Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
If your plan for 15 minutes of fame involves a fancy billiards trick shot, you’re going to have to spend far more than a quarter of an hour trying to top the Allstars Sports Bar in the UK who recently pulled off what has to be the most amazing, most complex pool shot in history.…
The sparklers arms race just made a few hefty strides towards sparklers doomsday as the folks at JoyBlend doubled their previous record by lighting off 200,000 of them at the same time. If you’ve ever wanted your birthday celebration to end in a gigantic apocalyptic fireball, this is how you’d do it. https://gizmodo.com/lighting-100-000-sparklers-at-once-is-the-quickest-way-1759224234 Our only…
Damn, the ocean isn’t here to play around. This worm, known as a sand striker, buries itself in the ground and can grow up to twice the length of a human. It has no eyes and no brain and yet it can snatch the body and soul (and everything else) of a fish from right…
I never really thought about visiting Alaska, but after seeing Tom Welsh’s trip out to the north, I started thinking about it hard. If I’m going to be cold in the winter, I might as well be cold and see some cool stuff. Welsh headed north of Anchorage by rail, 4×4, and a small aircraft,…
If you’ve ever been blasted by the downwash of a drone when it flies over you, you know how much air four spinning rotors can move. But to help improve the design and flight characteristics of future drones, NASA had its supercomputers simulate what that air movement actually looks like, and it’s impossibly complex. The…
Here’s a useful driving safety tip from our friends in Russia who all seem to have in-vehicle dash cams: If you find yourself on the road behind a mysterious cloud of smoke, it might be a good idea to slow down and drive around the obstacle, instead of speeding up and finding out what’s behind…
Here’s a nice little portrait of artist Alan Williams and how he turns random metal parts like the keys of a typewriter or a bicycle pedal into these intricately designed sculptures of animals. It’s definitely cool to see him work and transform recycled man-made machine parts into creatures that exist in nature because you get…
Snowboarder Tom Oye was snowboarding in Whistler, Canada when he got caught in a pummeling avalanche, and it’s beyond terrifying because we get to see the entire harrowing slide down the mountain. One second he’s getting ready to carve the slopes and the next he feels the ground crack underneath him and finds himself trapped…
When you win a championship as a professional athlete, you get a ring. But it’s not a normal ring meant for normal humans with normal fingers. No, championship rings are enormously gaudy boulders with, like, a million diamonds set in a very specific way because it represents winning or something. The excess is impressive and…
In this brilliant mashup of classical music, Grant Woolard manages to turn 52 masterpieces from 31 famous composers into a single track that anyone, even those who claim to hate classical music, will end up playing on repeat for days to come. [YouTube via Neatorama]
My advice in surviving winter? Move somewhere warm. Can’t do that? Then just stay inside for three months. Can’t do that? Then… wait, why can’t you do that? Friend’s birthday? Forget about it. Dinner? Order in. Life? Experience it through videos on the Internet. Like this one by ZALUSKart, where bubbles freeze over and over…
When you can’t rely on a computer to improve (or fake) a movie scene, you gotta improvise. And back in the days of silent films, filmmakers were really, really good at coming up with creative ways to cook up special effects. It was a master class of using specific camera angles, splicing together shots, using…
Furbies are little monsters and I never understood why they existed until today. As it turns out, they’re not useless excuses for a toy, but rather the perfect play thing for a red hot nickel ball. Furbies, you see, are meant to be burned. The furry exterior singes nicely, the body houses the burning flames…
BBC One’s Spy in the Wild series embeds animatronic spy animals out in nature with their real life animal counterparts to see what life is really like in the wild. The robot creatures can look a little bit creepy with their eyeball cameras, but the animals often embrace them as one of their own. Sometimes…
Artist John Edmark has done it again. With the clever use of a strobe light, he’s created sculptures that move like weird computer animations but are actually real, 3D printed objects that physically exist. It’s a bit hypnotizing but so, so cool, because they move and grow and essentially come alive in such a bizarre…
If you ever wanted to be a wizard, or just to try your hand at some magic tricks, you should learn the dark arts of… static electricity. Yep, with a bit of strategic contact with certain objects, you can easily fool kids and probably even trick your drunk friend into thinking you can control objects…
Meet Wilfrid Wood. He’s an artist who specializes in sculpting heads and figures that are never boring because they go far beyond the safe and traditional look many of us are used to seeing. Wood’s sculptures are often wacky, definitely fun, and always wildly expressive, like he’s managed to capture a person’s very specific reaction…
If you’re living under the assumption that your job could never be filled by a robot, think again. Your day-to-day routine might not seem as monotonous as the tasks that factory line robots perform, but as Michael Marczewski’s stressful short film Vicious Cycle asks, is it really? Even activities like chopping wood or playing baseball…
If there’s one takeaway from either the original 1982 TRON movie or the 2010 sequel, Tron: Legacy, it’s that glowing stuff is always kind of cool to look at. To build off this, the talented and creative bakers at Pies Are Awesome managed to make a delicious-looking TRON-themed pie that glows in the dark, but…
Winter is here and though it hasn’t overstayed its welcome just yet (it will), it’s still no fun to have to wear so many darn layers. It’s much more fun to imagine the other (better) seasons. Beauty of Science made this very colorful video using footage taken from microscopes or macro shots—chemical reactions, paint experiments,…
