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Do you want to avoid burglars and nosy neighbors? And pets and small children? And possibly all other human beings? But do you also have a refined aesthetic sense—none of that ugly concrete, please—and a green thumb? No worries! These anti-personnel plants are as effective as any moat. The plant kingdom is full of poisons,…
The revelation at the end of Fight Club that Tyler Durden was merely a figment of the narrator’s imagination blew more minds than that self-inflicted gunshot wound. But what if you could watch the movie without Brad Pitt’s character being there at all? Richard Trammell shows us exactly that in this brilliantly edited fight scene,…
Imagine looking up on your daily commute and catching this crazy visual trickery in the sky! Yesterday, Youtube user melkiy582 captured a massive halo of light was seen around the sun on the horizon in Moscow—a cool atmospheric phenomenon known by an even cooler name: Sundog. The scientific title for the pair of bright spots…
Back in 1968, the videophone was supposed to be just around the corner. Phone companies around the world were working diligently to make it a reality. But sometimes their futuristic promises could go a little overboard, like in this Southwestern Bell ad that promised not just videophones, but three-dimensional videophones—and robot shopping—by the year 2000.…
While not as spectacular as Adam Magyar’s Stainless shorts, this new video technique is quite neat. Aaron Grime used Photoshop to blend regular footage at a 1/50th shutter speed into a new 24 frames per second with a 1-second shutter speed film. The result is, as he says, eerie: https://gizmodo.com/watch-time-getting-frozen-in-these-hypnotizing-subway-s-1499019579 What is done here is…
Shiny new computer, shiny new software. The two go hand in hand. Except when they don’t. It’s one thing to let tech-savvy consumers have the option for a software downgrade if they see fit, but HP’s choice to push Windows 7 on consumers by default is another entirely: it’s bad, for everyone involved. No one…
Waterproof, drop proof, shock proof, snow proof, dirt proof, anti-reflective camera lens cover, full Touch ID functionality, the “thinnest, lightest, all-protective device case ever made,” and it lets you actually touch the iPhone 5s’ screen. That’s quite a resume for this LifeProof nuud iPhone 5s Case. For some, the waterproofing alone will be worth it.…
Rosetta—the first man-made spaceship designed to intercept and land on an comet—is alive and well. It just sent its first signal to the world after going into sleep mode 31 months ago. Scientists were anxious, hoping that the computer and the interplanetary probe would alright. All systems: nominal. The space probe—launched by the European Space…
As of today, the Real ID Act—which will require all US IDs to meet minimum federal security standards—enter the first stage of its multi-year enforcement. That has a lot of people pretty nervous; whether legislators use the term or not, it smells an awful lot like a national ID card. But what is Real ID,…
If there’s one telltale sign that a video wasn’t produced by a professional, it’s usually the crappy sound accompanying the footage. The microphones on a smartphone or a cheap camcorder are awful at best, which is why companies like Sony and Zoom are finally releasing models with stereo mics that will help your amateur productions…
The USNS Fall River, the fourth vessel in the US Navy’s new Spearhead-class of high-speed, shallow-draft transport catamarans launched for the first time over the weekend. This multi-function catamaran will transport cargo and up to a battalion of troops between ports. The Fall River measures 338 feet long and weighs just over 1,500 tons. Its…
Our friend and movie-maker Casey Neistat isn’t one to just accept when something doesn’t work. When he encountered an utterly frustrating feature on one of his cameras, he took matters into his own hands with this ingenious solution. https://gizmodo.com/the-wildly-functional-studio-of-video-wizard-casey-neis-513828366 The camera is the Canon S120, a solid compact point-and-shoot that Neistat relies on for its…
This is Turkish sculptor Selçuk Yılmaz and one of his most impressive works: A 1:1 reproduction of a lion weld from 4,000 hand-cut metal scraps. Check out the closeups to fully appreciate Selçuk’s outstanding skills. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook.
Airborne pollution is a major issue in China, with local hospitals opening up “smog clinics” and waves of city-dwellers migrating to more rural areas to escape. While Chinese officials are pursuing “cloud seeding” as a way to control pollution, a Zhejiang University professor thinks he has a better idea: Sprinklers. Big ones. Yu Shaocai is…
Fujfilm launched a teaser page on their website hinting toward what looks to be the next model in their line of retro-styled X series camera bodies, the X-T1, which will be announced on January 28th. The biggest design change from previous Fuji mirrorless bodies like the X-Pro1 and the X-E2 is the hump in the…
In an unusual convergence of Olympic sports, cryptocurrency, and 90s nostalgia, the Jamaican bobsled team is Dogecoin’s biggest hero this week. The team turned to the joke currency to raise money for its trip to the Sochi Olympics and, in doing so, raised the Dogecoin to Bitcoin exchange rate by 50 percent in just 12…
Good news: Each and every 2014 Olympic event will be streaming online, legally, through NBC’s official 2014 Olympics website and mobile apps. Bad news: You need cable. Go figure, NBC’s partnership with Yahoo for Olympics streaming isn’t quite the internet-future you might have hoped it would be. Sure, it’s great that online is an option,…
What do states want, deep down inside? What to they yearn for in the dead of night? According to this delightful map from Mashable—with a little help from Google autocomplete—the answer is mostly secession. But also some pretty freaky stuff! A whopping 11 states—including Maryland?—would like to break off from the Union, while Hawaii wants…
There are lots of ways to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars if you’re a watch fan or collector, but what if the traditional round face doesn’t interest you? De Bethune’s unorthodox new Dream Watch 5 looks like it was inspired by one of Starfleet’s spacecraft, and no one will ever mistake it for boring…
You’d think that, by this point, people would start being a little more discerning with their passwords. You would be wrong. And here are the 25 most common (i.e. worst) passwords of 2013 to prove it. Compiled by SplashData, the list pulls from the millions of stolen passwords made public throughout the year—a large chunk…
