Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
It sucks to be a villain. Not just because you’re destined to lose to the hero but because when you do lose, you lose everything, including your stupid awesome villain hideout slash lair slash headquarters. Why couldn’t you just lose a little bit and get to keep rolling around in the Death Star? Why can’t…
It’s not what its author intended but, after seeing Huelux, filmed in South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah, I want to see some spectacular time-lapse videos on huge storm systems. From the author: The weather in 2013 made it difficult for me to get some of the shots I wanted. There were many times I planned…
If this fly looks weird to you it’s because it’s dead—covered in the fungus that killed it. It’s a very special type of Drosophila—one born and raised in space—and it proves that interplanetary travel could be really bad for the human immune system. So bad that we may end up dead, killed by some stupid…
Capricious Mother Nature destroyed a building with a giant boulder in northern Italy, with an even bigger boulder missing a three-story farm house by a just few inches, stopping right at its main entrance. According to Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, the landslide happened in the village of Ronci Termeno, in South Tyrol. The…
This is genius. Mario Wienerroither replaces the music from popular music videos with imagined sound effects and noises of what’s actually happening in the music video. If you see someone jumping around, you’ll hear jumping around and not the song. The result? An awkwardly funny mashup of artists dancing by themselves to no tunes, making…
From Mexico and all the way up to Canada with something called the United States of America in between. One man, Tyler Fox, decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and make his way completely through the US. That would be a 2,600 mile hike through California, Oregon and Washington. Here’s what he saw. It…
It’s pretty hard to make Batman jealous. The dude has enough money for an entire world, gadgets to play with everyday, a secret cave to hang out in, dashing good looks and beautiful companions to take out to dinner. But here’s one thing you can have that’s better than Batman’s: a fully returning Batarang in…
San Francisco is fantastic. I’m admittedly biased because I live here, but behind all the headlines of late—skyrocketing housing prices, burgeoning class war, tech bubble 2.0—it’s still chock full of weird, wonderful, and just plain beautiful stuff. Marc Donahue from PermaGrin Films turned his sights on the city for “I Left My Heart,” an impressive…
This ridiculously cute little thing was spotted near the Monterey Bay Aquarium last week, just hanging out on its mama’s belly, holding hands, swimming around, snoozing, lovin’ life. We should all be so lucky. Incredibly, these pics are not the most adorable thing I’ve seen this week; that honor goes to the baby wombat and…
Except in extreme cases, I don’t think plastic surgery is a good idea for any human being. But when someone is attractive to begin with—like this South Korean reporter—I just can’t comprehend the reasons. Look at the before and after shots. Before After She’s not an isolated case. There are more examples of this kind…
“Arctic air has surged into the U.S. pushing into the Southeastern states and dropping high temperatures there into the 20s with colder wind chills,” says NASA. This NOAA GOES-East satellite image shows what was happening this morning at 9:45. It’s an Arctic Blanket, says NASA: This NOAA GOES-East satellite image was captured at 1445 UTC/9:45…
A Japanese seafood wholesaler found this lavender king crab in a shipment of regular king crabs. According to the company’s president Kenetsu Mikami, this is the first time he has seen a crab of this color in 25 years. “It could be a good omen,” he says. True. Or it can be a sign that…
When I started watching the latest Ken Blocks’ Gymkhana—filmed from every angle with a billion GoPro cameras—I was thinking “oh, this is neat.” By the middle of it I was “oh, wait, what? WHAT?” And at the end I was “what the hell did I just watch?” If there’s any video that realizes the potential…
These photos are actually pastel drawings, but these drawings are actually photos of real objects. Created by Cynthia Greig, they use no digital manipulation whatsoever. Just white paint and black pencil. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
I wish I could be 16 again to enroll in the futuristic Island School in Hong Kong, a 28,000-square-meter building that merges into the landscape. From the inside, it looks like a spaceship. From the outside, its structure seems to defy gravity: According to ArchDaily, “the design is formed by an atrium, which doubles as…
This picture isn’t new, but it’s nonetheless, amazing. You’re looking at an image of the Sun taken at night through 8,000 miles of Earth’s rocky matter. How is this wizardry possible? Because the Sun’s neutrinos can pass through anything. About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the…
Over a century after it first hit the highway, Porsche has finally unveiled the first car its founder ever designed. And guess what? It’s electric. When you think of Porsches, you undoubtedly imagine smooth lines, purring engines, and blistering speeds. The Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton model (a.k.a. the P1), designed by Ferdinand Porsche, has…
Earlier this week, Pennsylvanians woke up to backyards full of curious snow formations. The hollow cylinders varied in shape and size from doughnuts to hay bales to rolled-up carpet. They are snow rollers, making their first appearance in Pennsylvania in 10 years. If you’ve ever made a snowman, you pretty much know how this works,…
The Challenger crew died in a fatal explosion 28 years ago today. Left to right: Sharon Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith A. Resnik, Francis R. (Dick) Scobee, Ronald E. McNair, Mike J. Smith, and Ellison S. Onizuka. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
They may seem like photographs, but these are the finger paintings of Brooklyn-based artist Zaria Forman—an artist who draws using pastels on very large papers with extraordinary photorealism. Here’s Zaria in the middle of drawing the iceberg above: Her water renderings are hyperrealistic too: While I’m not a fan of this kind of art, I…
