Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Bacteriology and toxicology researchers have found volumes infected with herpes and traces of cocaine in all the copies of Fifty Shades of Grey at a public library. According to these experts, modern drugs tests will be able to detect traces of coke from the books in your body after reading them. The herpes virus was…
If you find calories hard to visualize, check out this great visual food index that show what 200 calories look like. I’m surprised at the tiny amount of canned peas that it takes to make two glasses of Coca-Cola.
Not only is Namibia a magnificent place, but it’s also pretty pretty surreal. Check out the houses in the village of Kolmanskop, abandoned by old German diamond miners and taken by the desert in a hundred years. https://gizmodo.com/its-hard-to-believe-that-this-is-in-our-planet-1464768492 https://gizmodo.com/colorful-desert-ruins-consumed-by-waves-of-sand-1466602523
Check out this great photograph by Paul Davis of the awesome sculpture by David McCracken on the beach of Bondi, Australia. Called Diminish and Ascend, this aluminum staircase seems to go to infinity and beyond. McCracken deformed the staircase’s structure to create the optical illusion, which works from other angles too. Image by William Patino.…
Flying is fun. Here’s a Turkish F-16 diving and rolling while firing flares.
Talking at a US Army demonstration of autonomous weaponized robots at Fort Benning, Georgia, experts said that “ten years from now, there will probably be one soldier for every 10 robots. Each soldier could have one or five robots flanking him, looking for enemies, scanning for land mines.” Those are the words of Scott Hartley,…
You’re not about to create the Iron Throne from the swords of your defeated enemies so why not play it a little safer by making one with a plastic garden chair and a can of spray paint? Seriously, this garden chair throne is almost as good as the one in Game of Thrones. Instructables user…
Kids will believe anything so why not let them imagine and wonder and dream and believe in magic? We all have to become semi-responsible, half functioning adults some day so let kids be kids, right? Refe Tuma and his wife certainly think so. Every November, Refe and his wife try and convince their kids that…
What you’re looking at is a cat lung being blown up with a straw. I know. It’s ginormous. More ginormous than what you would think is inside a cat. But that’s because lungs are incredibly expandable. What looks like a pile of bloody meat inflates into this perfectly pink balloon. Morphology explains: Here, a set…
A sinkhole the size of twenty football fields swallowing trees and swamps—like the one that evacuated Bayou Corne, Louisiana, a year ago—is already terrifying. But what’s more scary might be what’s happening now: the danger of an exploding sinkhole that will look like the gates of hell. The sinkhole is currently burping up natural gases…
Mike Hankey has captured this extraordinary photo of the comet ISON, which is experiencing some surprising activity as it approaches the Sun. It’s so perfect it seems unreal. ISON was discovered only a year ago and it’s now observable in the night sky. Hankey took this photo with a 60 second exposure. According to Pablo…
Today is the anniversary of the first and only launch of Buran, the Soviet space shuttle that was arguably better than the American original. The Russian space agency—Roscosmos—has published this video, showing the launch and return to Earth. The return was actually a remarkable achievement: Buran’s first flight was completely automated, from liftoff to landing,…
Beautiful work by Zaha Hadid for the $1-billion Iraqi parliament. When is someone going to ask her to design an entire city? https://gizmodo.com/1-billion-iraqi-parliament-will-rise-over-saddams-hal-1465171177
By now you’ve probably heard of BatKid—the alter-ego of five-year-old Miles, a super kid fighting leukemia. He’s on a mission today, courtesy of Make-A-Wish, saving San Francisco from the Riddler and Penguin. Watch it unfold live, right here. The plan to transform San Francisco into Gotham has been unfolding since October, with San Francisco’s police…
NASA says this is “the best ever image of the Antennae Galaxies.” The fact is that new photograph is the best ever image of a galactic collision I’ve ever seen. The detail obtained by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3—installed during a risky shuttle repair mission in 2009—is simply stunning. Zoooooom in! https://gizmodo.com/hubble-repair-mission-more-risky-than-you-would-ever-im-5046276 This new image…
The Mount Sinabung in Sumatra, in western Indonesia, erupted on November 11. It was a mild eruption but it just went into absolutely insane mode yesterday—as these images show. It’s four* miles high. According to the Jakarta Post, the eruption has already caused the evacuation of thousands of people: The pyroclastic flow of hot volcanic…
To the right: the necrotized ear of a 22-year-old dutch woman who just came from vacation in Italy. To the left: the common spider who liquefied its flesh and cartilague with one bite, a Mediterranean brown recluse. I thought these kind of things only happened in exotic countries but this bastard is everywhere, including the…
There’s no better way to start a Friday than watching some of the amazing animations from Dark Universe—the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden planetarium show. Bonus: Neil deGrasse Tyson reads a poem. https://amnh.kinja.com/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer-with-neil-tyson-1464452745
This is hilarious. Imagine shopping inside IKEA and hopping inside one of those strategically decorated rooms where every single thing has a price tag and playing with the faucet and looking at all the weird Swedish names and then… realizing you have no idea how to get out. That’s because you’ve just been pranked. There’s…
Though it may look like a deer, though it may move like a deer and though it may even smell like a deer… it still might just be a robotic deer that officials use to catch illegal deer hunters. Like the robot deer above, who totally looks like a normal deer but actually got a…
