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They are home to your favorite stories, your favorite songs, your favorite characters. You know so much about the Disney movies that you grew up with and the Pixar movies you love now but do you know where they’re all located? No worries, this map by artist Eowyn Smith will show you. England sure gets…
Meet 007. Not Bond but the bird. But they might just be as smart as one another because the crow can use tools to figure out complex puzzles just as well as a spy. Here’s a crow taking one of the most complex tests for the animal mind ever created. If he succeeds, the BBC…
HBO aired a special 15 minute preview for Game of Thrones Season 4 last night and it’s now up on YouTube to whet your appetite for dragons, swords, thrones, fantastic looking people, armor, dresses, politics, lengthy diatribes and general awesomeness. But as fun as it is to see a little bit of Game of Thrones…
Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for it. Boom. Holy hell. This is not a real eyeball. It’s a completely computer generated eyeball that looks realer than my own eyeball. A CG eyeball. It’s frightening, like they chopped half a human face for the eyeball. Actually, I’m not 100% sure they didn’t do that.…
Miss the space roller coaster ride that was Gravity? Then you missed out on Sandra Bullock’s stressful spinning, George Clooney’s charisma soaked storytelling and a beautiful movie that seemed to be done in one endless take. It was a fun ride. But not nearly as fun as this animation of Gravity boiled down to 60…
Here’s something that’ll make you feel good on a day you wish was still the weekend: a 16-month old kid watches Superman take his first flight in Man of Steel and adorably (and appropriately) cheers him on. It’s just pure happiness. You can see the wonder in his eyes, the excitement in his clap and…
Everyone is crazy about The Lego Movie—solid story, nonstop humor, good characters, and absolutely spectacular visuals. It’s not surprising, looking at how much work and care these people put inside this film—and how much fun they had making it. I mean, look at those people: Playing with free Lego sets and computers. Nerdvana. SPLOID is…
Look, it’s been a brutal couple of weeks for most of the country. It feels like winter’s never going to end. And while a single black rose might be what you feel like on the inside, that doesn’t mean you can’t put on a happier face on the outside. MoMA’s Design Store recently unveiled a…
In the years after World War II, most of Europe was devastated, both physically and financially. From this drab reality, one country began producing bright, technicolor textiles, including a print which bolstered its economy, created national pride, and ended up becoming one of the most beloved and recognizable patterns in the world. The postwar outlook…
Brain-bender alert! For the first time ever, scientists have managed to insert nanomotors into living cells. Once inside, the gold, rocket-shaped motors were propelled with ultrasonic waves and steered with magnets. Because we now live in a scene fromFantastic Voyage. It’s as crazy as it sounds. The team of chemists and engineers from Penn State…
Master swordsmith Tony Swatton—who has crafted swords for about 200 feature films—has made the Halo Energy Sword. The end result is pretty damn neat, but my favorite thing about Swatton’s videos is the process. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
The past nine months have been a real getting-to-know-you period between the National Security Agency and the American people, but the balance of intel is definitely skewed. We’ve got some catching up to do, and these expansive pics by artist Trevor Paglen show three government agencies—the NSA, National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency…
America’s new Zumwalt-class destroyer employs some of the most advanced technology in naval history. From cutting edge power and propulsion systems to mission-adaptable missile launchers, this comparative animation from Raytheon illustrates the new vessel’s impressive capabilities.
The Hahn HFP160 Firewood Pro Skidsteer Firewood Processor is just one of the many machines designed to turn trees into firewood at maximum speed. These ever-hungry metal monsters are the Four Horseman of the Industrial Apocalypse incarnated. It’s not the craziest one, however. This may be it: Which is similar to this: But there’s more.…
When you own a company specializing in online payments, the constant threat of hackers and phishing schemes is an inescapable part of the job description. So it’s hard not to experience a little schadenfreude in the fact that PayPal President David Marcus’s credit card information got swiped recently and taken on a bit of a…
Describing the sculptures of Austrian designer Klemens Torggler as “doors” feels like an insult. These aren’t doors—they’re magical pieces of engineering, half kinetic sculpture and half magic trick, that you happen to walk through. So, how do they work? You may have seen Torggler’s work around before: In his many YouTube videos, the Austrian designer…
So what if Annette Gabbedey was born without fingers? What many would consider a disability clearly hasn’t hindered her ability to craft gorgeously intricate diamond- and opal-studded trinkets. In fact, she argues that it’s actually an advantage. Based in St. Catherine’s Frome, in the UK, the 48-year-old metallurgist has been crafting jewelry for nearly a…
According to the experts the population will reach its peak 50 years hence, in 1988. Thereafter it will dwindle and we will eventually degenerate largely into old or middle-aged. The reason: Birth control. — July 11, 1938 Connellsville Daily Courier in Pennsylvania
We’ve already seen (or haven’t) the nearly invisible waterproof zippers that Columbia introduced on its sportswear designed for various Olympians competing at Sochi. But the uniforms designed specifically for the US moguls ski team have another hard-to-spot feature that could give them a small advantage in competition. Despite the hilly terrain they have to tackle,…
Some of the most important buildings of our time exist only on paper—and we’re left to reconstruct them, over and over, in our imaginations. But that doesn’t mean we can’t experience these lost structures through other means. To honor El Lissitzky—the famously unbuilt German architect who inspired a generation of avant-garde designers in the 1920s—an…
