Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
We’ve seen skydiving aerobatics performed inside a wind tunnel before, but Jeffrey Provenzano and Amy Chmelecki of Red Bull’s “Air Force” take it to the next level using flight suits upgraded with glowing LEDs, and photography tricks that create trails of light following their graceful movements. [YouTube via The Awesomer]
Danny MacAskill does things on a mountain bike that even physicists, who know more about the laws of the universe than anyone, would probably assume is impossible. The Scottish country side serves as the gorgeous backdrop for this video of Danny just being amazing on two wheels. But you probably won’t even notice the scenery.…
There’s a whole taxonomy of people on any given street who want something from you: the clipboard activists, the donation fund folks who are too aggressive, the lady selling bad art, the creepy free massage guys. And then there’s the humble sign spinner, the platonic ideal of mild inconvenience. It should come as no surprise…
These aren’t renderings, special effects, or a scene from No Man’s Sky. This is actual footage of the Earth and the Moon, as seen by Japan’s Kaguya spacecraft in October 2008. Shot with a pair of 2.2 megapixel HDTV sensors, it’s some of the first HD footage of our nearest neighbor that humans ever captured.…
Until I watched this video, I had no idea about the potential healing power of watching someone climb and then methodically chop down a huge tree, all set to dramatic music. The precision of the cuts in the tree to make the log fall exactly where it should, the subtle thump of the tree hitting…
The ocean’s already fraught with danger, the last thing you need while swimming is a massive humpback whale deciding it wants to leap out of the water a few feet from where you’re treading water. But that’s exactly what happened to Australian photographer Beau Pilgrim, who fortunately got the whole thing on video. To put…
Old bridges never die, they just cross over to the other side. After almost a century of service, the Broadway Bridge in Little Rock, Arkansas, was deemed “structurally deficient” and condemned to death by explosion on Tuesday. As the video below demonstrates, however, the bridge itself clearly had other ideas: According to CBS News, it…
There’s a fascinating backstory about the building that is now the National Audiovisual Conservation Center, which is where the Library of Congress stores all 6.3 million pieces of the library’s movie, television, and sound collection. It used to be a nuclear bunker that stored $4 billion during the Cold War. Now, it’s a one-stop shop…
The New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room is one of the most majestic spaces in the city. Unfortunately it’s been closed for repairs for two years after an ornamental plaster rosette fell from the ceiling. But after fixing that, reinforcing the other 900 rosettes with steel cables, and restoring the ceiling, the beautiful…
In pursuit of the ancient quest for ultimate power, men of legend have bent rivers, slain dragons, even challenged the gods themselves. More recently, similar heroes have thrown on a jockstrap and made videos like this: According to its description, the video shows “anabolic acrobat” Jon Call “web pressing” 225 pounds. According to me, that’s…
Here’s a really cool music video that uses 3D printing, stop-motion animation, and projection mapping to make a model come alive to sing a song. It’s a especially trippy, because it’s like seeing a statue start talking out of nowhere. The whole video for the song Magnetic by Dan Sultan took two months to get…
The Airbus A380 is an amazingly ginormous airplane that can fit over 600 people inside. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner tops out at around 300. But bigger isn’t better. The smaller Boeing 787 Dreamliner is used more by airlines across the world. In fact, the Boeing has 1,200 orders for the 787 Dreamliner, while Airbus has…
Last month, a grown man in fluffy Pikachu jammies performed a manic routine from Hell on Russian state-controlled Channel 1, complete with Pokébabes and Pokéhunks dancing with giant prop iPhones, half-twerking and bouncing about on blow-up Pokéballs. This Kawaii Carnaval horrorshow was performed by renowned Russian pop and opera-pop star Nikolay Baskov at the big…
The new plastic polymer £5 notes are bonkers. They can’t be crumpled, are extremely hard (though not impossible) to burn, and some wonky stuff happens if you shine a laser through the queen’s face. By far the strangest revelation about this Money Of The Future? The £5 can be used as a rudimentary record player…
Think you can pull off burnouts, drifts, and breath-taking jumps in your sedan just because you’ve seen all the Fast and Furious films? Being a stunt driver takes years of practice and the right equipment—and you probably have neither. But it turns you can get a similar experience by just slapping a GoPro on a…
Movies are supposed to make you feel something. The best ones can deliver scenes that make you feel all sorts of emotions through the fiction. CineFix cooked up a list of 10 of the most emotional movie scenes of all time—but really, it’s a dive that goes so much deeper than that, because it takes…
Some fruits and vegetables blow up better than others. A pineapple? Looks fantastic because it sends shards everywhere. An onion? Hell yeah, the unraveling of layers is awesome. A cucumber explosion? Just okay because it gets blown to bits too quickly. Lemons are a little disappointing, too, because you’d expect a better shockwave reaction from…
Malls were great in the 80’s. Or so I hear. Big clothes. Even bigger hair. Comic book stores, record shops, arcades, and movie theaters. And a bunch of bored folks goofing around indoors because there was nothing else to do. Ah, what a carefree life those youths lived. This short animation, Mall 84 by Gervais…
Yeah, he just did that. This fearless snake whisperer released 285 snakes back into the wild by dumping out a bag full of them and then rubbing the snakes on the ground to make them all slither away. It’s so gross looking because they just start shooting off in every direction, and absolutely frightening because…
Circles. Triangles. Squares. Those aren’t the things you expect to see in a movie but films have been using shapes to subtly influence emotion for a long time. Circles are lovable, triangles are evil, and squares are boring. Now You See It highlights the geometry used in shots to show you how movies use shapes…
