Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
With a top speed of just five miles per hour, Radio Flyer’s ride-on Landspeeder toy doesn’t provide much of a thrill for adults. But when you hack it apart and then rebuild it with one of Razor’s high-speed Crazy Carts, suddenly you’ve got a great reason to buy some more Star Wars toys. https://gizmodo.com/i-sure-hope-this-adorable-kid-sized-landspeeder-can-hol-1797086236 This…
There’s making an entrance and then there’s making an entrance. Beloved science educator Bill Nye made one of the latter recently while he was just trying to get beween floors. A group of swimsuit-wearing young women were recently trying to twerk in a Las Vegas elevator on September 22nd when they were interrupted not by…
Remember the RC toys you had as a kid? The ones you would lose control of when they went out of range 50 feet away? Gabriel Kocher’s custom-built camera drone has a range of almost two miles, allowing him to pilot it to the top of a mountain and capture exhilarating footage along the way.…
If you thought lumberjack would be one of the last jobs to be replaced by robots and automated machinery, you’ll want to replan your future after watching this tree-climbing, chainsaw-wielding contraption shimmy up a trunk while slicing off every single branch in its path. Trimming off all of the branches ahead of time makes it…
If there’s something more satisfying than watching hyper-specific machinery churn out random parts, I haven’t found it yet. In this behind the scenes video, one of Shandong Iraeta’s factories tirelessly turns giant rods of metal into perfectly spherical balls of steel. At one point in the process, the steel balls, which are used in rotating…
I am, admittedly, a very weak swimmer, and at this point in my life I don’t see myself signing up for Summer swim lessons. So I completely endorse this alternative approach to getting comfortable in the water: building a jet-powered wet suit that lets you cruise faster than Michael Phelps. On land, the suit is…
Colin Furze is back with another bizarre invention that will make you wonder why more mad scientists haven’t embraced YouTube yet. This time he’s turned a BMW E30 into a drivable hot tub, complete with a pair of leaf blowers used to generate bubbles, and a barbecue grill in the trunk. Not only did the…
The playground you frequented as a kid was probably blanketed in sand to help soften the impact every time you tumbled off the jungle gym. But did you know that something magical happens when you pump a pile of sand full of air? It suddenly enters a liquid-like state. The effect is known as fluidization,…
Your childhood fantasies of soaring through the air like Iron Man or Superman will seem far less fantastic after this sobering first-person footage of a drone racing alongside a moving cargo train reveals just how terrifying (and slightly nauseating) it would be to actually fly. Pilot Paul Nurkkala is at the controls of this custom camera-equipped…
White water rapids are Mother Nature’s way of telling humans to find another route to their destination. Even with proper safety gear like a helmet and life jacket, navigating tumultuous currents like this is a risky thrill. But it gets exponentially more dangerous when you stack six rafts atop each other and attempt to shoot…
Five months ago, the Russian/Ukrainian musical group 5’Nizza released a music video for their track, Samoliot, featuring a series of mishaps that were seemingly frozen in time. But while the action was paused, the artists themselves continued to sing as the camera moved around them. It was a clever take on the bullet-time effect made…
After losing a bet, YouTube’s jackofallspades98 spent four months building one of the most complicated Rube Goldberg machines I’ve ever seen. Spread across two tables, it’s so dense and complex that it took 297 attempts before it worked all the way from start to finish. It’s hard to imagine trying anything 297 times until you…
Remember that feeling of terror when a five-year-old version of you climbed aboard your tricycle before careening down a giant hill? That’s nothing compared to what François Gissy must have felt climbing aboard this adult-sized trike powered by a water tank pressurized to 6,000 PSI. When the valve holding back 35 gallons of pressurized rain…
Before Twitter killed it off, Kevin Parry was a Vine star (who has since jumped ship to Instagram) known for his simplistic yet mind-blowing optical illusions. He’s since compiled a few of them into a longer video that will have you spending the rest of the day trying to figure out how he made each…
It looks like drone pilot and videographer Alban Roinard somehow managed to fly his quadcopter into the dream worlds of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. But watching these European cities fold onto themselves isn’t the result of a million dollars-worth of special effects; it’s just simple mirroring tricks applied to captivating aerial footage. Ever since drones got…
There are certainly some downsides to working aboard a massive container ship that criss-crosses the world’s oceans for months at a time. But through the lens of JeffHK’s timelapse camera, it’s hard to imagine a more soothing and relaxing career choice than roaming the open sea. Over 30 days, Jeff captured roughly 80,000 photos of…
When you get exclusive access to a 150-foot-tall tower, you’re going to want to do more than just take in the view. So when the team from How Ridiculous got just such an opportunity, they made the most of it, hauling a heavy anvil to the top and then dropping it on a stack of…
The clever software that stabilizes bumpy video and turns it into smooth as silk footage works by tracking various targets in a clip so it can calculate the camera’s erratic movements. Here’s what happens when you instead tell it to stabilize footage by tracking just a single male nipple. Jake Alewel recently shared this video…
With all the fascinating planets in our solar system, it sometimes feels like the Sun gets overlooked. The Sun is amazing! People still worship the Sun, and that actually makes a certain amount of sense. So, what would happen if you took a small piece of the Sun and brought it back to Earth? Well,…
To ensure the foam fire suppression system actually worked before bringing aircraft into its new helicopter maintenance training facility, safety personnel at the Fort Indiantown Gap Army Reserve base in Pennsylvania performed a full scale test of the emergency equipment. But I can’t understand why no one is running through that hanger like a kid…
