Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Poorly Drawn Lines has become my favorite internet cartoon. Wonderfully quirky and absurd, beautifully designed, it always hits a sweet spot. Like this one, explaining the mental processes at both sides of a Facebook’s ignored friend request. I confess I click ignore all the time. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us…
It takes a special kind of courage and willpower to see yourself with no legs and decide that you’re going to be awesome at skateboarding. That’s the case of skater Italo Romano, a guy who lost his legs in a train accident when he was 13. As a teenager he lost his legs playing between…
The film you can see over these lines has never seen the light. It was made by Alfred Hitchcock after being traumatized by the images recorded by the British Army Film Unit at the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen. It’s a devastating film that should be shown at high school everywhere. Directed and…
A titanic sunspot—about four times the size of Earth—has appeared on Jan. 1, 2014. Called AR1944, it’s the largest sunspot in almost a decade. This image from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows it compared to our planet. They are so large you can see them with your naked eye. Another image taken on January 5by…
A man lost 37 pounds and his cholesterol level dropped from 249 to 170 by eating exclusively at McDonald’s for 90 days. He ate everything: from Big Macs to salads to sundaes to shakes to quarter pounders. It’s the antithesis of Supersize Me, the pseudo-documentary of a man who did the same—with two crucial differences:…
I’m sorry. People who serve in the army make incredible sacrifices for their countries and I am incredibly thankful for them. They do amazing things. They make our lives a lot better. But I can’t help but laugh at this wonderful compilation of fails in the military. They look like failed skits on sketch comedy…
Hyper-realistic paintings are always fun to look at because your eyes and brain totally want to believe they’re actual photographs even though you know they’re not. It’s like an internal conversation goes on in your head trying to talk your eyes out of what it sees. No, it can’t be just a painting. Are you…
Why oh why this handsfree all-in-one sink/dryer is not a standard fixture in every single public restroom in the world? First you soap, then you wash your hands, then you dry them, all in the same damn place. Isn’t this logical? Add automatic doors—or just doors that easily open outwards, without using your hands—and humans…
One day, in three or four decades, we will have holodecks like those in Star Trek. But, until then, it looks like the Oculus Rift will be the place in which we will be able to realize all our fantasies, from space sims to alternate lives.
A pair of Chicago-based astronomers have some good news for you alien-hunters out there. Despite previous assumptions, geophysics tell us that large Earth-like exoplanets (a.k.a. super-Earths) likely have both oceans and exposed continents. That means more Earth-like climates, too. Northwestern’s Nicolas B. Cowan and University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot just presented a new theoretical model…
Digg found this video of a guy jumping on a frozen trampoline. Here’s the money shot in slow motion, but check out the full video to hear the noise: It’s a nice change from all the people recording themselves throwing pots of boiling water in the air. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff.…
Everybody knows that it’s cold as hell in the Midwest right now, but satellite images of the tundra are still a sight to behold. It’s amazing to see it like this, with any sign of civilization covered in snow. From NASA: NOAA’s GOES-East satellite captured a Midwestern wintertime “White Out” at 2015 UTC/3:15 p.m. EST…
We all have that friend—that friend who won’t even look at a slice of bread because they’re participating in the latest faux-hippie, fitness-addict trend, the Paleo diet. “Cavemen didn’t eat carbs so why should I?” they say. Well, they’re just plain wrong. Cavemen actually ate tons of carbs, according to new research from paleobiologists at…
The scene seems like a storm over a sea of lava somewhere in Mordor, but you are looking at the surface of a failed star—the weather on a brown dwarf based on new data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s spectacular. Even more so when you think that’s not water falling from the sky. Published…
Dubai set the world record for the largest fireworks show in history on January 1, 2014. We saw a sample—taken at the Burj Khalifa—but that was nothing compared to this HD video, which shows the full scope of this titanic explosion chain from the air and different locations. The fireworks took over the entire country.…
It may seem impossible at this point, but humans keep enhancing their ability to kill others using guns. Example: the new Advanced Ballistics Concepts’ new Mi-Bullet, a projectile that expands into four connected parts as soon as it’s fired. The mechanism—shown in the video—is very clever, making it very hard to miss a target. According…
You probably know that wind chill temperatures could reach a record -70F during the polar vortex sweeping the United States right now. But what exactly is wind chill and how do they calculate it? Here are some answers: According to Wikipedia, “wind chill is the perceived decrease in air temperature felt by the body on…
When the six-barreled electrically-powered Dillon Aero M134D Minigun fires, you can only see a terrifying blurry vomit of death coming out of it. In super-slow motion, however, this lethal machine looks fascinating. Especially when it’s only destroying an old car from a helicopter. While you watch RatedRR’s latest awesome demonstration, keep in mind that this…
Michael Henao is a lucky man. You can argue that he’s insane, sure. Perhaps an idiot too. What else would you call someone who encounters a flood and tries to cross it? But, ultimately, he’s a lucky insane idiot who survived a suicidal—and failed—stunt. In early September 2013, Colorado suffered severe damage from a historic…
Three years. That’s what it took Matt Perren to make the lip-sync video you can see above, a time-lapse in which he moved his mouth every day to match the phonemes from Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now, then took a photo. I don’t know if he is a genius or a mad kid, but I…
