Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Our favorite puppeteer Barnaby Dixon is back with a kickass puppet raptor that packs so many moves that it totally feels like it has its own mind. The tail wags back and forth independently, the mouth opens and closes with ferocity, and the body and arms move as naturally as anything you’ve seen in Jurassic…
In the latest episode of BBC’s Spy in the Wild, a robot ape equipped with a spycam happens upon a wild orangutan that recently found a saw. She uses it with a stunning level of mastery, given the fact that she’s an orangutan. But wait, there’s more. Somewhat by surprise, the wild ape and the…
Iceland’s board of tourism is doing something right because the country has become a vacation hotspot in recent years. Apparently, even the flight up north can be a spectacular experience, as you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the northern lights from 35,000 feet. Most people would sleep the hours away on…
Directors make so many filmmaking decisions that go unnoticed by casual viewers because we’re not paying close attention—but the use of color isn’t one of them. Color immediately stands out. Films can be hyper colorful and smack you with the entire color wheel, or they can be totally muted and monochromatic. You’re able to recognize…
There are many things in this world that need to be invented before this, and possibly more things that need to be fixed, but I think we all need to shift our priorities so we can focus on creating portals that we can jump through and teleport to another place like in the video game.…
I find the history of numbers so much more fascinating than the application of numbers. Who cares about learning calculus, when you can geek out on the brief history of numerical systems? Alessandra King shows us how different civilizations came up with different ways to count things, and it’s really neat to compare all the…
If you’re from a place where it snows a lot (I’m not), and where people don’t annoyingly complain about how cold it is all the time (not me), and are totally prepared for the winter months (also, not me), you’re probably not as surprised as I am about this seemingly never-ending stretch of badass snow…
Argentina has so many wonderfully different backdrops and views that it’s a pretty perfect place to travel through. Guillaume Juin walked on the roads of the beautiful country and captured gorgeous imagery in this video. You can really see how diverse the landscape is. In the northern parts of Argentina it’s a total desert. In…
You know those weird things you thought as a kid that make absolutely no sense now? Like the thoughts that were weirder and more personal than thinking Santa Claus was real or that there were monsters under your bed. Those ones. Hearing them now is obviously silly, but seeing those wonderfully wonky ideas come alive…
Forget about dropping $300 on the Nintendo Switch just to get your next Super Mario Bros. fix. As Jason Cichon demonstrates, all you need is a big pile of plastic bricks and some mad Lego skills to build a custom side-scrolling Super Mario level. The only thing that’s really missing is a hero. Sure, there’s…
Inside nearly everything made of concrete, you’ll find reinforced steel rods that compress the material, making buildings, bridges, and other structures even stronger. The rods aren’t designed to break easily, but when they do, the best way to watch the destructive results is through the lens of a slow motion camera. The Slow Mo Guys…
Meet Patty Brennan, she has one of the most interesting jobs that anyone could possibly ever have because she’s an evolutionary biologist who studies the genital structures of sharks, birds, snakes, and more. Basically, she finds out how animals bone by dissecting them, making silicon molds, creating 3D models, looking at them under microscope, and…
The US one dollar bill is still old school. In fact, it has the oldest design of all US currency being produced today. So that means it doesn’t have the flashy tech, or the colorful hues, or the wild looks that have leaked into the redesigns of the more valuable banknotes. But that doesn’t mean…
There are aliens out there (and if there aren’t any, it’s just more fun to believe that there are). But if they are out there, how do we find them? Once we find them, how do we contact them? And once we contact them, how do we actually communicate with them? Wendover Productions made this…
Silly Putty does not make for a very effective projectile, and I’m also guessing it wouldn’t make for a particularly effective dildo, either. Yet somehow here it is, trying to be both. TAOFLEDERMAUS is a YouTube channel that exists solely to shoot weird shit out of guns. Weird shit like pieces of quartz, slugs made…
We loved Disney movies as kids, but we might secretly love them even more after we’ve grown up. They’re almost always a fun ride, they almost always make our cold hearts feel something, and they almost always have a wonderful animation sequence that takes you to another place entirely. In fact, it’s those perfect frames…
If a movie trailer distills a 2-hour film into its 3-minute essentials, what would it look like to distill movie trailer? Strangely, it would look a lot like object recognition software. Støj, a Copenhagen coding studio, ran the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street through an object-detection algorithm that identifies and labels everything on…
The next time you find yourself being chased by bill collectors, all you need is a beaker full of gallium to turn the aluminum baseball bats they’re wielding into what looks like a kid-safe toy made from squishy Nerf foam. Gallium is one of those rare metals that melts somewhere just above room temperature. When…
Plenty of homes have tangled nests of power cords just waiting to catch flame. To combat this domestic blight, Laura Kampf crafted a simple projector cabinet that both obscures cords and looks plain awesome. Kampf, whose creation began as a rough sketch, starts with the basics— she measures, cuts, and sizes the lumber as she whittles…
Watching popcorn pop is utterly captivating, even in real-time. But when you film the process with a high-speed camera capable of capturing 30,000 frames every second, watching those kernels explode in super slow motion turns making popcorn into a spectacle that rivals the Fourth of July. This macro footage was captured by YouTube’s Warped Perception…
