Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
One of the most memorable music videos of the 1980s is A-ha’s “Take On Me” featuring a young woman who’s pulled into a world that looks like it only exists as crude pencil sketches. The video took 16 weeks to animate by hand, but Trixi Studios created an augmented reality app that can recreate the…
It might seem like photographer Mike Olbinski is always at the right place at the right time to capture Mother Nature’s fury. But for his latest film, Pursuit, he says he actually spent three months driving across 10 states to capture this amazing timelapse footage, chasing storms and weather patterns for over 28,000 miles. Recorded…
It turns out the recognizable half-circle arch of a rainbow is a complete lie. When you’re standing on the ground looking up at a rainbow in the sky, the curvature of the Earth usually blocks its bottom half. But when viewed from a higher vantage point, like from a plane, or the top of a…
Among the many dangers firefighters face at work each day, those high-powered water hoses have enough pressure to cause some serious damage if they ever got loose. But they also make for an entertaining makeshift carnival ride that looks far more aggressive than any sketchy mechanical bull you’ll find at a Western-themed bar. At times this…
Fifty years ago the first Consumer Electronics Show was held in New York City, giving local nerds a sneak peek at all the electronic toys arriving in 1967. Twenty years later, Art Vuolo attended the ‘Summer’ edition of the trade show with a giant camera on his shoulder, giving us a wonderful time capsule of…
Kids and space ships go hand in hand, which is why so many of us fondly remember Lego set #1682, the Space Shuttle Launch, released 27 years ago. Last month Adam Woodworth created a tiny drone version of Lego’s shuttle that could fly indoors, but now he’s created a larger version that can soar through…
One of the several brave robots to make one-way trips into Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant’s severely damaged reactors has accomplished what its less fortunate compatriots did not, sending back photos of what appears to be melted nuclear fuel from the interior of the ruined facility. The remotely controlled Toshiba robot, which is similar in…
We typically only get to see rocket launches from ground level, where the space-bound craft drifts further and further away from sight. But in this dramatic new video, we finally get to see what a rocket launch looks like from the perspective of space itself. This timelapse video was put together by satellite firm Planet,…
When shooting a documentary, the vast majority of what you film gets edited out of the final production. But instead of letting thousands of hours of breathtaking footage go to waste, the creators of Planet Earth II have re-purposed hundreds of breathtaking mountaintop shots into this 10-hour-long relaxation tool. All of the footage included in…
Ninjas are stereotypically known for their expertise with shuriken, also known as throwing stars. But while Rick Smith Jr. spends his days as a professional magician, we’re going to assume his nights are spent as a crime-fighting ninja who uses throwing cards instead of pointy stars. Rick recently spent some time with the folks from…
Despite an endless list of fascinating and destructive experiments you can try, microwaves should really only be used to heat food. Not lightbulbs, not highlighters, and definitely not an airbag from a car. Unless you’ve got a high-speed camera to record the microwave’s door turning into a high-speed missile. Thankfully, The Slo-Mo Guys did, and…
A goat that was extremely bored, ornery, or both decided to smash in the front door of polyurethane manufacturer Argonics Inc.’s Colorado office this weekend, and the mystery may have gone unsolved were it not for the company’s surveillance system. Argonics uploaded video to YouTube of the goat’s July 16 rampage on Monday, writing its…
You might be tempted to think this is just a cool experiment, but don’t be surprised when Mark Zuckerberg rips it off and it’s suddenly packaged with Instagram. According to his website, this is the first app that Dan Monaghan has ever made. Float0 is an app that utilizes the new AR toolkit for iOS…
Scientists trying to unlock the secrets of our universe’s origin need to look no further than the photography studio of Thomas Blanchard and Oilhack. By mixing nothing more than paints, oil, and soap, the artists manage to create colorful miniature universes full of strange, tiny alien worlds. Their latest video, Emerald, makes you wonder if…
Drop a lit match in water, and it will immediately be extinguished. But model rocket engines, made mostly of potassium nitrate, sulphur, and charcoal, will burn all the way through even when completely submerged. As this high-speed footage reveals, to test a rocket engine’s apathy to H2O, you’ll want to find something stronger than a…
He might have billions of dollars, a company that promises to revolutionize space travel, and an upgraded full head of hair, but Elon Musk’s Hyperloop will never be as cool as this superconducting quantum levitation Möbius strip race track created by students at Ithaca College’s Low Temperature Physics Lab. Möbius strips, as we all learned…
It’s amazing what kind of useless skills you can teach yourself while you’re bored at work. But twirling pens on your fingers or mastering Solitaire aren’t nearly as impressive as driving an 18-ton front-end loader on two wheels while making the gigantic machine twerk. This video comes from what looks like some kind of heavy…
Like Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and other abstract artists before her, Crystal Ma creates colorful masterpieces that are as much about the creative process as they are about the finished product. As you watch Ma pour rainbow after flowing rainbow onto a canvas, it becomes hard to care what the final result even looks like.…
Most birds get all the lift they need to fly with the downward stroke of their wings—meaning there’s no upward force being produced as they raise them back up. Hummingbirds, on the other hand, produce lift with both their upward and downward wing strokes, creating air vortices that the tiny birds use to fly with…
Last summer, Mark Rober built the world’s largest Nerf dart gun, capable of blasting foam at 40 mph. Sure, that made it slightly more dangerous than the toy it was based on, but it doesn’t even come close to Rober’s latest bonkers creation: a giant Super Soaker that fires water at 243 mph. https://gizmodo.com/the-worlds-biggest-nerf-gun-can-shoot-darts-at-40-mph-1782334889 At…
