Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Do you know why a million people take a billion photos of the view from their airplane window? Because sometimes when the Sun hits just right or when the clouds start cotton candying so deliciously or when the grid of city lights shine the perfect shade you get something unbelievably beautiful. But no matter how…
Let’s face it. If you believe that Amazon can realize the awesomeness that is drone delivery, you should halfway fear a future of an overbearing police drone force monitoring us. That terrifying totalitarian future might not be as promising as Amazon’s vision for drones but what does that matter to an obsessive government? They’d just…
London-based designer and researcher Shamees Aden has a vision for the future of footwear. It’s a future where shoes are 3D printed out of synthetic biological material that responds to your every step and can regenerate overnight. She’s even made a prototype. Behold the Protocell sneaker. The shoes are customized for the wearers foot so…
It’s not exactly surprising but it’s always visually incredible how you can paint the world with data. Like this lovely map visualization. You can see the outline of continents take shape from just charting 19th century ship patterns. There are voids in the map, of course, but it’s impressively clear in so many parts too.…
It’s very rare to see clouds like these from this perspective. From space, all clouds appear flat most of the time, but NASA’s Aqua satellite got this beautiful angled shot on December 2. They look like ice cream clouds crowning a giant banana split over the Indonesian island of Flores. In a view from high…
You know, for all that “no one can hear you scream in space” crap, space sounds pretty bloody scary. Check out the sounds that Juno recoded as it was passing Earth to speed up on its way to Jupiter. https://gizmodo.com/first-video-ever-to-capture-the-moon-rotating-earth-is-1480576442 But while it sounds like screaming interdimensional demons, it’s actually Earth’s magnetosphere. The radio signals…
Pertamina—Indonesia’s state-owned oil and gas corporation—will have a new headquarters in Jakarta in 2020. One that looks like a smooth spaceship about to take off and generates electricity thanks to its design, created by American architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. According to the firm: The world’s first supertall tower for which energy is the primary…
Listen to Bill Nye’s letter to the President of the United States asking for $1.5 billion to support planetary exploration. He gives three excellent reasons. First, the potential discovery of alien life, which will change the course of human history. Second, the creation of new awesome technology, which will bring new businesses that can greatly…
Harvesting Christmas trees at insane speeds using a helicopter looks crazy from the ground and—as this video demonstrates—it’s mad from the pilot’s seat too. I still can’t understand 1) how they can make money using helicopters for the harvest and 2) how can they do it so fast. https://gizmodo.com/holy-crap-watch-this-mad-helicopter-pilot-harvesting-c-1480156519 SPLOID is a new blog about…
It’s amazing to see this group of wild goats escaping from a massive avalanche at the last second. And even more amazing to see the four who were left behind surviving it. It was recorded by a group of tourists at the refuge of Roc de la Pêche, in the Parc National de la Vanoise,…
Ice skating is great and all, but it’s downright magical if the ice is crystal clear. Youtuber Doc Martin got lucky with a crazy invisible lake of in Swan Lake, Montana. Don’t you wish you were skating on that right now? Whether water freezes wonderfully clear or all gross and cloudy all has to do…
According to NASA’s Juno principal investigator Scott Bolton “if Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise said, ‘Take us home, Scotty,’ this is what the crew would see.” It’s truly an incredible sequence—the first time ever that the Moon has been captured orbiting Earth. Bolton describes the video: “In the movie, you ride aboard Juno as…
Here’s the nuclear aircraft supercarrier USS Nimitz—the lead ship of its class—exhibiting a tiny fraction of its air power in a December 7 photograph taken over the Pacific Ocean. The US Navy has ten more of these nuclear titans, plus another ten carriers for amphibious assault. And then, here’s a brief list of the squadrons…
“Dinosaurs undoubtedly produced huge quantities of excrements”—starts this new research paper. There are many examples of petrified dino dung in museums, but not nearly as many as there should have been. In fact, we should we walking through mountains of Mesozoic manure—but cockroaches saved us from a world plastered with dinosaur turdcrust: Dinosaurs undoubtedly produced…
I never imagined ping pong balls were so extremely flammable but, as this video shows, only a few of them can cause a giant tower of fire several feet high. According to the YouTube found by Redditor ShlawsonSays,they are so flammable because they are celluloid, which burns really fast. And it seems that old ping…
Cool photo from Sandia National Laboratories of what appears to be some exotic plasma cannon to be installed in the first US star destroyer—until your dreams are destroyed when you read the caption: it’s a centrifuge “used to simulate gravity for re-entry situations.” According to Sandia National Labs, this testing is done in all kinds…
This video is crazy: Watch ace helicopter pilot Dan Clark demonstrating his incredible skills while harvesting Christmas trees at mad speeds. “Oregon helicopter pilot ruthlessly owning inertia,” saysRedditor coolmandan03. Indeed. It’s absolutely insane. Incidentally, did you know that “Oregon is the nation’s biggest producer and exporter of Christmas trees, selling about 7.3 million trees a…
You’re looking at Valkyrie Dome aka Dome Fuji, on the East Antarctic Plateau. Near these dark structures there is a ridge with hollows that can get down to minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit—minus 92 degrees Celsius. A team of NASA and US Geological Survey scientists have now officially declared this ridge The Coldest Place On Earth.…
You probably think you’re awesome. You are the most talented, you have the purest of hearts—everyone else sucks compared to you. You’re the betterest, period. Except you’re not. Esther Inglis-Arkell explains why you think this and why it will not change.
What will happen in the far, far away future? Watch “The Future of Our World, a small glimpse into a timeline of epic scale.” It is a classic slideshow but, since I know I will never see any of it, I just like to play it again from time to time. I kind of want…
