Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Drop a glass, it breaks. Put a fan to a house of cards, it’ll get blown away. Prick a balloon, it pops. That’s what happens in real life. But not in Preposterous, a hilariously absurd short from Florent Porta where the total opposite impossibly happens in completely random scenarios. So now the ground shatters into…
As YouTube’s Sam and Niko discovered, mounting a small action camera, like a GoPro Hero5 Session, to an arrow isn’t terribly difficult. The hard part is finding a way to stabilize the spinning footage it captures so that you end up with these hypnotic first-person views of an arrow in flight. It’s doubtful a TV…
Damn. Mantis shrimp are crazy. They can strike prey as fast as a .22 caliber bullet, but this other stabbing technique some mantis shrimp use to kill is scary dark. The little critters hide their body up to their eyes in the sand as they wait for a fish to swim by. When a poor…
Here’s a really fantastic use of time, resources, and uh, creative freedom: get 100,000 firecrackers and light ‘em all up at the same dang time. The rattling explosions hit in such a way that it’s basically sounds like if you fired every weapon in the world at the same time. Plus, it looks incredible—like some…
One of the wildest things that happens in nature is caterpillars go to sleep one day and then transform into a damn butterfly after a month. I thought that as a kid, and I still think it now. Like, that’s the closest thing we’ve got to actual sorcery on Earth. But it’s just an egg…
Most countries scribble their borders around a map and call it a day. Everything inside those lines is forever known as that country; everything outside is not. Simple enough, right? Not when you mix in colonialism, wars, history, natural resources, the terrible whims of despots, and more. For any of these reasons, you end up…
Thanks to the new mini NES, we’re all wafting through fits of nostalgia for 8-bit graphics and classic Nintendo games. Jerry Liu loves this era so much, he decided to launch an art project dedicated to reliving our favorite game moments. Called Back to Bits, the project features whimsical gifs by more than 40 artists,…
Instead of sticking his camera’s lens in the eyepiece of a powerful telescope peering into the heavens, filmmaker Thomas Vanz captured this stunning footage of a giant star going all supernova by actually pointing his camera at a glass aquarium filled with colorful inks and water. His low-tech approach to simulating one of the universe’s…
A Japanese company called On-Art Corporation wants to build a Jurassic Park-like attraction called “Dino-A-Park.” But instead of spending billions of dollars trying to bring extinct creatures back to life, the company has instead created some of the most life-like and realistic dinosaur costumes you’ve ever seen. Recently revealed in Tokyo by the company’s CEO,…
Ready to feel anger and resentment towards your younger self for not taking better care of your Hot Wheels toys? Bruce Pascal has been collecting them since he was seven years old, and now that he’s all grown up his collection, with over 3,000 tiny cars in it, is worth well north of a million…
I have this really fussy can opener that I always forget how to use and for some reason, I’ve never bought a normal can opener to replace it. Or maybe I’ll just never replace it and use this neat spoon trick to crack open a can instead. Basically all you have to do is give…
This is cool. Emanuele Fornasier ran an electric current through various chemical solutions and recorded the reaction to reveal the formation of crystals. It’s like seeing the birth of a snowflake. The process definitely looks fantastic but in reality, it’s really, really slow. It can take hours or even days for the crystals to take…
What’s hiding under the sea? A lot. In this neat animation, Real Life Lore explored the depths of the ocean and details what you would run into at what level, and most of it is goddamn terrifying. Luckily for us puny humans, most of us can’t even get very far in the ocean to see…
It’s after a superhero discovers his powers and before that superhero faces off with the big bad guy that we get treated with a montage sequence showing our favorite superhero doing various good deeds all around the city while bystanders stand around and stare with their mouth agape. You know those scenes in superhero movies,…
Adding to the long list of things you never knew was a legitimate competitive sport, the Red Bull Street Style World Final recently took place in London, where athletes juggle soccer balls in impossibly amazing ways using any part of their body except their hands. Argentina’s Carlos Alberto managed to beat out Japan’s Kosuke Takahashi…
There’s nothing odd about this. There’s nothing surprising about it either. If you watch a very hot knife cut through a piece of styrofoam, it’s going to be exactly as satisfying as you’d think it’d be.. The styrofoam shrivels up after each cut and turns into this goo that looks more like a marshmallow than…
Seems like it’s been a while since we checked up on our favorite country via a sweeping nature video, so it’s good to know that, yup, Iceland is still the most visually stunningly place on Earth. The drone footage comes from the Highlands of Iceland, which are in the center of the beautiful island, and…
Going to space in real life is a lot of work, so let’s just take a journey with this compilation of movie scenes from A Trip to the Moon (1902) to The Martian (2015) and all the classics in between like Alien (1979), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972), and more. Going to space…
It is deeply satisfying—momentarily, anyway—to watch a bloated exercise ball filled with water explode as it hits the ground. It reminds me of something I watched recently, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Huh! Dropped from a height of roughly 150 feet, the bright pink ball produces quite a large wave of…
Slime mold is fascinating, because though it’s only a single cell organism with no brain, it somehow stretches its tentacle-like fingers in a coherent pattern in search for food. This time lapse footage speeds up the process of that goopy crawl (in reality it only moves a few centimeters a day), but you get to…
