Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
With the lights on, John V. Muntean’s Lego creations look like something a five-year-old would build. “Look, mommy, it’s a horse!” But turn the lights off, shine a spotlight on these creations, and suddenly their real raison d’être is revealed; intricate shadow designs that change as each mass of Lego bricks is turned. This one…
The potential for millions of YouTube views either gives people superhuman abilities, superhuman courage, or superhuman stupidity. One of those three might explain why Flaviu Cernescu climbed to the top of this 840-feet tall abandoned chimney, hopped onto a unicycle, and rode around what appears to be a crumbling structure. Do we have to remind…
Campari—the bright red liquor best known as the start of the negroni—is delicious. But what the hell is it, exactly? The few people who know have kept the recipe a secret for well over a century. That didn’t stop master bartender Hiroyasu Kayama from trying to make his own. Although the company website hints that…
Did you know the words “male” and “female” aren’t actually related to each other? As in, there’s no “male” in “female.” The word male is derived from the Latin word masculus, while the word female comes from the French word femelle. It sounded close enough so we just made them both pronounced like male. Damn,…
Rubber bands can become colder than room temperature through sheer mechanical force. Stretching one heats it up (duh) but letting it contract cools it below its starting temperature. Let that weirdness sink in for a moment. Most people would leave that odd bit of science at “Woah…” and that would be that. But the folks…
Ever see the super strong, super light super material known as carbon fiber get squished like this? Once the hydraulic press hits it, the threads start coming undone, and it slowly disintegrates as the pressure becomes stronger and stronger. What’s pretty neat, though, is how the carbon fiber rod still stands up steady throughout and…
I love New York City. I live here, so I’m biased. You might hate New York, and think it sucks, and think it’s dirty, and think people who live in New York talk about New York way too damn much. That’s fine. You’re actually more right than you know. But even you should be able…
I mean, if we’re going to eventually get flying cars (we won’t ever get flying cars, you fools), we can technically fly them in any goddamn direction we want, right?Which means, why the hell not flip the car upside down and fly around New York with the road as your roof and the sky as…
McDonald’s food is already pretty unappealing, but as a lifetime of internet consumption has taught me, the moral bottom is limitless. Here are the most repulsive secondary preparations for food ostensibly cooked by a 53-year-old clown. 1. Juicer Running burgers, fries, and soda through a juicer is bad. The dry matter coming out of one…
Even if you didn’t see Suicide Squad and somehow escaped the reviews of it and, like, also didn’t hear the horror stories about Jared Leto’s Joker, you’d already know that it would never have topped Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight anyway. Not only is Ledger’s Joker an iconic performance, his character was also…
Sometimes failure isn’t always a bad thing. This 19-foot tall domino tower was only ten layers away from officially becoming the second tallest in the world—but then gravity claimed yet another victim. As heartbreaking it is to see all this hard work go to waste, it’s also pretty cool to watch 241 layers of dominoes,…
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the company of drummers, and every last one has been a little bit weird. That level of independent limb coordination must do something to your neural circuitry. Some of them hide their strangeness… unless they get to talking about “room tone.” Then they start describing sounds as…
For a brief moment there, nothing happens. A Big Mac gets drenched in sulfuric acid, and it just kind of looks exactly the same. And then it starts getting gross. The bun is the first to go, turning into this dark, putrid color and losing its pillowy texture. Let’s Melt This, the geniuses behind this…
We’ve all had the occasional shopping cart fender bender while coming around a blind corner at the end of an aisle. But here’s what would happen if you were trying to speed through a grocery store at 72 miles per hour, got distracted by a free sample, and then slammed your cart head-on into a…
Sure, it may look like the seagull is playing along with the man hiding the food under three cups in an attempt to trick the bird but know this: seagulls are motherfuckers who don’t care about you or silly games. It is not playing along. It is in complete control. The bird is only pretending…
The making of a record isn’t exactly a big mystery but there’s still a bit of old magic in seeing music get put to wax in a factory where the metal gets etched and the vinyl gets stamped out. Super Deluxe took its stoned mode camera into one of these vinyl stamping factories and recorded…
Obviously, in order to answer this super-silly thought exercise, you’d have to make it a little bit more manageable to calculate. That means in this scenario, the Earth is perfectly round, has the same density all throughout, and won’t, like, scorch your bum when you fall through the core. Life Noggin explains the math behind…
Even a massive cargo ship can sometimes be no match for the massive storms brewing on the world’s oceans. But when you add hundreds of thousands of tons of cargo into the mix, the last place you want to find yourself is on deck when cargo starts spilling overboard. Unless you’re this guy, who not…
Some things, like cooking or watching terrible movies, are best enjoyed in the company of a significant other—or casual sexual acquaintance, no judgements here. Personally, climbing over 2,000 feet up to a rickety crane overlooking Tianjin, China doesn’t seem like a romantic activity so much as a way for both people to plummet to their…
Remember your high school wood shop teacher’s non-stop litany about safety? Here’s a real-life example of why you shouldn’t goof off with power tools. Taking a break from smooshing stuff, the folks behind those hydraulic press videos attached a bicycle brake to a lathe to see if they could bring it to a grinding stop.…
