Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has alerted of the awful state of the asteroid defense system, a program mandated by Congress in 2005 to detect and track at least 90 percent near-Earth objects greater than 460 feet (140 meters) in diameter by 2020. This is bad news. From the report: While the program has discovered,…
I love Alex Ries’ sci-fi illustrations because they feel more close enough to our current reality to be truly believable, like some lost far-future NASA concept mission designs. Even his alien creatures feel biologically plausible. Alex Ries is a Melbourne-based illustrator and concept artist who has been featured in Cosmos Magazine, Pearson Education Canada, and…
2033 is the last single from French musician Leon. The video—directed by Thomas Blanchard—is kaleidoscopic collage of images that drags you into a psychedelic vortex of colors, shapes, and pop music. It may be too early to pop any pills, but coffee and this will have a similar effect. Leon is a French singer and…
Here’s a video that shows the full custom build process for Kindred Snowboards. They plan the design, get the wood, glue parts together, shave it down, add materials, press it together, clean up the edges and do so many things to one board that it may sound boring when you read it but is incredibly…
ADHD made an animation that plays with the idea that we are some kind of computer simulation. From being monkeys eating fruit turn to landing on the moon to putting dumb videos on YouTube—it’s all a never-ending cycle of video game stages on the hands of an alien or our own future descendants. SPLOID is…
These photographs by Rebecca Bathory make it seem as if the apocalypse has come and gone and the world is in complete ruins. Not quite. They’re actually photographs of countries and places that were a part of the former Soviet Union. The forgotten decay is haunting. The photographs come from Bathory’s book ‘Soviet Ghosts’ which…
You are looking at the second of the two Boeing 747 space shuttle carriers being taken to its resting place at the Joe Davies Heritage Airpark, in Palmdale, California. After two decades ferrying the space shuttles across the country, the two legendary aircraft are now retired. Over the next 20 years, it made 66 flights…
NBC12 posted this photo of (allegedly) the most patriotic sunset I’ve ever seen. According to them, the image was taken by two viewers from the Virginia Center Commons—a mall in Richmond, Virginia. I don’t know if it has been doctored or not, but AMERICA F*CK YEAH. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join…
That big block of metal is inconel, an extremely tough “austenitic nickel-chromium-based superalloy,” one of the strongest metals known to humans, used in “in extreme environments subjected to pressure and heat” like nuclear plants. How do you cut such a hard thing? Let’s watch a video. That’s a ceramic head rotating at very high speed.…
The everyday life of orcs in Mordor is tough. Any given day they end up with a knife slicing their stomach, an arrow piercing their jugular, or their head severed by who knows what. This short film tells the story of an Orc in one of those complicated days. The film—directed by Sam Gorski and…
When I see Ben Chen’s illustrations I imagine an endless orgy of movies, video games, comics, and random pop culture icons going on inside his head. The resulting hangover transforms into these hooraying but witty and elegant pieces of graphic humor. You can follow Chen’s work on Flickr or buy his t-shirts in Threadless. This…
Here’s a fascinating graphic comparisonof the mirrors of optical telescopes since the Yerkes Observatory—a 1893 40-inch refractor in Williams Bay,Wisconsin—to the largest of them all, the 128-foot (39-meter) European Extremely Large Telescope at Cerro Armazones in the Atacama Desert, Chile. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
As it releases closer and closer photos of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency has announced the landing site for Philae, the little spaceship that will be launched from the Rosetta mothership to touch down on the surface of this object—the first comet landing in history. Here’s the primary landing site: Site J is…
I started watching the music video of Give It Up—the fourth track of Kutiman’s first album Thru You Too—with skepticism. After all, how good can a song be if it’s made from samples taken from random, unconnected YouTube music clips? Well, apparently, it can be amazingly good. Just watch and listen. Kutiman’s real name is…
I want this for breakfast today, tomorrow, and everyday for the rest of my life: A coffee rubbed beef patty, covered in creamy pumpkin aioli, caramelized onion, pumpkin spice duck bacon, tomato, and cilantro and baby arugula salad. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
This blurry abstract painting is the mashup of 100 of the most popular Hubble Space Telescope images, made by Michael West of the Maria Mitchell Observatory. [The] Hubble’s top 100 images were downloaded and resized to identical pixel dimensions. At each point the 100 pixel values were arranged from lowest to highest, and the middle…
This is the MacArtney 11kV, 400 amp wet mate connector, a plug “eliminates the need to bring cables to the surface by wet mating and de-mating cable infrastructure, wave energy converters, tidal energy converters and floating wind turbines.” I just find it fun because it kind of looks like a regular 120v plug. MacArtney’s wet…
Edge of Tomorrow was a pretty good movie—and spectacular too. So much that I thought most of the stunts and effects were computer generated. But no, a lot of those explosions and jumps were completely real, as this complete behind the scenes B-roll footage shows. Very impressive. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…
The Awesomer found this cool video of the one and only Willie Nelson telling a story with a brilliant trick that uses every single card of a deck. It’s amazing to see a legend like him telling a simple story. I watched in trance and with a smile all the time. SPLOID is a new…
Markus Kontiainen visited 11 different cities in Japan, China and Southeast Asia over 35 days and recorded this visual diary of what looks like an absolutely magical place. I’ve been to many of the cities he’s visited, but after watching his video, it’s clear I need to go to more. The video, which he calls…
