Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
After centuries of medical science I thought doctors knew every single bit of the human body. Incredibly enough, ScienceDaily reports on the discovery of a new body element called the anterolateral ligament, which apparently has been hiding all this time in our knees. According to ScienceDaily “the Anatomical Society praised the research as very refreshing…
Because China lives in a world where they can build anything by yesterday, we often get to see a lot of architectural miscues and all around building hilariousness. This isn’t one of them. This one’s actually awesome. https://gizmodo.com/china-accidentally-built-an-apartment-complex-in-the-mi-1442963266 NEXT Architects has just won a competition to build this mobius strip-inspired bridge in Meixi Lake in…
Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft just called my attention over a public campaign to stop Japanese citizens from uploading photos of them doing impossibly stupid stuff to Twitter. This made me realize two very important things: 1. I really have to go to Japan soon. 2. The number of humans doing stupid things is exponentially proportional to…
The wonderful folks at The Art of the Title specialize in putting together compilation videos of, you guessed it, title sequences. They can be from movies, from specific directors, from film franchises and so on. In this one, they’re tackling the title design of video games. You can see just how much video game graphics…
Watch Pentatonix—a voice quintet from Arlington, Texas—singing an astonishing a cappella medley of Daft Punk’s hits, from their recent Get Lucky to their classic One More Time. It’s like a club sound system made of humans controlled by David Guetta.
The Make-A-Wish foundation is letting the oh so cute Miles, a five-year-old boy fighting leukemia, live out every little boy’s dream: to be Batman. Or I guess, Batkid. It’s going to be awesome. Miles isn’t just dressing up though, he’s going to save people and fight bad guys too. Even better, San Francisco is going…
Microsoft is using 3D cameras to detect and translate sign language to spoken language and vice versa—in real time. Watching this makes me want to have a Star Trek universal translator. https://gizmodo.com/kinect-has-gotten-super-good-at-reading-sign-language-816161462 Sounds like a cliché, but having travelled through the world, I’m convinced that destroying language communications barriers will be one of the keys…
A fast food restaurant chain discovered that Japanese women don’t like to eat big burgers because they are ashamed of opening their mouths wide. So they invented this clever paper holder to hide their mouths while stuffing their face like piggy men. Surprisingly, the invention was a huge success. The company claims that consumption of…
A clever design and ad campaign to raise money for Fondazione ANT, an Italian organization that provides free social assistance, healthcare and prevention against cancer. I kind of find La Gioconda more beautiful without the hair.
A group of University of Washington researchers is working on a completely new kind of spaceship that could make relatively fast interplanetary travel possible: a nuclear-fusion rocket that will shorten the time of a trip to Mars “from eight to nine months to less than three.” I hope it works in the short term. Humanity…
The Phillip Island House by Denton Corker Marshall is a beautiful home on a beautiful bay in an island off the coast of Melbourne. And it’s beautiful because you can’t really see it. The bay is the house. One of six buildings hiding in plain sight at Gizmodo. https://gizmodo.com/the-art-of-hiding-a-building-six-acts-of-architectural-1454259712
Today is the 120th anniversary of America’s real life Tony Stark: Raymond Loewy. Not only does he look the part but—like the movie character—he had a prodigious design mind. He shaped some of the most iconic machines and objects made in the 20th century, from cars to locomotives to even the Coke bottle. https://gizmodo.com/raymond-loewy-the-man-who-made-the-20th-century-beauti-1458724316
This image has all the new worlds discovered by Kepler. The total is now 3,538. The big balls are actually stars. The planets are the tiny black dots in front of them, shown to scale. It’s ridiculous. Ridiculous because it’s nothing: Scientists now estimate that one in five Sun-like stars have Earth-sized planets in habitable…
This terrifying two-plane crash somehow miraculously resulted in no fatalities. It’s insane that people could survive after two planes hit each other in mid-air. It’s almost impossible that everyone could survive from the fireball and ensuing chaos after the crash. But they did. Thank God. NBC News revealed that the crash was a result of…
It’s sort of unbelievable but these sculptures are all made from aluminum wire. When you look at the artwork up close, you can see each line of wire coming together to form the body of a human but when you’re looking from far away it totally looks like people frozen in carbonite. My Modern Met…
This picture from World War I seems to perfectly capture the chaos of war. There are soldiers marching forward, there are airplanes flying above, there are bombs, there are clouds of smoke. But it’s not ‘real’. It’s real in the sense that these things happened and that these things were photographed during WWI but the…
This ridiculously awesome man made version of Thor’s hammer Mjölnir is so impressive that even our most Thor-like human Chris Hemsworth would have trouble swinging it around. Though it’s not quite the weight of 300 billion elephants, it’s the closest thing to Mjölnir on Earth. That’s because it’s made from 10 separate pieces of steel…
Kids are just the best. And dads who love their kids make them even better. Leon is a boy who was born without fingers on one of his hands. Instead of making him think he was different, his father Paul McCarthy made him believe he was special. In fact, McCarthy made a prosthetic hand with…
Keiichi Matsuda is excited about this invention and I can’t blame him: A solid table that reproduces a virtual version of anything that you put under its sensors—in realtime. You can see how it reproduces the hands moving in the clip above, but there’s more: Created by Professor Hiroshi Ishii and his students at the…
In China, the air is so filthy and the smog is so crushing that beautiful blue skies can only exist when they’re shown on giant video screens. The picture was taken at Tiananmen Square by Feng Li for Getty and the fake blue sky against the backdrop of the real toxic air makes this so…
