Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
My first thought when I started to see Danny and the Wild Bunch—a short live action and animation film by Robert Rugan—was: “Is this some dumb Pixar imitation.” I’m glad I kept watching, because I love when sugar, spice, and everything nice goes to hell. SPLOID SELECTS is a series where we feature awesome and…
Margaret Weitekamp, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s curator of science fiction and space memorabilia, has some thoughts about why Leonard Nimoy and his Spock character were so universally loved. She also published this photo of the ears he used in the Star Trek classic The Wrath of Khan. Paradoxically, it’s the humanity in…
Munchies made this really interesting short documentary where chef and food writer Dave Arnold travels the world interviewing animal-rights activists, scientists, producers, and politicians to shed some light on what is really going on with foie gras. SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
I know these kinetic sculptures by Korean artist Choe U-Ram will haunt me dreams tonight but, their soft movements and the dramatic lighting hypnotized me, and now I have to watch these videos over and over again. Silver Insecta Lamp URC-1 Custos Cavum SPLOID is delicious brain candy. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter.
His technique may not be orthodox but it’s definitely efficient. I timed it and he chops an onion in, roughly, ten seconds. Which is less than what it takes to do it with a domestic food processor—considering that you have to cut the onion first, put it in the machine, close the lid, chop it,…
In what may be the biggest case of mass hysteria ever experienced in the history of the internet, everyone in the planet speculated tonight about what’s the color of a stupid dress. Some people even claimed it changed color.* Others looked for Photoshop analysis or scientific explanations. Here is the true color. The dress is…
Update: This was all a hoax. David O’Reilly and Kim Laughton curate a wonderful head innards shaking website, Hyper Real CG, that shows a collection of pictures that look completely real but are actually just hyper real 3D art made from CG. It’s really crazy how close to real life we can get with art.…
I don’t especially love pistachio. I don’t go crazy over tiramisu. Heck, I don’t always have the sweet tooth hankering normal humans have for dessert and yet after watching this pistachio tiramisu get made, I can’t help but feel as if my taste buds have all banded together demanding that I eat this right now.…
I don’t know where this image originates from but it’s around the Internet right now and it shows a picture of a dress that is so very clearly white and gold to me but is black and blue to so many other people. It’s black and blue to Google Image Search. Photoshop’s eyedropper tool says…
You can zoom in this 48-megapixel image of the USAF boneyard in Tucson, Arizona—stitched from Bing Maps satellite images—and try to identify all those airplanes. Or you can watch this USAF documentary on how the US stockpiles thousands of planes in deserts around the country to keep the active fleet flying.* Or you can do…
I have had black sesame ice-cream and it’s absolutely delicious. It didn’t look like this soft black sesame ice cream cone, however. The one I had was absolutely black. This one looks weird, as if someone got a time machine to order a cone in 1038, when all ice cream was in black and white.…
Watch legendary surfer Laird Hamilton zoom over huge waves in Raglan, New Zealand. He is using a foilboard, a surf board with an underwater hydrofoil that makes it rise above the surface when it reaches certain speed. Hamilton was the first person to use Mike Mack’s foil board invention with a jet ski, but here…
Italian sport fishermen Dino Ferrari and his twin brother Dario lured in this monstrous 280-pound (127-kilogram), 8.75-foot-long (2.67 m) catfish on Thursday in the Po Delta, in Italy. After taking these pictures and weighting what the Italian media calls “The Monster of the Po” they released it back into the river. The brothers used a…
I don’t know what Italian animators Salvatore Murgia and Dario Imbrogno mean by this: “OTTO is a video created with the intention to talk in a metaphorical and abstract way about the natural circle of events, which often switches the rules of the characters involved.” But I know y ou should watch it because it’s…
Here’s an awesome 3D visualization from NASA that shows how the Sahara Desert helps fertilize the Amazon rainforest even though they’re on two different continents that are separated by an entire ocean. The Saharan dust is carried over by wind and the phosphorous in the dust is essential to the Amazon. It’s really neat how…
New Zealand craft brewery Garage Project reveals how they make their Hops on Pointe beer cans and it’s like watching a machinery ballet unfold before our eyes. It’s funny to imagine these big honking machines made of metal and wires dressed in tutus but there is a surprising elegance to the can making process. Funnily…
Who knew that rubber band balls could serve as an endless source of entertainment? Slow Mo Lab stuck a firecracker inside one of those balls and filmed it exploding in oh so sweet slow motion. It’s like watching a mummy spontaneously combust right before our eyes. It might be the coolest thing I’ve seen this…
Holy crap, it’s real! Behold the first glimpse of Paul Allen’s crazy space venture: The largest airplane in history, a 385-foot (117-meter) wingspan beast designed to carry and launch a giant rocket to space, with a combined weigh of 1,200,000 pounds (540,000 kg)! Check out the mind-blowing photos. But first, watch this video to observe…
Daniel Cheong loves digital blending—a post-production technique “that manually mixes multiple bracketed exposures in order to obtain the maximum dynamic range” without getting the everything-is-illuminated effect of overcooked HDR. His work is beautiful. His photos are sightly surreal, yes, but I love the results. That storm against the Milky Way photo above is a great…
If you like coffee as much as I do, New York City is the place you want to be. Filmmaker James Casey shares New Yorker’s obsession with coffee and shows them talking about it in this neat video that made me crave a cup of deep black joe. While I was enjoying my good hot…
