Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Reddit user JM2845 recently shared this amazing GIF of a barge in British Columbia emptying a load of timber into the water in a most unusual way, by tilting at 3o-degrees and having its cargo tumble right off the side. Amazing. Maybe this is commonplace amongst these kinds of barges, but it is certainly gasp-inducing…
New Scientist has a story on how peregrine falcons rely on a sailors’ trick to hunt down their prey. The video is like watching one of those World War II dogfighting films. [Falcons] fixed a potential victim in their field of view using a method commonly used by sailors to avoid collisions, called constant bearing.…
New York has at least a few magical moments through the day. This is probably the best, when the sun is about to disappear engulfed by New Jersey and Manhattan is still alive and buzzing. Hungarian photographer Örs Cseresnyés captured this moment perfectly. It’s my current desktop background (I miss NY). Here are some more…
Russia is developing weaponized ground drones, including some big amphibious models like the one you can see here. Add the thousands of combat air drones from many nations already flying through the world and it’s not crazy to think in a full robotic war happening before 2020 somewhere in the world. Some of these ground…
Winter is no fun, especially when it comes too soon or overstays its welcome. How can you make it more enjoyable? By being awesome like Chris Marchand who decided to turn snow into snowlemonade (snowade? water?) by making a beautiful and colorful ice wall fortress in his yard. Look at it. It glows. Marchand, who…
I’m one of those horrible humans who take nature for granted and recharge myself through indoor fluorescent lighting. I like walking city streets, I like going into city bars and I like eating city food. Feeling tires screech, hearing sirens wail, coming across unexplainable damp spots, that’s all what I’m used to. But then I…
You’re not looking at a digital painting or a photo that’s been manipulated with Photoshop or some sort of hyper real painting here, you’re looking at a real photograph taken with a real camera. No Photoshopping at all. Hard to believe, right? How did the photographer, Patrick on Flickr, pull off this delirium-inducing image? Quite…
Almost everything looks cooler when it’s filmed in slow motion, right? Explosions, athletic feats of achievement, glass breaking, water pouring, fireworks shooting, highlights happening, fighting and pretty much everything else in the world. Except one thing. Beatboxing. It looks positively explicit in slow motion. YouTube star Flula showed himself beatboxing in slow motion and well,…
According to Colossal, aquascaping is an incredibly competitive art. I didn’t even know aquascaping existed, but I have to admit that some of these winners from the Planted Aquarium Design Contest 2013 are beautiful and—when you see fish flying over mountains, deserts, and forests—they feel quite surreal. They are made with organic plants manicured into…
Each year since 1945, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists sends a letter to the UN Security Council in which they tell them how close we are from nuclear holocaust using a Doomsday Clock. In 1960 we were two minutes from midnight. Their new 2014 report says we’re still five minutes from the Apocalypse. “Five…
Researchers from New York University recently unveiled a drone that “mimics the movements of swimming jellyfish.” Designed by Leif Ristroph, an applied mathematician at NYU, the drone was presented at a fluid dynamics conference in Pittsburgh. It’s tiny and adorable and I want one. Ristroph wanted to design a drone based on insect wings. However,…
From the sky, New York was cloud wonderland this morning. This was taken by Jennifer Gormley: This instagram is from amtraver (thanks for the heads up, Teresita.) SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
New research from a team of scientists at the University of Western Australia will change the way you think about the difference between plants and animals. Mimosa pundica plants, they found, can learn and remember, despite not having a brain. Those active little fern-like things always did seem sort of smart, though, didn’t they? With…
Photographer Eric Sterman recently got his hands on a DJI Phantom quadcopter and a GoPro camera and flew them both above the Banzai pipeline in Oahu, Hawaii. The footage is nothing short of stunning. In fact, it’s downright otherworldly. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us on Facebook
You don’t need to travel into a brown dwarf star’s atmosphere or Saturn’s hexagon to see colossal lightning. Just look at these photographs taken by Francisco Negroni of the eruption of the complex volcano Cordón Caulle, in Chile. He told me that, while scary, there was no immediate danger: The first photos, the one with…
We’re rich! You would scream if you stumbled upon these cash wads in a cardboard box but your calculations would be a little off. Not because you counted wrong but because there actually isn’t money in the box. What you think is a box of 100s is actually just an excellent wood carving. The money…
We were once toddlers before. We’ve gotten drunk as recent as a few days ago. We maybe got too sore from working out. And we’re not always perfectly balanced. We know how awkward it can be sometimes to just… walk. It’s okay! It’s not always as easy as it looks! Look, even computer simulations tasked…
When we watch movies, we pay attention to specific parts of the scene and focus on different actors and look at certain things on the screen. Most of what we see is influenced by what the directors want us to see, our attentions are easy to grab after all. So what if you showed the…
We all know what famous Disney princesses and villains look like in the cartoons and movies but what about in real life? How do their beautifully exaggerated features translate into real humans? Pretty good! Artist Avalonis attempted to make real life Disney characters by piecing together real life famous features as reference points. I think…
Here is a tummy tickling compilation video of Vines from Zach King, the magic wizard of Vine. He’ll snatch cats out of computer screens, turn Rubik’s Cubes into candy, fly through beds and doors, jump out of his clothes, magically change colors of any object and more. It’s the most entertaining use of the 6…
