Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Do you remember the first time you tried flying a drone? And almost immediately crashed it into a wall? Experiences like that make it hard to believe that professional drone racers are able to pilot their tiny crafts at such impossible speeds without having some kind of super-human, X-men like powers. Part of what makes…
A pipe organ can cost more than $200,000 and weigh thousands of pounds. Not this instrument. The paper organ built by master craftsman Aliaksei Zholner costs and weights only a fraction of that—and it works just like the real thing. According to his blog post in a paper-builders forum, Zholner built the entire system from paper…
It takes far more patience than most of us could ever muster to create the mesmerizing domino falls that Hevesh5 painstakingly lays out. It’s even harder to come up with ideas worth spending countless hours on, but these color-changing dominoes are especially satisfying. The use of nearly invisible clear dominoes also adds a unique element…
The Academy Awards are almost here and many people will be talking about red carpet fashion, comedic monologues, and who got robbed. But few will be paying attention to the most important awards category—Best Visual Effects. This supercut pulls together all the past winners into a nice little reminder of how much has changed in…
If the internet is remembered for anything, it will be as humanity’s most comprehensive archive of things you probably shouldn’t try at home. Like making your own high-speed spinning toy that can reach speeds of over 100,000 RPMs, and then attaching razor blades to your creation to see what it can destroy. The results are…
Migrating an ant colony into a new terrarium because of an infestation of mites should not be an enthralling video experience. But this narrator manages to make it feel like a journey into Mordor! The peeps at AntsCanada had a problem. Mites were taking over their colony of Yellow Crazy Ants. Mites were everywhere and…
Planning a trip is tiring, but planning a trip around the world is exhausting. Aren’t vacations supposed to be relaxing? Instead, save yourself a bunch of time, stress, and money by visiting some of the world’s most popular tourist destinations through this impressive hyperlapse video. It’s assembled from 3,305 Google Maps screenshots, so strap in…
A swinging pendulum is notoriously mesmerizing—that’s why hypnotists are always swinging pocket watches in front of someone’s eyes to put them under. But when you add an extra point of articulation, creating a double pendulum, the seemingly random and flailing motions that ensue go well beyond hypnotic. In fact, if you need to get any…
The world seems like it’s only full of ugly and terrible things right now, but find a microscope and you’ll discover there’s still beauty to be found. These microscopic crystals, invisible to the naked eye, look like forests full of towering trees spouting up from nothing when magnified hundreds of times. What you’re actually looking…
If you get queasy even on a docile Ferris Wheel, you’ll want to avoid a ride called the Tagada at all costs next time you’re at a carnival in Myanmar looking for a cheap thrill. Safety concerns aside, it looks like it would make even Air Force test pilots lose their lunches as it spins…
A few months ago we discovered synchronized wind tunnel dancing and hoped the event would become a real Olympic sport. But now we’ve discovered an annual competition for indoor skydiving athletes called the Wind Games, and we should probably just cancel the Olympic Games altogether and watch them instead. The clip above features Poland’s 16-year…
Math is often considered synonymous with pain, boredom and frustration. It’s not uncommon to hear someone say, “ugh, it’s like doing math.” But math is beautiful in theory, miraculous when applied, and awe-inspiring at every turn. Even if a person is entirely allergic to the idea of digging into the nitty-gritty of crunching numbers, it…
As currents shift in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, they bring an abundance of nutrients and plankton to the region, luring predators of all sizes. Swarms of anchoveta arrive first for an easy meal, but soon find themselves having to come up with unique ways to fend off larger predators like sharks and tuna. The result…
Back to the Future II gave us an awesome glimpse of the future where sneakers automatically laced themselves. What the movie left out, however, was that those sneakers would cost you $720 a pair. Oof. But if you’ve got a bit of Lego lying around at home, you can give any shoe self-lacing powers on…
It was only announced last week, and it’s not supposed to be available until later in the year, but somehow YouTube’s LordDraconical managed to get his hands on Nerf’s new Rival Nemesis MXVII-1oK. He promptly gutted it and then upgraded it to turn it into a wacky foam bullet-shooting monster. https://gizmodo.com/nerfs-colossal-new-gun-blasts-100-rounds-at-70-mph-1791572357 To upgrade the new…
The Dark Knight is very probably the best superhero movie of all time and that has a lot to do with Joker being the best villain and Christopher Nolan being a fantastic director but it also has to do with… Michael Mann? Here’s a video from Glass Distortion that shows scenes from The Dark Knight next…
The director Oscar Hudson explains that his music video for Bonobo’s song No Reason is a film about staying indoors. I think it’s a magnificent take on that feeling when you’ve stayed indoors for way too long and you suddenly feel trapped and unable to escape because you’ve run out of things to do inside and…
The windows in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are awesome. You can electronically dim them for five different levels of sunlight and visibility. That’s so much better than the typical airplane window shade option of blinding or blocked out. But the coolest thing about Dreamliner windows are how huge they are, like vertical panoramas of the…
The Social Network was a fantastic movie for many reasons: the direction of David Fincher, the music by Trent Reznor, the acting of mostly everyone involved, and, of course, the screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. It’s trademark Sorkin, with dialogue being stacked on top of more dialogue and characters expressing so many different things at once,…
If you’re going to endure all the pain of getting a tattoo, you probably want to ensure that whatever’s being permanently etched on your body is unique and original. So instead of a heart with a dagger through it, why not get a series of animated figures that turn you into a living zoetrope? First,…
