Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
How could anyone go two years without noticing something this huge? Well, humans have been around for 200,000. Bristle worms and their polychaete brothers have survived five mass extinctions. Many aquarists fill their tanks with live rock, i.e. chunks of coral that still harbor biological and bacterial matter. Bristle worms often piggyback on these corals,…
Blender is some impressive free, open-source animation software. It can be used to make some terrifying garbage if you don’t know what you’re doing. But some people are really, really good at it. Like a modern-day Prometheus, watch César Salcedo mold digital clay into the shape of Emmy-winning actor and sort of musician Bruce Willis’s…
The original Boston Dynamics video of a bearded man bullying a robot with a hockey stick is haunting enough. But add a creepy narrator and a robot that really just loves his box, and you get a true glimpse at how the robot uprising starts. [YouTube] Contact the author on Twitter, or via [email protected]
Climbing something this high is concerning to begin with, but intentionally doing it without safety equipment borders on suicidal. Not only do you risk the obvious by doing unassisted solo climbs, but according to uploader Urban Adventures, “it’s easy to die from things you can’t see like radiation and electrocution.” So just add that to…
If your jerky co-workers make you feel bad about eating donuts for breakfast, point them towards master chef Hiroyuki Terada’s latest creation. He turned a few boxes of Dunkin’ Donuts’ finest into a sushi roll you’ll want to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and every meal in-between. If you endeavor to make them yourself, instead…
Most of the letters that chef Bruno Albouze says are vowels, and eeeeiiit souwnduhs ieencrayedaboulh. I think this is a video where he teaches you to make a baguette-like bread, but honestly I’m too blissed out on his voice. He’s like Bob Ross but from some fictional European country. Did you hear he just said…
Freestyle competitive jump rope is a real sport. It’s badass and has almost nothing in common with its schoolyard predecessor. Let that sink in. And then feast your eyes on Nick Woodard—one of the sport’s luminaries and multiple-time world champions—as he performs a routine that involves standing back flips, corkscrews, and hand stands. It’s like…
The Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques might not have the most exciting name, but every year Siggraph draws the most talented programmers, engineers, and artists to its conference to show off their brilliant CG creations and developments. The conference also hosts an annual computer animation festival, which…
I have trouble eating two slices of cheesecake in an hour, so I can’t imagine what my insides would look like if I crammed 13 slices in a minute. Then again, I’m not a competitive speed eater. Matt Stonie completed a self-imposed challenge to eat as much cheesecake as possible in one minute. He wasn’t…
Pitting molten or superheated metal against everyday objects has very much become a genre of internet videos, and hot metal is not to be fucked with. You expect it to win, and you kind of hate it for winning, like the Yankees, or death, or cops. Once in a blue moon though, something comes along…
Meet two parkour superstars who bring the Mario brothers to life in this spellbinding display of ninja-like gymnastics. As you can see, no CGI Koopa Troopa is safe. The video was made by the folks at Dark Pixel, a YouTube channel that released a similar video three years ago. This sequel is just as awesome…
As you already know, ice is brittle stuff, which makes it bad for applications like stabbing fruit or beer cans. Add a little wood pulp, sawdust, or in this case, toilet paper, and you’re cooking with a whole new substance called pykrete. Pykrete, despite mostly being ice, has some odd properties—notably a slower melting rate…
Londa and Bret Edwards were clearing debris from Idaho’s Highway 14 when things took a serious turn. Within the span of a few minutes, all hell breaks loose, with huge boulders and trees tumbling down onto the only road in or out of Elk City, Idaho, leaving the town’s residents stranded and without power. The…
As relaxing as a lava lamp is to watch from the outside, from the inside it’s a whole other level of mesmerizing. You’d assume that dropping a GoPro in a working lava lamp would be like diving into an active volcano, but the footage is more akin to peering inside a beating human heart as…
Winter can be a dangerous time to be outside. This video was filmed by a cameraman outside the WJET-TV tower in northwest Pennsylvania. Although we hear the huge ice spears crashing into the roof above him, he seems pretty casual about the whole thing. He ends his injury-free ordeal with a particularly polite, “aw jeez…
In the post-apocalypse, you want Aaron Day on your team. Using incredibly limited resources, he manages to recreate Settlers of Catan, one of the most beloved board games, using an inspired and economical approach to woodworking. He makes all of the game pieces out of a single 2×4. What might be the most interesting/painstaking part…
When most escalators break down they just temporarily become stairs (as the Mitch Hedberg joke goes). But this one decided to glitch in a way that actively ruined the days of the people riding it. The escalator, located in Ningbo in China’s Zhejiang Province, suddenly reversed, creating a “fuck this shit” deluge of falling human…
Through a series of button inputs, a player has found previously undiscovered menus that lay dormant in the arcade versions of Mortal Kombat 1, 2 and 3. How did they last so long without being discovered? The newly discovered menus were personally programmed by MK creator Ed J Boon, and display as “EJB Menu” after…
Candide Thovex is a professional French freestyle skier who’s known for his creative approach to the sport. Creative in this instance meaning incredibly dangerous and jaw-droppingly awesome. “One Of These Days 3″ is the most recent video in his freestyle series, following up January’s installment, which garnered close to 19 million views. In this most…
Nobumichi Asai and Studio WOW recently teamed up with Intel’s #ExperienceAwesome campaign, and created this incredible face-mapped art performance. Asai is a VFX expert who’s worked on similar projection and face-mapping projects. The process began by scanning the model’s face and then creating motion graphics on top of a 3D model of her head. CG…
