Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
To make a spearhead like a Norman smith from the year 1066, you have to start with an iron steel sandwich. Yup, a piece of hard iron or steel gets sandwiched between two pieces of soft iron until they’re all hammered and welded together. After that, a socket needs to be made, which means the…
The same folks who realized Owen Wilson is contractually obligated to say “wow” in every film have stumbled upon something truly strange: Matthew McConaughey makes a lot of noises. Noises that are not words. Noises that do not convey almost any information other than “I am Matthew McConaughey and my mouth can make this sound.”…
Gold is so malleable that a single gram of it can be stretched into a strip nearly two miles long. A tiny little coin can be pressed into a 0.0001-millimeter-thin golden rectangular sheet the size of a tatami mat. So leave it to the talented artisans of Japan to transform a tiny bit of gold…
A good movie owes a lot to great writing and acting. But the people responsible for the rhythm of emotional arcs and intimate moments of conflict are rarely if acknowledged. Those people are film editors, and counterintuitively, an editor is often at their best when their work is totally invisible. The power of an editor,…
Bad news, guys. There’s a limit to humanity. Even if we had the technology for interstellar space travel, we still wouldn’t be able to see most of the observable universe because we’re actually limited to only being able to go to a hundredth billionth of a percent of it. We’re stuck within our local galaxy…
When it comes to a steady hand and an impeccable attention to detail, David Damek’s model making skills rival brain surgeons when it comes to the precision of his work. His YouTube channel is full of lengthy videos detailing his wonderfully detailed builds, but be forewarned if you’re racing towards a deadline at work, you…
We know that mixing sodium with water causes awesome explosions. We know that skipping rocks across a lake is very probably one of the funnest things you can do outdoors. Next time, we’re all bringing a pound of sodium to the lake so we can watch it explode over and over again as it skips…
Meet Tom Woodruff. You’ve seen him in movies but probably didn’t even realize he was in them because he specializes in playing creatures. That is, he’s been the alien in Aliens, a gorilla in various TV shows and movies, done work for Jumanji, and so much more. What’s cool is to hear him talk about…
BBC’s Attenborough’s Life That Glows is an absolutely gorgeous look at the mysterious creatures around the world that have bioluminescent powers. It details the lives of fireflies, glow worms, fungi, fish, squid, plankton, and other creatures, and shows how they use their glow-in-the-dark abilities. Sometimes it’s to attract mates, sometimes it’s to prevent predators from…
Painting a wall is boring because it takes so much time and requires so much preparation to not get paint everywhere. But what if it could be exciting and done quickly and the point was to get paint everywhere? Like what if you blew up some paint buckets to see if the explosion of colors…
Superheroes have superpowers and exist in worlds where reality doesn’t exactly exist and have weird names and are totally not all the way human. But! A lot of them are actually based on real people. Which makes a lot of sense, since it was real people that invented our favorite characters and they took inspiration…
Whoa. This aerial view, courtesy of a drone, captures something not often seen: a pod of false killer whales (which are a species of dolphins, of course) chasing and hunting down a shark in the waters near Sydney, Australia. You can see the gang of false killer whales basically acting like a pack of wolves…
Have you ever noticed that airplane wings curl up at the very end? Why is that? Called winglets, the curled tips shrink the vortices at the end of the wing, which in turn improves its fuel efficiency. What’s cool is that this wingtip design is stolen from nature: birds curl their wings when they fly.…
YouTube rewards channels for how many subscribers they have. Passing 100,000, gets you a Silver Play Button award. But seven months after hitting that benchmark, Cody from Cody’s Lab got tired of waiting for YouTube to send him one and decided to make his own. Cody spends a lot of time on his channel doing…
Sitting back with a good book is a popular way to help relieve stress. But artist Tauba Auerbach has created an incredibly intricate pop-up book, devoid of any words, that will totally relax you simply by opening and closing each page. Watching these 2D pages transform into 3D structures is better than tending to an…
Meet the Drosera Capensis, also known as the Cape sundew. It’s a deadly little thing that looks like some sort of alien finger trap but it’s actually a carnivorous plant with sticky tentacles that basically entomb bugs that come across its way. It’s crazy to see how it traps the bug, as if it were…
I want to know more about the world in this short animation Entropy, by Tim Cahn. I want to know why the spaceship is leaving Earth. I want to know what the space station is doing all the way out there. I want to know who’s there. I want to know where the ship is…
I’m not sure which is my favorite part in the making of this cast aluminum skillet. Is it the tight packing of the foundry sand around the original cast iron skillet? Is it the careful pour of the molten aluminum into the mold? Is it when the excess metal is sawed off? Is it the…
What a day it has been. Time to go into an elective waking coma while this guy makes a crazy-looking knife with skill and precision. Apparently kiridashi—the shape of knife being made here—are often used for pruning bonsai because they have lots of leverage near the tip. Doesn’t that seem nice? Just hanging out with…
Is it the fuel? Not really. Even though giant passenger jets do guzzle down fuel at a ridiculous 0.67 miles per gallon—seriously, they need 1.5 gallons of jet fuel for every mile traveled—there are so many people on an airplane that the fuel cost gets split down to a much more reasonable price: a per-person…
