Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
After nearly four years, David Lewandowski has created a new entry in his highly successful rubbermen videos. Now they’re hungry. Back in 2011, Lewandowski scored a hit with a short video titled “Going to the Store,” in which one impossibly flexible, sexless computerized humanoid traipsed through real world footage—like a Marty Cooper video, only 3D.…
We’ve all seen the grade school science experiment where sticking a couple of electrodes into a potato produces enough current to power a small light bulb. But engineer Marek Baczynski took that experiment several steps further, building what could be the world’s first autonomous potato—and the ultimate housepet. A single potato doesn’t generate a lot…
If Microsoft wants a guaranteed way to sell a million Hololens augmented reality headsets, it should listen to Abhishek Singh and pitch the hardware as the ultimate way to get in shape by playing the first level of Super Mario Bros. in real life. Unlike the Wii’s balance board accessory, this might actually help you…
At some point in time humanity got its wires crossed and parachutes, an invention designed to save lives, became a tool for risking life and limb. Instead of gracefully floating down the side of a mountain, paraglider Joseph Innes skimmed along the bottom of a narrow canyon, just inches away from breaking an ankle, and…
It’s assumed that when robots one day replace humans in boxing and ultimate fighting bouts, the ensuing battles will be like watching a real-life Transformers movie play out. But these tiny sumo robots tell a different story, with lightning fast fights that are over almost as quickly as they begin. YouTuber Robert McGregor spliced together…
Banana slugs are slow. Like, ridiculously slow. Watching them eat is tantamount to watching paint dry, which is why Canadian photographer R. Jeanette Martin wisely set her phone to record in timelapse mode when she encountered a particularly hungry mollusk in her garden. Martin, who hails from Garbiola Island in British Columbia, was walking her…
The next time NASA releases spectacular footage from a flyover of a distant planet or moon, you’ll have good reason to wonder if what you’re watching actually came from a spaceship, or from a microscope in a studio filming oil, paint, and liquid soap all mixed together. Galaxy Gates, directed by Oilhack and Thomas Blanchard,…
With a mind-blowing display of precision and timing, 14 students from the Fuji Municipal Harada elementary school in Fuji, Shizuoka, Japan, set a new Guinness World Record for the most skips over a single rope. In just 60 seconds, the students managed to skip 225 times without a single mistake. Watching these kids in action…
The estate of M.C. Escher may have just lost its lucrative stranglehold on the dorm room poster market thanks to artist Chris Rodley, who used a deep learning algorithm to merge a book of dinosaurs with a book of flower paintings. The results are magnificent, and deserve a spot on the walls of our finest…
By default, the Amazon Echo searches Bing when you have a question. If you consider that source of information to be a little too accurate, maybe Alexa Jones is the solution. Honestly, parody videos like this are rarely very funny. But putting Alexa’s voice with Alex Jones’s ranting is really something special. Ask Alexa how…
Animating anything by hand using stop-motion techniques, one frame at a time, is a time-consuming and mind-numbing process. But in order to create the surreal organic images for his WoodSwimmer video, Brett Foxwell had to slowly slice away at a log, sliver by sliver, while photographing the entire process. It sounds like a nightmarish, sliver-filled…
Thanks to an exterior clad in what look like reflective metal bars, Alain Robert, a professional urban climber, simply walked up to the Meliá Barcelona Sky hotel and started climbing, eventually scaling the 29-story structure in just 22 minutes, without the use of any safety gear. Robert is well known for his climbing stunts like…
Wave a high-powered laser around fast enough, and the human eye will perceive an image in the light trail left behind. That’s how laser projectors that cost thousands of dollars work, but it’s also how this cheap, 3D-printed plastic contraption turns a simple laser pointer into a full-on light show. All the files needed to…
When you strap on a virtual reality headset, your body has a constant (heavy) reminder that what you’re seeing isn’t real. But what happens when virtual reality spills out into the real world? This tech-filled room is able to warp and bend reality making you feel like you’re tripping on drugs you don’t remember taking.…
When you rub your hands together to create friction and warmth, heat energy radiating off your hand creates air currents. They’re completely invisible to the human eye, but with a simple setup, it turns out your digital camera can reveal this invisible world around us. The technique is known as Schlieren photography, which YouTube’s Veritasium—aka…
Aside from turn signals, a car’s horn is really the only tool a driver has to communicate with other vehicles. (Besides gesticulating wildly out of the driver’s side window, of course.) It’s so loud and abrasive, however, that it always sounds like you’re screaming at other motorists, leading to middle fingers and other unwelcome responses.…
When you see a 15-piece orchestra full of trumpets, violins, and cellos, you’re probably expecting to hear a little Chopin, or Mozart. But the Rundfunk-Tanzorchester Ehrenfeld (or Radio Dance Orchestra of Ehrenfeld, in english) plays a near perfect rendition of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger in this delightful clip. And if you’re wondering what…
According to Twin Galaxies, the official high score for the arcade version of Ms. Pac-Man belongs to Abdner Ashman, with 933,580 points. Or at least it did, before an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft achieved the maximum possible score for the game, 999,990. Playing the Atari 2600 version of the game (which explains why the…
If you’re a nervous flyer, you’re probably going to want to skip this video, because after watching YouTube’s Linkerius fly so low to the ground that it looks like he’s perpetually going to crash, you’ll be terrified of ever stepping foot on a plane again. As dangerous as skimming the earth at hundreds of miles…
“It’s just an earthworm,” you say. “Nothing to worry about,” you say. But the Powelliphanta snail can grow to be the size of a man’s fist and they would presumably be happy to nibble on some fingers. Thesee carniverous mollusks are found in moist areas of New Zealand forests. While they are certainly gross, earthworms,…
