Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
It’s not just the intense heat that makes it hard for researchers to closely study an active volcano, there’s also a potpourri of noxious gases that are less than ideal to inhale. But at the controls of a sensor-laden drone, scientists from the University of Cambridge have been able to capture amazing close-up footage of…
Tom Scott took a pair of DJI Phantom 3 drones to the University of Manchester’s High Voltage Laboratory, where they can manufacture lightning strikes measuring over a million volts. The goal was to see what happens to a drone were it to get struck by lightning while flown in a storm, and the results will…
Alongside games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja was one of the early iPhone hits that we all eventually got tired of and buried in a folder somewhere. But YouTuber Giaco Whatever came up with an incredibly dangerous way to make the game interesting again: try it in real life with a flying razor blade. It’s…
One of the most exciting things about HoloLens is that no one is entirely sure what to do with it. It’s a game-changing device that’s bound to bring some revolutionary new applications. So far, developers have been getting the hang of it by adapting old ideas to interact with the real world. Now, some fine…
For the past couple of years, mediocre drone videos of dramatic landscapes have littered the internet. Like, we get it, drone pilots. Your camera flies and stuff looks pretty from the sky and the whole conceit is pretty trite at this point. And then I saw these four minutes of magic, filmed in South Africa.…
By now we’ve seen everything from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Donald Trump to popular memes processed by neural networks like Google’s Deep Dream. They’re like bizarre drug trips, but without the drugs. But it was only recently that Alexander Reben was curious enough to see what a neural network would make of the…
The world was given a slight reprieve from the unbearable antics of April Fools’ Day this year given the festivities fell on a Saturday. But Reddit also did its part to make April 1 a little more bearable with a collaborative art project that saw thousands of users painstakingly creating pixel art, one tile at…
Animals electronically coerced into singing has been one of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements. The internet is now packed full of countless songs performed by countless creatures, but few are as wonderful as these random autotuned animals singing the Duck Tales theme. Insane Cherry’s animal cover is so unbelievably perfect that you’ll wonder why the original…
“Cat music” is a funny YouTube search, filled with lullabies for kittens and clips of cats singing. But what happens when you take a cat’s meow, cut it up, and turn it into a club banger? Great things, my friend. Great things. YouTube team Fred V & Grafix did just that in a new video…
In the land of no wings, the KFC bucket is king. That’s the theory YouTube supergeek Peter Sripol set out to prove recently by building an RC plane with nothing but greasy KFC buckets for wings. And guess what: it worked. You’re probably thinking that a bucket-winged airplane that can actually fly is some sort…
It seems like raccoons get a bad reputation. Many people believe that they are rodents and that impression isn’t helped by their tendency to eat garbage in the dark. But raccoons seem pretty cool to me. It’s time that their image gets some rehab and this video of a couple of raccoons popping bubbles while…
An artist named Daihei Shibata created a series of interstitial shorts for a Japanese educational TV show called Design Ah. They mess with viewers’ expectations of what’s going to happen, except that the unexpected ways they play out are surprisingly even more satisfying to watch. There are currently three videos in Shibata’s It’s Different From…
You’d think that putting dinosaurs in any movie would be blockbuster gold, but while Jurassic Park was a massive hit, its sequels aren’t remembered as fondly. Instead of rehashing the same ideas from the original, the sequels should have just put a talented parkour runner in a crappy T-rex costume. We could watch Jurassic Parkour…
Hands-on experiments can make studying chemistry slightly more enjoyable, but the bulk of the learning usually comes from a massive and boring textbook. Maybe the world would have more aspiring chemists if classes were instead taught using these microscopic videos of chemical reactions happening right before your eyes. The Beauty of Science created Precipitation3, a…
If you thought Cadbury Creme Eggs were humanity’s greatest confectionery creation, Alex O’Brien Yeatts, a baking and pastry student at the Culinary Institute of America, has come up with a dessert that looks straight out of a geology textbook—not a cookbook. Working with cake decorator Abby Lee Wilcox, Yeatts created what looks like a massive boulder.…
In the world of competitive dominoes, stacking 4,200 tiny plastic bricks is, surprisingly, not even close to setting any kind of record. But YouTube’s FlippyCat might have created one of the most satisfying domino falls to watch, since the entire structure was stacked around a 360-degree camera, putting you in the center of all the…
As far as amusement park rides go, bumper cars rank somewhere between Ferris Wheels and benches when it comes to thrills. They don’t drive anywhere near fast enough to do any real damage. Unless you swap out their electric motor for a gas-powered engine from a motorcycle, that is. Colin Furze, internet famous for trying…
Costume-changes during a live performance are fast and frenetic, limiting how elaborate makeup and outfits can be. But for this performance by Japanese dance duo AyaBambi, a high-speed face-tracking projector was used to change their appearances while they performed, even creating the illusion of wearing masks that instantaneously appear over their faces. Japanese studio WOW,…
Just as everything is cooler in slow motion, humans are fascinated with watching things happen in reverse. That’s probably because time only moves in one direction for us, but whatever the reason, watching gummies melt and unmelt alongside classical music just made Thursday a little easier to bear. Erwin Trummer is the genius behind this…
Thanks to YouTube, the easiest way to score your 15 minutes of fame is to buy an expensive machine, master its capabilities, and film yourself using it. Some go with high-speed cameras, while others go with hydraulic presses. William Osman, on the other hand, went the laser cutter route, and used one to make a…
