Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Orchids are beautiful flowers—until you see one of them opening a pair of deadly arms and jaws to kill a butterfly who was just looking for some pollen to eat. That’s what the orchid mantis does, the “first known predator to lure prey by mimicking flowers.” Now, this process has been documented for the first…
Growing up sucks. Getting older is no fun. Having your body deteriorate to a shell of itself is embarrassing. But wrinkles and brittle bones are a fact of life. But why! PHD Comics and integrative Biologist Joao Pedro de Magalhaes explain in this nifty animated comic on what aging is and how we can use…
I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have much self control when it comes to awesome things that deserve to be purchased. Even if they don’t do anything I can’t help myself. See awesome, buy awesome. I assume the entire world operates like that too. So now I’m thinking about how many people…
Filed in things you now know are possible but should probably never try in your lifetime unless your life depended on it but maybe still shouldn’t: jump starting a dead car battery with an AK-47. Yes, you can do that. Watch these insane Iraqi soldiers use the metal of the AK-47 to bridge the two…
Everything I own, everything I will buy, every fiber of my body, everything in this world should be dipped into water paint. The hydrocoating process is popular in weapons and helmets but really deserves to be shmeared all over the world. We might have to come up with better designs but I never want to…
Amazon Prime Air’s drones are plagued with practical problems that would make them inviable in urban environments for the foreseeable future. What about Amazon Rockets? They’re only a bit more ludicrous. But seriously now, what Jeff Bezos should really do is build a delivery network made of supersonic pneumatic tubes connected to every home in…
December is the time to catch up on everything you missed out on the year before. Like movies. Maybe you didn’t realize so many watchable movies came out in 2013. Maybe you said you wanted to watch them in theaters. Maybe you said you wanted to watch them when they got out of theaters. Maybe…
There’s something about this video that fills me with terror more than any other shark clip I’ve ever seen. It’s not its monstrous looks, but the vision of it coming at you out of nowhere, accelerating until it engulfs your head with its jaws. The complete video is even worse. It’s terrifying to see this…
This has been around for some time, but this simple and entertaining space-time warping demonstration by Dan Burns is a must watch, even if you’re already familiar with these concepts. SPLOID is a new blog about awesome stuff. Join us in Facebook.
In an “incredible rare sighting” by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, NASA astronomers may have discovered two black holes entangled in a “death spiral.” According to Peter Eisenhardt at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena: At first we thought this galaxy’s unusual properties seen by WISE might mean it was forming new stars at a…
A new research paper published today in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that men and women’s brains connectivity is very different which, according to the authors, gives a “potential neural basis as to why men excel at certain tasks and women at others,” matching some commonly-held stereotypes. The study—one the largest of…
You may yawn “oh, it’s just another boring space station time-lapse movie—meh!” and don’t watch this video, but that would be a big mistake. This is, by far, the most breathtaking time-lapse from space I’ve ever seen. It even has a comet flying through. Goosebumps. David Peterson’s video—created from ISS mission photos—really captures the incredible…
Volvo has been first with many of the car safety inventions now in everyone’s cars, so it’s no surprise that they’re spearheading an effort to have street legal self-driving cars in Sweden by 2017. Hopefully it will all work perfectly and soon we will all be able to enjoy them.
Do you want to buy a house or a piece of Star Wars history? Would you like a Ferrari or the DL-44 Blaster that Harrison Ford used? A college education or a toy gun? The answer is obvious right? It’s Han Solo’s DL-44 Blaster every time. The blaster pistol made famous by Han Solo is…
Anyone with a smartphone knows how impossible it is to take pictures in the dark. At best you get a picture that looks like a pile of dark to darker grains of sand. Researchers, however, have come up with a better way. They’ve been able to take ‘ultra sharp images’ with little to no light.…
Things that usually spin really, really fast: a top, the wheel of fortune wheel, other wheels, circular objects, knobs and other things of that nature. Not a mountain! Well, unless you’re Superman and can fly around it. Newsflash: we’re not Superman. However! Kevin Parry and Andrea Nesbitt of Candy Glass Productions might be. They created…
Anyone trying to make a gingerbread house for the holidays this year can pretty much give up right now. Just eat everything instead because no matter what you do, you can’t possibly top the artistry of these gingerbread museums. Designed by Caitlin Levin and Henry Hargreaves for Dylan’s Candy Bar, they capture the world’s most…
The new World Trade Center is bland and boring by day but, when the night comes, if there’s a strong wind, it will scream like a demon, waking people up and sending a chill down everyone’s spine. I hope the people living around it stock up on ear plugs. Listen.
This is Kliuchevskoi, an active volcano on the Kamchatka Peninsula, photographed from an extremely oblique angle by astronauts onboard the International Space Station. We’re used to photos taken from space to be flat, 900 miles straight from the top shots. This one, however, is an extremely oblique angle shot,which makes the scenery look like a…
The Australian ABC News service has posted this video captured by a sea eagle. The bird stole a wildlife camera in a crocodile meat trap in the Margaret River, Western Australia, taking it on a 68-mile trip. The camera was found by aboriginal rangers weeks later, at a different river. Man, I never thought I…
