Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
The answer to why we spend money in pure science research and space exploration is obvious to me, but I often see people whining about how we can invest those (very limited!) dollars on doing other things with direct material benefits. Physicist David Kaplan’s has the perfect answer to these complains. In the video, Kaplan…
Redditor sesipikai did something wonderful: He wore a heart rate belt during his trip to Rome, in which he proposed to his soon-to-be-wife. He then exported the data to an XML file and created this fascinating graph using Excel. Of course, every man’s (and woman) heart rate would probably run at different rates, but it…
Artist JR made something beautiful in Le Havre, the second biggest port in France: He used 2,600 sheets of paper and pasted them into the ship containers to form an image. The ship will go all the way from Le Havre to Malaysia. This piece is part of the project Women Are Heros. This video…
Damascus steel is a Middle Eastern type of steel famously known for its resilience and distinctive patterns. Its secret was a unique forging technique that has been long lost. Nowadays experts try to reproduce it and, while it may not be exactly the same process, watching them doing it feels like magic. The sound the…
Is shaving the best way to remove hair? Mehdi Sadaghdar emphatically answers yes after performing stunts for this video. He hilariously tries crazy alternative hair removal methods—burning it off and electrocuting it off, for example—and decides that shaving is so much easier than any other way. This guy is funnier and crazier than the guys…
I don’t understand America’s fascination with Thanksgiving turkey, especially when most people cook it so badly that they make it more bland than it already is. But if you insist in cooking this instead of a flavorful bird or meat, at least cook it properly. Or crazy. Or both, like these engineers didin this experiment.…
If you could travel through time where would you go? To the future? To go see dinosaurs? And what would you do? Cure cancer? Prevent wars? Sure. But what about just using time travel to selfishly make your life easier? It sounds silly but it really might be the funniest thing you can do with…
I’m surprised by the quality of some of these Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailers made by fans. Some are so good that they could be made into the official ones for all I care. Like the one above, by Kode Logic. It seems like all fans are mostly excited by the crusader-type lightsaber from…
I’m still not sure if Better Call Saul is going to be good but I do know that I miss watching Breaking Bad so much that I don’t really care. I’d watch characters like Saul Goodman and Mike Ehrmantraut in anything. Here’s the first real good sneak peak of the upcoming TV show. It shows…
Chris New took these fascinating loops at GE Global Research lab. Above: “A tube of almost pure quartz heated to temperatures of around 1,700 Celsius to create custom laboratory glassware.” Chris New is a Georgia-born, Brooklyn-based photographer/cinematographer/director. Currently he is producing work for a digital branding firm in Manhattan. You can follow him in his…
There is no music in this short. No narration. Just the sounds of the daily routine of one of the last lighthouse keepers in the world: Leonardo Da Costa. He maintains the lighthouse at Cabo Polonio, Uruguay, a dangerous coast full of sunken ships. If you experience ASMR,you are going to love this. Leonardo Da…
Good news, everyone! Orion, NASA’s first manned spaceship after the retirement of the space shuttle, is ready for launch this Thursday, December 4. You can see it here at Space Launch Complex 37, on top of a Delta IV Heavy rocket. Meteorologists say there’s a “60 percent chance of acceptable launch conditions.” At Space Launch…
Mario Wienerroither has achieved the seemingly impossible: Turn one of the weirdest collaborations in music history—the classic Christmas song The Little Drummer Boy sung by Bing Crosby and David Bowie—into a hilarious video without music, even more surreal than the original. The song is even more strange and out of place when you learn it…
If you mix Tarantino’s final shooting scene in Reservoir Dogs with Mike Myer’s Fat Bastard you’ll end up with something like this: An orgy of latex prosthetics, greasy food, guns, and, of course, blood. Bonus: John C. Reilly is the protagonist. This is an excerpt from Rubberhead, directed by Eric Wareheim: A Vimeo on demand…
Artist David Cerny’s moving statue of Franz Kafka would make sense to anyone who has read the stories from the great Czech writer—it’s a literal representation of what Kafka does to his readers: It twists their minds in the most unexpected and fascinating ways. David Cerny’s is one of today’s most influential Czech artists. Here’s…
When I first saw this video I thought someone invented an insanely fast machine to cook delicious shrimps in just a few seconds. Thinking it through, I soon realized it was impossible. It’s from a fake cooking show made to advertise the Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…
This weekend, a forest turned into a real life Frozen kingdom of ice in Hungary. It wasn’t the Snow Queen Elsa, but the rapidly sinking temperatures that caused the fog to suddenly freeze on a hill top, turning trees into strange surreal sculptures like the one above. These photos were taken yesterday by the Hungarian…
Danielle Tunstall told Sploid that she is as a horror photographer who wants to share her psychosis with us. She lives up to her description. Her images are highly stylized, often bloody and always obsessively crafted. Sometimes there is a sexual component, but every time her photos are disturbing. NSFW. She uses a combination of…
Until now, all photos of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko have been in greyscale. According to a research paper that will be presented at the American Geophysical Union’s 2014 Fall Meeting, you are looking at its first true color photo, taken with Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera. The reason why the image is blurred is because the comet moved…
I have seen countless science fiction movies and documentaries about the future of humanity. None of them were as inspiring, beautiful, and realistic as this extraordinary short film by Erik Wernquist, narrated by Carl Sagan. Watch it and get ready for goosebumps. For maximum effect, I highly recommend that you use headphones, turn off the…
