Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Ask MetaFilter member JannaK presented the community with a puzzle that had been troubling her family for nearly 20 years. Her grandmother died in 1996 from cancer and in her last days she scribbled down a seemingly non-sensical string of characters on index cards. Nobody knew what it all meant. Then the Metafilter community solved…
Wow. NicksplosionFX just created a time machine of emotions by stitching together every single—yes, every single—original Nintendo NES video game start screen in one epic video. The whole shabang lasts 3 hours and goes in alphabetical order and has so many memorable beeps and boops that you can’t help but feel like a kid again…
I love the work of photographer George Christakis. He creates fantastic images, composing photographs into impossible landscapes that sometimes feel entirely possible and others make you feel as the lone survivor of a dream that has collapsed. In his own words: I had scenes of people, lonely at strange environments, looking for peace, enjoying a…
Meet Sepideh Hooshyar, a provincial Iranian teenage girl who dreams of becoming an astronaut. As a young woman in a conservative Muslim culture that disapproves of such pursuits, Sepideh spends her days studying astronomy and her nights watching the stars. This documentary chronicles her quest to dream big. Sepideh lives in Sa’adat Shahr, a town…
There are many ways to scuttle a warship. Here are three of them: explosive charges, torpedoes, and nuclear blasts. Spoiler: Loose lips sink ships but C-4 sinks them much better. Even better than nuclear blasts, but not as cool as torpedoes. Explosives The video above shows the last few seconds of the USS Oriskany—an Essex-class…
The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan? You know the one—it cost $6.7 million to build. Yesterday, a snowblower smashed one of its 15 seamless glass panels, which created this beautiful cracked vignette of New York City. It looks like a painting. Image above from Twitter Plenty of pictures of the smashed panel have…
This 29.6 carat blue diamond was found last week at the Cullinan Diamond Mine near Pretoria, South Africa, the same mine where the famous South of Africa blue diamond—the second largest cut diamond in the world—was discovered. The mining company claims that it is “extremely valuable.” The stone is an outstanding vivid blue with extraordinary…
Behold the Severodvinsk—the pride of the Russian Navy, the first of the post-Soviet era Yasen-class submarines. It entered service at the end of December 2013 and it will replace the old Akula-class and Alfa-class subs. But unlike those warships, and thanks to a new cruise missile, the Severodvinsk has strategic and tactical nuclear weapon capabilities.…
Brooklyn-based photographer Zack Seckler took to the skies over Botswana in an ultra, ultra, ultra-light aircraft to take these incredible pics of native wildlife doing its collective thang. From less than 500 feet up, he was able to capture zebras, cows, and vegetation that are so beautifully composed they look like they’re part of a…
Like in Game of Thrones, where the Iron Throne was forged from the swords of all the enemies Aegon the Conqueror defeated, this Cyclosa spider uses its dead enemies’ bodies to build a big fake spider decoy design to sit on. Seriously, the spider uses its victim’s insect corpses to construct a larger spider-shaped design…
It’s okay. It’s not just you. You didn’t pop a pill you shouldn’t have before your afternoon coffee. You’re not in a dream world. The billboard actually looks like that in real life and apparently it’s on purpose, the broken electronic billboard is being tested for all working colors. I see acid. The picture, recently…
What’s your favorite thing to see explode? Never thought about it? How could you. I think it might have to be the watermelon The hard outer shell of the fruit makes for perfect fragmentation, the watermelon’s shape holds an explosive pretty darn well and its red flesh makes for colorfully gory splashes (especially against the…
It’s amazing the new tricks that people can just invent with their bikes. Once you think that everything has been done before, someone decides to murder the laws of physics. This new trick though might be more impressive because I’m getting the spins just looking at it. How does the rider manage to land such…
Sochi, Russia, the host city of next month’s Winter Olympics, is nothing close to cold right now. The temperature hovers at a very mild 55 degrees which means it’s very far from freezing which means it’s very far from snowing. But. Like. Um. You kind of need snow to host a Winter Olympics. So Sochi…
Watch as a biker attempts to base jump off Bolivia’s famous Death Road and fails badly. Don’t worry, he survived, but it was really painful: “injuries included fractures in his forearm and cut tendons in his knees.” SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Artist Heather Hansen thought it would be neat to cover her hands and feet on charcoal and transfer her body moves directly into paper, like a human plotter. She called it Emptied Gestures, an “experiment in kinetic drawing.” SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
Yeah yeah, this is stupid. BUT one day—when it’s South America and Africa’s turn to become the most powerful continents on Earth—you will not laugh that much. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
It looks like a regular tree, but the Manchineel can kill you. Everything about it is extremely toxic. If you touch its leaves, they will cause “a strong allergic dermatitis.” It’s so bad that, if you stay under its foliage while it’s raining, the water will cause instant blistering wherever it touches you. It gets…
The London Array—the world’s largest offshore wind farm—started operating on April 8, 2013, about twenty kilometers (12 miles) off the coast of Kent and Essex, England. Looking at these pictures taken from space gives you a perfect idea of the Array’s amazingly vast extension. It has a maximum generating power of 630 megawatts (MW), enough…
It’s easy to forget how beautiful the world is when we shackle ourselves inside all day. Maybe on the weekend we’ll take a hike, we say. Maybe next month we’ll make a trip out to the woods, we plan. But even if we do all that, we still don’t see it enough. Good thing photographers…
