Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
After miraculously getting a Little Tikes Cozy Coupe toy to take flight, the RC hobbyists at YouTube’s FliteTest challenged themselves to get one of Ikea’s cheap Jokkmokk wooden chairs airborne. Not only did they succeed, they also managed to complete all of the flightworthy upgrades in a mere six hours Building an RC plane isn’t…
Matt Denton has been putting his 3D printer to good use again, possibly the only good use for those plastic-extruding machines. He’s super-sized all the pieces in Lego’s 1979 Technic Bulldozer set, which required over 600 hours of printing to recreate all 372 parts. Re-assembling all of those pieces into a five-foot long Lego Technic…
Tesla’s hit a few speed bumps in getting all the pre-ordered Model 3’s out the door and onto customers’ driveways. But perhaps the company can learn something from Daniele Benedettelli, who created a fully autonomous Lego car factory using the iconic building toy. Now, I’m not saying Musk should consider rebuilding his factories out of…
Breakfast may or may not be the most important meal of the day, but it’s also arguably hardest to make. Can you really trust yourself to safely use a hot stove while you’re still half asleep? Obviously not, and why go to all that effort when you can build a Lego machine to make you…
Planes are not designed for tall passengers. Even an hour-long flight can be uncomfortable when you’re twisted and contorted to fit in a seat. So watching an 11-hour flight from London to San Francisco take just four minutes in this spectacular cockpit timelapse makes me wish supersonic air travel was an everyday thing. This timelapse…
Mathematician Kokichi Sugihara, of Meiji University in Japan, once again proves he’s the greatest illusion inventor of our time. Instead of just creating mind-melting images, he creates real-life 3D objects that appear to ignore the laws of our universe. How can this arrow, that perpetually points right, no matter how you turn it, actually exist?…
Downhill skiers hit tremendous speeds as they race down a mountain, but it’s still not fast enough to outrun an avalanche. Fortunately for Maxence Cavalade, the parachute he was using to speedride down Mont Charvet in France carried him to safety and probably saved his life. It’s worth pointing out that the avalanche was undoubtedly…
It’s not uncommon for cartoon characters to find themselves unwittingly dragged through all the chaos of a saw mill. From the audience’s perspective, it’s usually hilarious. But when you send a small camera on a log through a saw mill, scary doesn’t even begin to describe the experience of being pulled through all that machinery.…
Popular in Turkey and parts of Asia, ebru is a unique form of painting that swaps a canvas for a liquid-filled pan that’s sprinkled and splattered with vibrant colored pigments. Using specialized tools, unique patterns can be created by carefully mixing the floating pigments through a process that might be even more satisfying than the…
When it comes to Rube Goldberg machines, if you have to ask why, you’ll probably never understand the joy of building impossibly complex machines to accomplish the simplest of tasks. Need a piece of tape? This machine takes almost five minutes to do nothing but dispense a sticky strip. And that’s assuming all the mechanisms—made…
As you raced through your locker combination four or five times a day during high school, did you ever stop to wonder how those seemingly random rotations actually worked to protect your lunch and textbooks? The lock’s mysterious inner workings were always hidden away under a metal case, but this clear plastic replica finally reveals…
If, for you, Halloween is less about trying to score free candy, and more about terrifying every last adult and child that crosses your path, then a company called VFX Creates has the perfect prank for you. What looks like an empty (suspiciously blood-splattered) box breaks open to send a screaming, heart attack-inducing ghost head…
With millions of people uploading thousands of hours of video every day, your content needs to be pretty unique if you want to stand out on YouTube. For Steve1989MREInfo, that involves filming himself eating old army rations—extremely old army rations—and subjecting his intestines to century-old torture. For his latest video, Steve managed to get his…
Pipe bending machines make short work of twisting and shaping metal tubes into everything from car exhausts to trombones. Yoshihito Isogawa’s pipe cleaner bending robot works essentially the same way, although it’s more of an exercise in pushing Lego to its functional limits, as opposed to filling an automated void in the crafting world. That’s…
You might think the most dangerous part of a roll of plastic wrap is the metal cutting blade on the package, but another hazard lurks within the roll itself. After turning aluminum foil into an functional blade, Japan’s most talented knife maker has now demonstrated how a roll of regular food wrap can be hardened,…
Silly fringe theories about Planet X—an imagined planet typically named Nibiru that is on course to hit or pass by Earth with disastrous consequences—are the kind of thing normally relegated to vanity press-published books or those tabloids you browse in the supermarket checkout aisle. On Wednesday, they made it into Fox News, with the added…
If you’ve got kids at home, or if you’re just incredibly careless with your own Lego collection, YouTube’s The Brick Wall has built a Roomba-like robovac that sweeps any errant plastic pieces off your floors, letting you finally walk around barefoot with impunity. The vacuum—it itself, made from Lego bricks—relies on a sweeping conveyor belt…
If you weren’t able to scrape together $500 to buy Elon Musk’s fund-raising flamethrower, YouTube’s Jairus of All has a cheaper, DIY alternative that instead spews a massive spinning tornado of fire using a pair of ducted fans and a tank of liquid propane worn as a backpack. Jairus’ cannon has a wonderful ‘banned science…
NASA test dummies go through a lot so humans don’t have to. They get used for brutal impact tests, and sometimes said tests don’t go so well… for the dummies, not necessarily the scientists. Courtesy of NASA’s Langley Research Center, here’s some footage of recent tests involving dummies that have been stuffed full of sensors and…
Proving it’s the most versatile and useful tool in your kitchen, not only can you turn aluminum foil into a razor-sharp knife, but if you’ve got access to a giant hydraulic press, you can also smoosh it into the shape of a frying pan that actually works, solving any sudden frying emergencies. https://gizmodo.com/resourceful-knife-maker-proves-you-can-turn-aluminum-fo-1824071769 Like most…
