Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Dylan Jones came up with a hugely inventive skate trick where he’s able to get his board to 360 degrees horizontally around a rail. Enthusiasts online are likening the new trick to the bizarre stunts pulled off by skateboarding greats like Rodney Mullen and Gou Miyagi. It hurts my brain to think about. But every…
You forgot to buy milk. Naturally, it’s all the big bang’s fault. Cheeky video essayist exurb1a uses human forgetfulness to explain the concept of determinism. Essentially, it’s the idea that because the universe and everything in it follows rules, we all exist in a highly complicated chain reaction that governs everything from the movement of…
Climb aboard kids—it’s time to tune in, drop out, and have your mind expanded. The Acid Interstate is the third and (so far) grandest attempt at a hallucinatory on-rails experience from Mincrafter MiningGodBruce. It took him a year to build this swirling landscape and 250 hours to record. Pay attention to the pylons along the…
After creating a near-perfect functional replica of Captain America’s iconic shield, YouTube personality the Hacksmith is trying to build his own flying Iron Man suit. To test a couple of compact jet engines the suit will rely on, he strapped them to his waist, hopped on a longboard, and lived every 10-year-old’s wildest fantasy. In…
Okay, it’s probably hell if you actually tried it. Alex Gorosh visited 13 museums in London, saw more than 140,000 works of art, and walked more than 22 miles in one day in an attempt to see all the art there is to see in London. He didn’t even see more than 1 percent of…
If you try hard and believe in yourself, anything can be a knife—but turning rebar into a legit-as-hell kunai is a fresh take. Rebar is that tempered steel often seen holding together concrete structures. Sometimes it’s in mesh form but more commonly rebar comes as a long braided-looking pole. Besides creating a beautiful pattern in…
If you look closely at a map, you’re bound to find some really weird shit. Countries you never knew existed pop up, bodies of water reveal themselves, and the borders of countries look totally random. What’s more random about those borders is when they have weird panhandles or salients, basically appendages of land that have…
There’s no end to the impressive stuff handy YouTubers will make out of wood, metal, and plastic. Peter Brown, however, favors unorthodox building materials. Crayons, he’s found, are a reasonable substitute for clay. In lieu of plastic, he’s turned hardened milk on a lathe with less successful results. (He tells us he subsequently had set…
Sure, some random objects like a frying pan and a shovel make some sort of sense to use as a ping pong paddle replacement. But an iron? A kitchen knife? A wooden spoon? A rolling pin? Just watch these two dudes get wild with their paddle ideas. Even though they’re doing it as a goofy…
As arguably the world’s most active volcano, Hawaii’s Kīlauea presents a unique opportunity for researchers who want to observe the Earth’s geologic processes in real-time. Even more importantly, as a goddamn erupting volcano, footage of Kīlauea is gnarly as fuck. This week, the United States Geological Survey demonstrated that gnarliness by sharing over 10 minutes…
Of all the movie presidents—not fictional presidents like Morgan Freeman’s President Tom Beck in Deep Impact, but rather, actors’ portrayals of real presidents—which one did his best? To help you decide, Candice Drouet put together a quick video showing actors playing presidents, including Robin Williams as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Kevin Spacey as Richard Nixon, Jon…
I mean, the animator in the gif above changes his shirt at least four times before he’s able to make the Ninja Monkey doll walk, like, a couple of steps. That’s a lot of time spent animating the most basic of motions lasting just seconds. Imagine all the elbow grease that goes into the more…
Using a super-absorbing chemical compound called sodium polyacrylate, you can turn boring old H2O into a magical blob-like substance. There’s a lot of fun you can have with these water beads, including deep frying them, but watching them turn invisible when submerged is easily the best trick. Self-billed chemist and science enthusiast Andres Tretiakov posted…
Here’s an excellent re-imagination of two of the most famous depictions of artificial intelligence in film, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Samantha from Her. Tillmann Ohm stitched together the actual dialogue from the films to construct a new conversation between the two. It flows rather well. Of course, HAL is still a…
Time-lapse footage has the power to turn mundane things into the most fascinating video you’ve ever seen. Aside from making sure you don’t step in it, you’d probably barely notice ice cream melting on the sidewalk. But when the hours long process is sped up so it takes just a few seconds, you’re left with…
Pro tip to cyclists: sailing through the air horizontally while gripping your handlebars for dear life is the most efficient way downhill. While this is 100 percent an ad for a fixie bike company, it appears to be both real, dangerous, and hugely effective. Just look at how this daredevil pulls ahead of everyone else!…
You don’t need a million dollar Steinway piano to put on a captivating musical performance. You don’t even need a real piano, as Sami Elu proves, by hacking together recycled instruments, materials you’d find at a hardware store, and a bunch of unused chopsticks. Does his Frankenstein’s monster instrument sound like anything you’ve ever heard…
None of us will probably ever make it to the red planet but if you want to get a feel for what Mars would sound like (or hear what it’s like from inside an airlock), saddle up with this video from Cody’s Lab. He drops a camera inside a vacuum chamber and then turns down…
Fun fact: Jason Statham has kicked more people than he has punched people in his movies. I’m glad that information occupies a part of my brain, and I’m so glad that I can share that with you so that it’ll take up a wrinkle in your brain now too. Burger Fiction shows all the kicks…
Aluminum started as one of the world’s most expensive materials because it was difficult to refine—even though it made up 8 percent of the world’s crust. But eventually aluminum became one of the cheapest materials after methods of mass producing it were invented in the 1880s. It went from $1200 per kilogram down to a…
