Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
When I first came across this photo of an impossibly sharp and tall island rising alone in the ocean I instantly thought it was fake. It’s real. Its name is Ball’s Pyramid—”the tallest volcanic stack in the world”—and it’s located just south of Lord Howe Island, off the east coast of Australia. Ball’s Pyramid is…
National Geographic’s Your Shot member John Goodmantook this beautiful—and terrible—image north of Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles, California: “A lone surfer returns from the sea, bathed in the sodium light of an onshore industrial site.” Two ways to understand Earth clashing in one perfect image. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
The Sporty Supaheroe—a jacket that integrates white and red LEDs within a special fabric to allow joggers and bikers to be seen in the dark—won a Red Dot Design Concept Award in 2013. Now they have an Indiegogo campaign so you can buy it, along with other cool gear. If the jacket’s $1850 price tag…
Here’s a fun old trick anyone can do: draw arrows on a piece of paper, put a glass in front of those arrows and pour water into the glass. Watch as the arrows you drew magically change directions right before your eyes. Refraction is a mind bending thing. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome…
Seriously, why the hell would anyone want to kiss a cobra snake?* The GIF grosses me out, but the video is even worse. That’s when he actually opens his mouth. Ugh. * I wish someone asked me that question after I met my first wife. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
Here’s another classic musicless music video by Mario Wienerroither. This time, it’s The White Stripes’ The Hardest Button to Button that gets stripped of its audio and remixed with empty noises to sound like real life. It’s a lot more awkward and a lot less revolution rousing! Like two kids playing for change in a…
After enlightening us with obscure facts about The Simpsons, CineFix is revealing more information about something else everyone loves: superheroes. So here are 7 facts about your favorite superheroes—Spiderman, The Avengers, Superman, Wolverine, etc.—that you probably didn’t know. https://gizmodo.com/9-simpsons-facts-that-you-probably-didnt-know-about-1530716522 Even if you’ve treated the comic books as gospel since you were a kid and the…
This new cool SpaceX photo popped in my Twitter feed right after reading how Putin is annexing Crimea to Russia in the same way Hitler annexed the Sudetenland to Germany back in 1938. I don’t know what will happen next but this is yet one more reason why NASA should fast forward the manned use…
This picture looks like the nightmarish moments before a mid-air collision, but breathe easy! It was just a lucky shot by photographer Sebastian Lebigrand, who was aiming for the moon and caught these two planes passing each other at completely different altitudes: apparently they are 1,000 feet apart. The RyanAir plane is cruising at 36,000…
When I first saw this photo I immediately thought “what the hell is thing?” Then Attila Nagy told me about it: It’s a nuclear armed AGM-86B cruise missile. Three of them, in fact, being loaded on a B-52 Stratofortress. It’s hard to tell because you are looking at the butt of this 1.4-ton nuclear shark,…
The whole base jumping thing is getting out of hand. The Awesomerer found this video of Tom Erik Heimen setting himself on fire and jumping off a 3,900-foot cliff in Norway. The biggest risk, they say, was that the small parachute—called pilot chute—that it’s used to deploy the actual parachute might catch on fire. Fortunately,…
Japanese people claim that ice cream company Gari-Gari Kun makes the best popsicles in the world. They’re about to introduce a new popsicle flavor: Pasta with tomato sauce. The tomato sauce is inside the popsicle in gelatin form. It sounds terrible but something tells me that it must taste good. Yummy or yucky, I really…
Laurent Durieux is one of my favorite illustrators and designers ever. His re-imagined movie posters—recreated in an exquisite retro-futuristic style—are simply a true pleasure. I love to get lost in the fine detail and admire his perfect command of color and shading. You can buy his amazing artwork here. Laurent Durieux has been working two…
The promise of the self-driving car is taking too long to materialize—but it may be around the corner. As soon as 2020, says Nissan. This video shows the XchangE self-driving concept car now on display at the Geneva Auto Show 2014. Imagine being able to take a road trip like this, chilling and relaxing, with…
She’s good. After nailing her first edition of doing impressions on foreign languages, Smoukahontas is back for the sequel and it’s just as impressive. It’s so fun to see her make up very believable words and get animated depending on which foreign language she’s doing. Her impressions are pretty much spot on to non-foreign language…
Excuse the portrait mode video but this golf trick shot is so impressive that we can ignore the blatant disregard of proper cell phone video recording etiquette. Here’s what goes down: the guy behind hits a golf ball to the guy in front who swings and hits the same ball without the ball ever touching…
Um, wow. I don’t know if it’s the song selection or because it’s in black and white or the fact that everybody in this video is so attractive, but what started out as incredibly awkward—seeing two strangers meet each other and kiss—turned into something pretty damn beautiful. The premise of the video, called First Kiss…
Sometimes when you go a stadium to watch a game or an arena to watch a concert, you’ll have the option of buying an overpriced large beer or a slightly less overpriced small beer. Go small to save a few dollars because the small cup holds just as much beer as the large cup. More…
Having a kid is a lot of responsibility but if you’re a man-sized child, it can also be a lot of fun. Take Carsten Riewe, for example, he made a Caterpillar P5000 Powerloader costume from the movie Aliens for his 13-month-old daughter. What’s the point of having kids if you can’t do crazy things like…
These worms were collected byAlexander Semenov on various research expeditions, in locations like the Great Barrier Reef. I wonder how different—or similar—life could be under the oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa. If there’s any life down there, that is. The organisms are various species of marine worms, collected then photographed alive in a lab. Catching…
