Tech News

The Freaky, Bioelectric Future of Tattoos

America loves tattoos. From tribal designs to tramp stamps, this country can’t get enough ink. Last month, a Pew study showed that tattoos grace the bodies of nearly 40 percent of Americans under 40, a massive number of customers in a $1.65 billion industry. Like any industry, however, the tattoo industry must innovate. But what…

Bosch Will Soon Let You Remotely Park Your Car With Your Smartphone

How many times have you had to pass up a spot in a crowded parking lot because there wasn’t enough room to squeeze your car in and get your doors open? In 2015 Bosch will debut its Automatic Parking Assistant which will allow vehicles to automatically pull into a tight parking spot with or without…

LG’s Bringing Back WebOS to Run Its Smart TVs

It’s official, LG really is incorporating an open WebOS into its 2014 lineup of smart TVs. That includes everything from the curved 55 to 77-inch OLED models all the way up to the curved 105 inch monstrosity you’ll never get through the front door. In all, LG plans to incorporate the operating system into a…

Astonishing satellite image shows China covered with pollution

The smog situation in China is getting even worse, with pollution levels as high as 30 times the limits set by the World Health Organization.Check out this image taken in late December, 2013 by NASA’s Terra satellite. You can’t barely see anything because of the crap floating in the air. It gets even worse at…

Until 1891, an Ancient Sycamore Tree Grew in L.A.’s Industrial Core

It was a reassuring symbol of stability amid the upheavals of colonial expansion and transformation of the land: an ancient, sprawling sycamore tree known as El Aliso. Growing in what is today the heart of downtown Los Angeles, the tree cut an imposing figure. It measured 60 feet tall and 22 feet around the trunk.…

Sol Republic’s New Sweat-Proof Earbuds Might Be the Most Versatile Yet

Running headphones are for the most part a hideous, utilitarian lot. They stay put when you’re running and don’t short out when you work up a sweat. They probably live in your gym bag. Sol Republic’s new Relays are headphones designed with the simple goal of making a single bud that works for everything and…

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LG’s Fitness Tracker: Looks Like a Fitbit, Works Like a Smartwatch

We saw a half-baked version of LG’s Lifeband Touch last year at CES, but couldn’t actually play with it, and we never actually saw the fully torqued tracker come to fruition. This year the fitness tracker is back, and it is surely trying to be a whole lot of things all at once. Slated to…

Netflix Will Stream House of Cards on LG TVs in 4K

You can get your House of Cards fix on LG TVs in 4K soon, LG and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced at a CES press conference this morning. Not sure how fast that will eat up your data cap, but since the show was filmed in 4K, it might as well stream in 4K.

LG Home Chat: One Service That Tells All Your Appliances What To Do

LG has a new messaging service that lets you tell all of your appliances—from washing machines to ovens—what you need them to do. The service was announced at the company’s CES press conference, and should go into effect in the next few months with the release of the LG’s newest line of smart appliances. Say…

The Biggest Chromebook Yet Is Still Super Cheap

Toshiba is coming out with a Chromebook of its own. It’s slightly larger than the Pixel, and more than a whole thousand bucks cheaper. The new machine has a 13.3-inch full HD display, weighs a slight 3.3 pounds, and is less than an inch thin. It’s got 2GB of RAM, a 16GB solid state, 100GB…

Beautiful aerial picture of New York City covered with snow

The folks fromElysium Weddingstook this neat picture of a snow-covered New York City from an airplane. You can see Manhattan in the middle, with Queens and a bit of Brooklyn on the top right corner and New Jersey on the bottom left corner. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us in Facebook.

The Drone at Light Speed

Still yet swift, the track “A String of Lights Beneath the Lake” by Australia-based musician Tuonela combines the hazy apparation that is drone music with an urgent momentum often considered anathema to drone-ness. If still waters — to borrow a metaphor suggested by the track’s title — run deep, then still music might yet travel…

Listening For the Earth’s Heartbeat Inside the World’s Deepest Hole

In September 1990, a group of scientists put a drill head to the ground in southern Germany, where two landmasses once merged to form the supercontinent Pangaea 300 million years ago. Their goal? To drill the deepest hole ever made into the earth, a “telescope” into its core. The German Continental Deep Drilling Program, aka…

Here’s the interior of the awesome Lego Simpsons home set

The Lego Simpsons home set—reference 71006—just keeps getting better. Take a look at the back of the box, showing the interior of the house, which opens thanks to the central hinge pieces. It’s as detailed as the real thing. From the living room with the famous sofa to the kitchen to each room… everything looks…

British Fighter Jets Are Flying With 3D-Printed Parts

BAE Systems, which helps the UK’s RAF put together its aircraft, has revealed that some Tornado fighter jets have been flying with spare parts built using a 3D printer. Flights heading out from BAE’s Warton airfield in the UK have seen Tornado GR4s flying off with 3D printed cockpit radio covers, support struts and power…

This Surprisingly Strong Bentwood Chair Looks Like It Would Snap In Two

Tadao Ando is like the concrete-whisperer: the Japanese architect has an unmatched talent for manipulating the everyday material to do pretty magical things. Dream Chair is one of his latest projects—a collaboration with Danish manufacturer Carl Hansen & Son—that switches up his usual scale and medium. The result is a seat that seems too precarious…

The NSA Would Like Your Sewage

When residents of Howard County, Maryland, flush their toilets, their sewage will soon end up at the NSA’s new computer center several miles away. Collecting and storing so much data has been generating a whole lotta heat for the NSA—we mean this quite literally—and the agency’s now buying treated wastewater to cool their equipment. The…

How London Was Redesigned To Survive Wartime Blackouts

One of the more interesting aspects of urban life during the bombing raids of World War II was the clever and strategic re-designing of the London streetscape so that residents could live in a state of blackout. By turning off the lights at night, residents could hide the city from aerial view and thus leave…

Canon PowerShot N100 Has Two Cameras So You Can Take Frontback Photos

Last year’s Canon PowerShot Nwas a weird little point-and-shoot camera with an odd design aimed at roping in the masses who have ditched tiny cameras for smartphones. It was neat, but not all the way there. With the new PowerShot N100, Canon has redesigned the camera so that it can do even more smartphone-like things.…