Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
You’ve probably played with one in passing while wandering through a toy store, but did you know these expanding plastic spheres have an actual name? They’re called Hoberman Spheres, named after engineer Chuck Hoberman, and they’re now somehow even more relaxing. For an installation called Bits and Pieces, artist Nils Völker hung countless Hoberman Spheres…
To be fair, whale sharks don’t come in any size other than “huge.” That’s kind of their thing, being that they’re the largest fish species on Earth. How huge are they? How does approximately 40-feet long and 45,000 pounds strike you? Lucky for shark biologist Ocean Ramsay who’s swimming alongside this one, whale sharks are…
Ever wondered how Wilson makes its fuzzy little tennis balls? Benedict Redgrove captured the entire factory process in Thailand and reveals the full 24 steps it takes to make the bouncy balls. That’s a lot more steps than I ever imagined it would take, but the machinery involved is really interesting to see (especially that…
I don’t know what 1,000 suns actually looks like in real life, but I would imagine it’s probably something like lighting up this 20,000 watt light bulb to full, world-scorching power. It’s that eyeball-burning and -blindingly bright. Photonicinduction tested this 20kW Halogen light bulb that’s used for large scale film sets indoors—where it can flood…
The Joker is easily one of the best villains in film and TV (and obviously, comic book) history, but who is the best Joker? Jack Nicholson combined the mischievous campiness of the character with the deranged thirst for violence. Heath Ledger’s The Dark Knight Joker is somehow just as iconic as Nicholson and fit Christopher…
The unfortunate truth of peering into our collective past is that eventually, something intolerant rears its head. For example, this pancake recipe found and cooked by 18th century cooking aficionado Jonathan Townsend doesn’t call the griddle treats pancakes at all—they’re “Indian slapjacks.” Their vaguely racist name is derived from the presence of one of the…
A new video from Real Engineering explains the nuts and bolts of how SpaceX is planning to bring people to Mars and details the advantages that SpaceX has in making that actually happen. It’s both fun and enlightening! Some of these things you may already know—like, for instance, how the Hohmann Transfer is the most…
Glass can explode, and seeing it happen in slow motion is damn incredible. The Slow Mo Guys pointed the Phantom V2511 high-speed camera at a Pyrex glass measuring cup that was heated with a torch and then doused in cold water to capture the exploding glass (something about the sudden temperature change isn’t good with…
If there’s one thing Pokémon Go is missing (besides functioning servers, trading, battling, a tutorial, serious nerfs to Vaporeon’s stats, a clear indication of the rules surrounding gym battles, and easier ways to acquire Stardust) it’s a bespoke Pokéball-throwing experience that’s indistinguishable from hate-lobbing a phone into the pavement. Well, scratch that one off the…
Wonder Bread is already semi-miraculous: It’s impossibly soft, sweet, and shelf-stable. But unlocking the true potential inside this fluffy stuff results in a substance nearly impervious to heat and electricity, not dissimilar from what used to cover the exterior of spacecraft. The process for turning Wonder Bread into carbon foam is essentially the same as…
The magnetized liquid known as ferrofluid already looks like some kind of alien substance, but a design studio in Barcelona created a short video used this strange material along with CGI to create something that resembles a Pixar film you’d watch in hell. According to its Making Of video, the team realized that ferrofluid when…
One day, when climate change has finally turned the Earth into a real-life version of the Hunger Games, we’ll probably race these things for fun. Maybe we’ll even slap a child on top! Hey, they basically already do it in Texas. Sure, this is probably just a Roomba shell on an RC car. (The video…
The iconic buses in London are red, big-ass double-deckers that use roller blinds to show the destination stop rather than the typical LED display. I think the blinds look a lot better than the digital displays. Here’s how McKenna Brothers makes them, from the cutting of the letters, to the making of the negative, to…
Watch the cityscape of Hong Kong mirror itself in this short time lapse, The Allegory of the Cave by Visual Suspect. It’s break-your-eye-balls stunning as you try to track the movement of what you’re looking at. Hong Kong is famous for its densely packed buildings so seeing the city and its reflection in the same…
Even the most die-hard Nintendo fanboys could be forgiven for not knowing about the 64DD. The 64DD was a magnetic drive that snapped onto the bottom of the Nintendo 64, slated to run bigger, rewritable games, and give the massively popular console internet connectivity. After four years of development delays the 64DD finally launched in…
Turning inanimate puppets into beautifully animated stop-motion characters requires a lot of patience, a thorough understanding of movement, and countless supports, armatures, and lighting gear the viewer never gets to see. But in Dario Imbrogno’s OSSA, that animation gear is as much a star of the film as the dancing characters are. [Vimeo via The…
Damn. That’s a good statue. This 158-foot-tall bronze figure depicts Guan Yu, an ancient Chinese general, and majestically towers over Jingzhou, China. Shanghaiist says that over 4,000 strips of bronze have been stuck onto the body of Guan Yu and he stands atop the 86,000 square foot Guan Yu museum. All that is great but…
Dyson’s Bladeless Fans are wonderfully awesome but also ridiculously expensive. Am I really going to spend 300 bucks on a fan? Nah. Thankfully, Rulof the master maker of things breaks down how to build the bladeless fan with a water jug, a few vases, and a microwave fan. Just like Dyson, this DIY version of…
There’s an iPhone laying somewhere on this carpet. You have to stare really hard and probably scour every pixel of this picture and possibly stop blinking for at least four minutes in order to find it, but I promise you that it’s there. Jeya May Cruz dropped her iPhone onto this rug and basically saw…
Using the Panasonic Lumix G7‘s 4K photo mode which captures still shots at up to 30 frames per second, photographer Matt Taylor captured remarkable before and after night photos revealing just how bright the light generated by a nearby lightning strike can be. Matt estimates the lightning bolt struck about one or two miles south…
