Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Air hockey is Canada’s greatest pastime. Okay—that’s not exactly true, but who the hell doesn’t love a game of air hockey? The low-pitch buzzing of the table’s fan, the constant thwack of the puck bouncing off the boards, the excitement you get when you score: It all brings back some of my fondest memory at…
Artists David Bayo’s skills are all the more impressive when you lean it to get a closer look at his work. Instead of carefully applied brush strokes, he creates lifelike portraits by laying down dots, millions of them, in a painstaking process that required over 90 hours of work for this simple black and white…
The sound of a leaky faucet drives most of us batty. Pi Bennett heard the faucet dripping onto a baking sheet and was inspired to go out all and turn it into a song, with video to match. Glasses, plates, pot lids, balloons—clearly, there’s more musical potential in the kitchen sink than we thought.
All those old games that people used to play? They’re still a lot of fun. Kids today can have their Overwatch and their Pokemon Go, just give me the simple complexity of a Centipede or a Frogger or an Asteroids and I’ll always be happy. They’ll never get old. Stop-motion animation masters PES made an…
Am I going to watch that new Bourne movie? I don’t know, probably not. Are you? You probably don’t need to, because the coolest part of the movie isn’t actually in the movie—it’s this behind the scenes footage showing the filming of a car chase. The B-roll footage shows how the arm of the chase…
Every year around the Fourth of July the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission puts on a graphic demonstration of why you should be really careful when setting off fireworks. The video of the demo arrived a little late this year, but if you’re a fan of horror movies, it was still totally worth the wait.…
If it looks like a roof and it’s sloped downward like a roof, it should act like a damn roof and have stuff freaking slide off it, right? Not when it comes to Kokichi Sugihara’s “Impossible Rooftop.” Even if you place a ball on top of this model house’s roof, it won’t roll off. Instead,…
Sean MacCormac is just like you and me. He puts his (probably very expensive custom sportswear) pants on one leg at a time, then straps a snowboard to his feet, cinches a parachute to his back, and leaps headlong out of a plane and directly into a thunderstorm above Florida. Whatever! What’s so special about…
Check out this a microburst near Phoenix, AZ, sas hot from Phoenix Sky Harbor international airport. According to Bryan Snider, the photographer who captured this terrorstorm sweeping across the rapidly-darkening Arizona sky, there was flash flooding in the area. Oh yeah, and lightning, high winds, and hail. Fucking weather, man.
A spacecraft parked in orbit at a distance of one million miles has captured the mother of all timelapse videos—an entire year on Earth. Enjoy. The EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite has now recorded a full year of life on Earth from its position at Lagrange point 1, a sweet orbital spot a million…
What movie scene scared you the most when you first watched it? Was it something embarrassing? Or is it something you’re still scared of, and if you see anything resembling it in real life, you completely freak out? CineFix lists what it thinks are the seven scariest movie scenes in film history and analyzes the…
What could possibly be the reason for an engraving machine to make these noises? Do spacey-sounding arpeggios make it engrave better? Does it support MIDI? If you know anything about the fine art of engraving, do please enlighten us. [Digg Video]
Keven McAlester’s short film which compares Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill in the 1940s to today using perfectly synced footage is the closest thing we can get to experiencing legitimate time travel. In 1959, shortly after the black-and-white footage on the left was filmed, Bunker Hill was the focus of an ambitious urban-renewal project, which is…
Bigger is always better, but you can make anything even awesomer with the addition of fire. That’s what Kevin Kohler, the Backyard Scientist, did with one of those vortex air cannon toys. He not only built one ten times larger, he also uses it to blast rings of propane gas towards an open flame to…
Apparently, some elephants are as intelligent as an eight-year-old child. This and other sometimes-depressing, sometimes-inspiring facts are in the latest hilarious Casually Explained video on the spectrum of intelligence. It covers the range of “little robots” that respond to stimuli all the way up to people (not any of us, sadly) who can rewrite any…
When you combine an unhappy group of people with a leader who is more than willing to feed and exploit their fear with wild speeches and rhetoric, things can go bad. When people in business and intellectuals want to be on the favorable side of public opinion, so they start doing things they don’t believe…
Futurama may not make me laugh as hard as other comedies, but its vision of the future and all the shenanigans that come with it have always been enjoyable to watch (throughout all its various cancellations and comebacks). Kaptain Kristian makes the case that Futurama is special because it was the “master of hiding brilliance…
I could tell you that this hay floating in the air and spinning around in a circle is a result of a dust devil, where hot air rises up through a small pocket of cooler, low-pressure air above it (kind of like a harmless mini-tornado). Or I could tell you that it’s obviously dark magic…
The deep sea is home to creatures that are sort of normal but then have some sick twist that make them monstrous and so creepy you want to peel your skin off. A squid can’t be just a squid, it has to be a giant squid the size of a school bus. A shark can’t…
When you blow up a quarry that’s 65 feet high with 75 tons of explosives, you turn the rock wall into a tsunami wave that sends nearly 400,000 tons of rocks flying everywhere. The blast of the Bremanger Quarry in Norway looks great because it was carefully planned, with explosives planted in 454 blast holes…
