Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Lego’s Star Wars constructions kits are legendary. Even though the company has dozens of cool kits based on popular movies, there’s still nothing like seeing your favorite Star Wars characters miniaturized and given the proper Lego treatment. YouTube user Bar Van Dijkwent went a step further. He built the new Lego Death Star (Item #75159…
For practical purposes, the metal Cesium can be found in spacecraft propellant, radiation devices that treat cancer and atomic clocks. For impractical purposes, it reshapes itself and explodes in the most beautiful and unpredictable ways. Cesium (also spelled Caesium) is one of the most extreme elements on the periodic table—depending on how you’re measuring, it’s…
The simple and obvious answer: they come from the Romans. But the whole story on how the months of the year got their names is a little bit more interesting and includes bits about how the calendar first started in March, how they just started naming months after numbers after June, how there were month-less…
These daredevil dudes are total pros, so they aren’t fazed at all when one of their guys gets his wingsuit caught on the wheel of an airplane. But holy shit, can you imagine yourself in that holy horror show? You just jumped out of a damn airplane and instead of plummeting to the ground (the…
Nuclear weapons are already scary enough, but when you dig deeper and find out how powerful the weapons truly are, they get even more terrifying. The weapons we’ve built after the first atomic bombs are so strong that you can basically use Hiroshima as a unit of measurement. The largest nuclear explosion in human history,…
Peering at the world through a close-up macro lens reveals tiny details that normally go unnoticed. It can also make the smallest of things appear completely grandiose. Steel wool and a battery makes for an easy way to start a fire, but zoom in as it burns and it looks like the entire world has…
The Hurricane Hunters from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are perhaps the ballsiest pilots on this terrifying and vengeful planet. For the last few days they’ve been flying recon missions into Matthew—the category 3 hurricane that’s going to kill all of our children—to collect data, and post some incredible videos to Twitter. Unsurprisingly, the…
So how does somebody even win a Nobel Peace Prize? Ted-Ed delves into the history of the award (how it is one of the five prizes created by Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite), the nomination process (a bunch of people can nominate somebody including past laureates, university professors, member of governments, and others), and…
It’s a bird? It’s a… wait, yeah, it’s a plane. But the only reason you’d know that there’s a plane flying above you is because you randomly pointed your ridiculously powerful 200x zoom camera towards the sky and managed to spot an airplane flying through. The zoom is so strong that you know exactly what…
I enjoyed this portrait of pop-up book artist Matthew Reinhart because, well, pop-up books are awesome and will never stop being amazing no matter how old I am, or how far technology advances. But also because he explains the technical aspects that go into making a pop-up book, like the v-folds he uses to make…
Sonic is supposed to be fast. In fact, as an otherwise nebulous, frequently-rebooted character, that’s really all that can be said about… unless you grew up in Europe, where that was never the case to begin with. In early games Sonic’s land speed was markedly slower abroad, and it’s all due to differences between PAL…
YouTube’s The Slow Mo Guys have turned some of life’s most mundane happenings into amazing footage using their high-speed cameras. But capturing an underwater explosion at a blistering 120,000 frames per second lets us see the rapidly expanding initial blast that then collapses into a white hot ball of ‘let’s watch that again and again!’…
Have you ever wondered why Americans and Brits spell English differently? How are colour and color the same word? Centre and center? What’s up with that? It’s all thanks to Noah Webster (yeah, the Webster of Merriam-Webster). When America gained independence, Webster wanted to simplify unreasonable spellings that were handed down from the British. Webster…
Gallium is one of those rare metals that turns to a liquid somewhere above room temperature, allowing you to do fun experiments—like pouring it onto a vibrating speaker while playing music—without risking severe burns. Point a camera at the results and that fun science experiment suddenly feels like you’ve discovered a distant alien world bubbling…
The 75-story Sulafa Tower skyscraper in the Dubai Marina is so tall that it’s essentially above the clouds. So this guy is not just BASE jumping off a super high balcony, he’s also jumping straight into a cloud of fog below. That thick blanket of mystery basically covers the world, hiding everything that’s underneath it…
Man, this Costa’s hummingbird legitimately looks like it has a shiny purple baby octopus attached to its face like the facehugger in Alien. I mean, look at how wacky it looks, it almost seems as if the octopus was digitally slapped onto the face. But it’s not. It looks that way because male Costa’s hummingbirds…
You know what’s nice? Seeing someone work hard at, and eventually accomplish a goal, even if that goal is something as semi-useless as popping a 100-meter wheelie on a bike. For that reason, Mike Boyd is the human embodiment of motivational clams guy. Not only does he spend a lot of this video falling off…
Featuring sneakers in movies is a fun way to blend fiction and reality and adds another layer of geekery to any film (what are those?). But the best movie sneakers either give them a personality of their own, like the Nike Mags in Back to the Future or the Reebok Alien Stompers in Aliens. Or…
These traditional Chinese Suomian noodles have been made in Nanshan Village for over 300 years, and supposedly there are only 300 people left in the world who know how to make them. That’s because the process of making these noodles is a little bit more unique than making your typical noodles—it can sometimes look more…
Anything looks cooler in macro. Setting stuff on fire with a blowtorch is rad, for obvious reasons. And even in death, the humble crayon manages to fill us with child-like joy. Namaste.
