimizing supersonic missile to its armament. These things are nuts. The Dual Mode Brimstone by MBDA is a millimeter wave radar and semi-active laser guided missile designed for use against fast-moving targets, both at land…
The Hubble telescope is always a source of joy and glee for me, especially their 3D flyby videos created using actual images and data. Now you can see them all in one single gallery and feel like a little kid looking at the universe. Here are the very best clips. Flyby of the star-forming region…
For those of you concerned that rockets, jet fighters and the like aren’t environmentally friendly, some good news: scientists have worked out how to use bacteria to create rocket fuel. A team of scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Joint BioEnergy Institute have genetically engineered a version of E. Coli that is…
Anyone can build a castle with sand, but can you build a castle on sand? Artist and photographer Vik Muniz collaborated with MIT researcher Marcelo Coelho to engrave a castle onto a single granule of sand. The process brilliantly combines both high and low tech in the history of imagemaking. Muniz sketches the castle using…
Who’s your favorite X-Person? If it’s Cyclops, a) that’s lame, but also b) you’re in luck! Spice up your lonely bathroom-mirror cosplay with a pair of real-life laser goggles that can set paper on fire and pop black balloons! Creator AnselmoFanZero really sums it up when he describes his project as “insanely stupid and dangerous”…
