Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Jeff Victor is a fantastic illustrator and a long time Gizmodo reader. I asked him to send us his favorite illustrations from one of my favorite series: Evolutions. His first one is Princess Leia, which I find delicious. I want a lot more Bill Murray, though. Bill Murray Batman Gary Oldman Arnie Superman Tom Hanks…
It seems like a spaceship arriving to another planet, but it just happened right here on Earth. It’s an actual image from the successful Morpheus vehicle test completed today at the Kennedy Space Center’s Shuttle Landing Facility. There’s great video too. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
The first time I saw this image taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory I instantly thought of dozens scenes in science fiction movies, games, and illustrations—interstellar ships about to come out of hyperspace portals or wormholes. Spectacular photo. The reason why this looks like wormhole is because a galaxy in the foreground is acting as…
This footage shows a Russian 9K22 Tunguska anti-aircraft weapon system going out of control as it during a recent exercise firing with real ammo. Miraculously, it was reported that nobody was harmed in the incident. Some people are speculating this was filmed in Crimea, but it could have been at the recent war games near…
Man, Jupiter’s moons are a lot cooler than ours. The spacecraft New Horizons captured this gigantic exploding volcano on its moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the solar system. It seems crazy to see something so far away captured in such detail. The explosion and its 200-mile-high plume happened back in 2007, but…
“A valid attempt at a backflip over the Mount Baker highway,” says the author of this jump over a highway in Whatcom County, Washington. Well, at least it wasn’t a total failure and you didn’t smash your face against the asphalt. Totally worth it I say (if only because I love to make satisfying looping…
It may seem like this guy has a space-time bending black hole on his skull, which is about to swallow that guy’s finger, but of course it’s just an awesome optical illusion, created by artist Cory Ferguson, instagrammed by Geometry Chaos. If you have to get a tattoo, you may as well blow people’s minds…
I will be going to Montreal as soon as the weather gets a bit better. I wish I could visit some these fascinating tunnels photographed by Andrew Emond, which are part of a 3,000-mile maze under the city.
This is amazing news:NASA is sending a mission to Europa! If everything goes well, a robotic submarine may be landing on Jupiter’s moon—the world that scientists believe is the most likely to contain life in the Solar System—by 2030, a real space odyssey. This has the potential to change the world. “Attempt no landings there,”…
When I first saw this I thought it was so cool that it had to be some kind of photoshop hoax. But it’s real. It’s called interchange spiral and this one is in Florida. Can a highway be beautiful? At least from space it can. The interchange connects the SR 9A and SR 202 in…
Surprise! NASA just issued a last minute asteroid notice: Today, a 100-foot (30 meter) asteroid called 2014 DX110 is going to fly by Earth closer than the Moon. The closest point will be 217,000 miles (about 350,000 kilometers) at around 4PM Eastern Standard Time. I love how they rush to downplay these close encounters of…
If you haven’t watched True Detective yet, go start watching it ASAP. If you haven’t watched the last episode, run and watch it now. But if you have seen it, then go ahead and watch the following video. It’s the most hilarious True Detective montage yet. The horror. The Yellow King is actually Carry Fisher.…
He chain smokes. He loves his guns. And he almost looks homeless. But he’s actually pretty damn awesome. Meet Doug Coulter. A gunsmith who’s also an amazing DIY engineer. So amazing that he’s built a nuclear fusion reactor in his basement. Yup. Motherboard visited Coulter to see his DIY fusion reactor and to see how…
It’s like magic. A street performer defies gravity by contact juggling a sphere in front of a crowd and it’s absolutely mesmerizing to see from his point of view. You feel the pressure he has to perform, the focus he has in his movements and the art of it all. I’ll be giving you money…
I don’t have the brain capacity or the finger dexterity or the lung capacity to do any of these things because I am not a genius fish human. Kevin Hays, on the other hand, is probably a fish human. Powered by the brain of a computer. With the fingers of robots. Oh and he’s a…
Here’s some fun you can have at home with little to no effort: make a mini crossbow from a bottle cap, two popsicle sticks and a rubber band. You can fire off flaming arrows, toothpicks, skewers, Q-tips and more with just your thumb. Dave Hax shows us how and the process is rather easy. Just…
Ah, that’s a good hit. 100 good hits, actually. Artist Wyatt Burns created a way to smoke 100 cigarettes at once with a crazy contraption and it looks, well, predictably suffocating. He lights up all the cigarettes with a torch and feeds all the smoke into a plastic bag. In his performance art piece, he…
Did you know that corn kernels turn to liquid before becoming popcorn? When you heat a kernel, the sealed-in moisture liquifies its starch, the pressure builds, the kernel explodes and the liquid expands as it solidifies in a fraction of a second, resulting in the cell structure you can see above at 250x. SPLOID is…
I don’t know how the hell someone came up with the idea of racing a 2015 Subaru WRX STI against a Stick Bomb, but they should give her or him a medal.
Scandinavians are great with languages, but Finn-Swede smoccahontas isn’t speaking any foreign tongue in this video, even while it sounds like it. She’s just making up most of the words and make it sound like she speaks them perfectly. Having travelled through almost all of these countries, I’ve to admit that she really nails it.…
