Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Much like the venerable technology of the floppy drive, Europe’s hair metal classic “The Final Countdown” just won’t die. After floating into laughable obscurity, the synth-heavy anthem was reborn when a magician named Gob made it his theme song. Now, hobbyist Paweł Zadrożniak has fed the tune through the hardware harmonics of his “Floppotron.” We’ve…
Here’s a thought exercise that starts getting kind of gross the deeper you dive into it: what if the entire world’s population lived in one city? What would that city look like? How big would the city be? Or how small can you pack it? Is it even possible? RealLifeLore says that you can fit…
It’s been three meth-less years since Breaking Bad ended. That’s way too damn long without the good stuff of Heisenberg. So to celebrate the three-year anniversary of the show, Nerdwriter decided to take a closer look at its best episode: Ozymandias, the third to last episode in the series where everything Walter White worked for…
Who knew a crappy T-rex costume we once all dumped on would turn out to be one of the best things to happen to the internet? In this video Mark Gomez dons the inflatable dino suit and thrashes a jetski around a lake. The fact that he can still perform mid-air twists and flips without…
There are a lot of logistical problems that pop up when you build a 600-foot structure like the Three Gorges Dam in China’s Hubei province. For example, how do ships navigate the sudden extreme difference in water heights on either side of the dam? That’s an easy one. You just build the world’s largest elevator…
Chemistry sure is a pretty science, especially in macro. Just check out the stunning crystallization process of things like potassium chromate, sodium chloride, ammonium chloride, and more. Each one is totally unique and packs its own flair, you don’t know how it’s going to end up until it’s finished. The colors, the structure, the wild…
Most of us can only imagine what it was like in the early 2010s, when visual content was still primarily consumed via plastic video discs, but one lucky urban explorer got to experience it firsthand when he discovered a deserted but otherwise intact Blockbuster store in south Texas. Incredibly, YouTube user RubarGar _ found the…
The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t officially recognize this enormous inflatable city of fun as the world’s largest bounce house, but when was the last time you were at a birthday party and saw one of these as big as a McMansion? Not only does it look larger than most homes, you can apparently…
We’ve all fibbed a little when it comes to our resumes or during a job interview. But apparently ‘knowing how to expertly back a truck full of metal pipes onto a floating barge’ isn’t something you’re going to want to just try and fake on your first day of work. There’s a really good chance…
Sony has a long history of dumping tons of money into spectacularly over-the-top commercials for its Bravia line of TVs. This time around it packed an abandoned casino in Romania full of glitter-filled balloons that were then popped to create a shimmering explosion of color. Will the ad actually help sell Sony’s 4K TVs that…
Turns out, dropping a giant concrete block onto a car ends exactly like how you would imagine it would: the car gets completely obliterated and smashed to smithereens. Crash Zone pulled off this incredibly silly stunt and filmed it in slow motion so you can see the damage in lovely, exacting detail. The concrete block…
Tilt-shift lenses can make whole cities look like desktop miniatures through some amazing optical trickery. Unfortunately, we don’t have any of them up in space, but it hasn’t stopped some cosmic creatives from trying to mimic the effect on photos taken by NASA, ESO, and other space research groups. A collection of these excellently doctored…
The music video for Lorn’s song Anvil doubles as a short animation about the future where the year is 2100 and overpopulation is dealt with a mandatory postmortem social network. That is, a social network where people are forced to plug in and die. Yeah, it’s a wee bit dark. The animation style is wonderful…
Video game characters have it easy: they never have to change clothes. Whether they’re saving the world or just catching Pokemon, our heroes—Master Chief, Link, Mario, Samus Aran—are always wearing the same damn thing. But their outfits aren’t always cheap. Master Chief’s get up can cost over a 100 million dollars. Even Link’s elf get…
New York City basically already looks like a living, breathing movie set in real life but this surreal video transforms the city completely by turning the buildings into fake facades that don’t actually house anything. Claire & Max gave the busy streets of New York an eerie sense of calm in the video by stripping…
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, even within the realm of professional chefs, is an absolute madman. Even his midnight snacks are more involved than most people’s date-night dinners. Behold his latest creation: Ribby McRibface. Ribby McRibface, unlike the standard McRib, is technically available any time. Yet a vast gulf lies between “available” and “realistically attainable.” Everything except…
Malaria is a horrifying disease. It explodes your cells and wears their skins as camouflage so it can more effectively burst more cells. The disease kills over a million people every year—but as Kurzgesagt explains, our best bet to eradicate malaria is by building a new mosquito. Mosquitos are excellent vehicles for disease. (They were…
The velvet ant (a.k.a. cow killer) has one of the most painful stings of any insect. And that’s just one of the ways they’re absolutely horrible little creatures. Many species of velvet ant start life as parasites attached the eggs of other insects, because if you’re going to be a jerk, 110 percent is the…
Unimpressed with the flashlights sold at your local outdoors store? Need to be able to spot bears at night from five miles away on your next camping trip? Just do what YouTube hacker Samm Sheperd did and build your own using eight 100-watt LED chips that produce somewhere around 72,000 lumens. For comparison, the digital…
Sure, maybe I’ve thought about doing something like this before while peering over a hotel balcony and staring at the pool on the ground level. And yeah, maybe I’ve considered it as a potential escape strategy for the times in the future that I would be chased by some world class assassin. But no way…
