Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Thanks to the never-ending battle between Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, the thought of someone dropping an anvil on your head seems like a minor inconvenience at worst. But as YouTube’s How Ridiculous demonstrates with a refrigerator, cartoon violence has misled us once again. After being dropped from a 150-foot-tall tower, the anvil plows…
When you’re eight years old, barreling down a Slip ‘N Slide is terrifying, even in the comfort of your own backyard. To get a similar thrill when you’re older requires bigger risks, but you’ll never convince me to ride this Slip ‘N Slide perched at the edge of a towering cliff. Watching the first-person GoPro…
Peter Sripol is a talented engineer with an obsession for building RC planes using unorthodox materials. Instead of balsa wood, he’s built working aircraft using Lego, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. But his masterpiece is successfully turning a tortilla into the world’s first edible aircraft. After using flatbreads to assemble more traditional-looking planes that…
Watching someone slowly turn on a light switch seems like an excruciatingly boring way to spend 30 seconds. But when the action is paired with a real-time graph charting the movement it turns soothing. For some reason Daihei Shibata’s short film Unendurable Line makes me want to watch mundane things play out for hours on…
We haven’t found too many practical uses for ferrofluid—a mix of oil and iron particles that appears to morph and change shape when exposed to magnets—aside from fun desktop toys. So now that we’ve discovered it becomes a nightmarish-looking blob creature when you mix in a little color, maybe it’s time to just stop making…
It took Antonio Stradivari months to create one of his instrumental masterpieces, but you can make yourself a tiny wooden violin in just a few hours using popsicle sticks, toothpicks, coffee stirrers, and string. It can’t be used to play Mozart, but you can still pretend to play it whenever your friends start complaining about…
The odds of two paintball projectiles colliding in mid-air during a match are incredibly slim. And even if they did, the resulting explosion would happen so fast your eyes would barely see it. But with some clever timing, even more luck, and a Phantom V2511 high-speed camera recording at 28,500 frames per second, you can…
They’ve been used by large companies for rapidly creating prototypes for at least a few decades, but finding a reason to put a 3D printer in every home hasn’t been as successful. Making accessories for your vacuum? Boring. Building pop bottle bridges? Meh. Super-sizing Lego? Hello holy grail of 3D printing. Matt Denton used a…
In the United States, it’s illegal to interfere with any aircraft soaring over your property. So if your neighbor’s drone is caught spying on you, you can’t just shoot it out of the air. But apparently the laws are different in Sweden, where you can take down drones using impossibly dangerous weapons; like a rocket-propelled…
The classic US stereotype of attempted Iranian ideological indoctrination via chants of “Death to America” and such has been old hat for quite some time. As noted by the New York Times on Saturday, in the past few years Iranian pro-government propaganda efforts have increasingly taken the form of rap videos glorifying the country’s military,…
Is Barnaby Dixon the reincarnation of Jim Henson? It’s hard to believe that there isn’t at least a little bit of Henson inside the young puppeteer as he demonstrates his latest creation, a glowing bug puppet that’s so articulated it even has moving fingers that can grasp tiny objects. Made from a lightweight, form-fitting plastic,…
Synesthesia is a rare condition where experiencing one sense (like sound) triggers an involuntary experience of another sense (like vision). If you’ve never experienced this phenomenon yourself, this colorful abstract animation by Andy Thomas simulates what it’s like to visualize sounds. Inspired by a recent trip to the Amazon, Thomas turned the unique and diverse…
The intense flash of light and booming crack of thunder that follows a lightning strike can be exhilarating, but it’s best to observe both whilke safely inside your home. As Norway’s Daniel Modøl discovered while filming a storm from his deck, those unpredictable lightning bolts can strike anywhere, even 16-feet from where you’re standing. Modøl,…
Riding a bike without a helmet or other protective gear is already a risky idea. But climbing aboard a custom-built bike packed with 1,000 rockets while you’re protected by nothing but a fireproof slab of foam strapped to your back is risk on a whole other level—even if you’re a semi-pro mad scientist like Colin…
As someone who still struggles to string a bunch of words together into cohesive sentences, I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around the thought processes required to plan and execute an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine like this. That whiteboard flip is at least worth a nomination for a Nobel Prize. It takes almost…
Unless you’re afraid of heights, few would call a ride aboard a hot air balloon a thrilling experience. But did you know there’s such a thing as competitive hot air ballooning? It might not be as exciting as air-to-air combat in fighter jets, but can you think of a sport that has a better view?…
Does the thrill of accelerating a dragster to speeds of almost 300 miles per hour outweigh the tremendous risks involved with the sport? It’s hard to imagine David Tremayne wanting to climb behind the steering wheel again after he lost control of this dragster at speeds few of us will ever experience on four wheels.…
In Julius Horsthuis’ short film Recurrence, he takes the audience on a slow descent into a sprawling metropolis he’s created. But as you get closer and closer to the city, and try to make out details like houses and skyscrapers, you start to realize that those tiny details only reveal more of the same, and that…
They’re fun, but Nerf’s blasters, even the most powerful ones, aren’t known for their impeccable accuracy. So if you find yourself in the heat of battle surrounded by opponents, you’d be much better off with this Nerf grenade in your arsenal, which blasts foam darts in all directions. Designed and built by YouTube’s Giaco Whatever,…
In addition to capturing moments of road rage, an action cam mounted on a motorcycle rider’s helmet can occasionally record a straight-up miracle, as was the case with Matthew Murray who ended up plummeting 250-feet off a mountain road after a problem with his bike’s steering. After a failed attempt to lean into the corner,…
