Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
On its quest to free the world from the burden of fossil fuels, Tesla has unfortunately hit some speed bumps with the production of its Model 3. So instead of relying on batteries and electricity for power, perhaps the company should consider this four-wheeled contraption which runs on a gigantic spring-powered mouse trap. https://gizmodo.com/guy-builds-a-terrifying-gigantic-mouse-trap-that-can-p-1794872364 Based…
Toss a turkey in the oven and it cooks from the outside in, which can take hours of roasting before it’s done. But what if you cooked a turkey from the inside out? That’s what Allen Pan tried by filling a raw turkey with molten aluminum and then letting the whole thing cook, cool, and…
If you scroll through your phone, you’ll undoubtedly find a bunch of novelty apps you rarely use. The same fate could eventually befall a simple PC and Mac app called Random Access Character that generates an infinite number of bizarre characters using random shapes and textures—but only if you somehow get tired of watching them…
Some of humanity’s greatest inventions were created by accident. Corn Flakes were originally meant to be a dough made from boiled wheat, Silly Putty was supposed to be an artificial rubber, and Silly String was designed by a chemist to be an instant spray-on cast, but went on to become a fun way to ambush…
Even with the hours of preamble as I shuffle through the airport to my gate, flying is still an amazing experience for me. But taking off in a commercial airliner isn’t anywhere near as magical as the way Jean-Baptiste Chandelier takes flight in this stylishly-edited new video, which makes paragliding look as close to being a…
Archer Lars Andersen doesn’t post a lot of videos to his YouTube channel. But when he does, it’s to show off a mind-melting new trick he’s mastered, like getting arrows to change direction mid-flight so that he can hit targets hidden behind obstacles that he can’t actually see. This would have undoubtedly been a useful…
Amateur life-risker Joerg Sprave has successfully built custom slingshots capable of firing everything from bowling balls, to Christmas trees, to lethal Lego bricks. His latest creation, a slingshot that can launch full-size swords, is as ludicrous-sounding as it is awesome to see in action. Sprave’s slingshots are mostly built from wood, but the giant elastics…
Still having a hard time finding a Nintendo Switch? The hunt’s only going to get harder now that the holidays are here, but why add to your pre-Christmas stresses when you can just build your own playable version of Super Mario out of cardboard, and save yourself hundreds of dollars? In addition to cardboard, a…
Need to run downstairs to fetch the laundry? Or maybe there’s a phone call you just have to take? Life with a baby can make even the smallest chores feel like a herculean task if you don’t have a nanny. But it turns out, if you keep your floors clean using a robot, maybe you…
Through the lens of a talented photographer, familiar scenes can be turned on their heads, fooling your eyes into seeing something completely different. In this video, it looks like Lars Leber captured the ocean as waves churned up a blanket of sea foam, but in reality it’s a long timelapse of clouds slowly rolling through…
Taiwanese dancer Huang Yi also happens to be a talented engineer and inventor. The two disciplines don’t seem like they’d naturally go together, but Yi recently gave a TED Talk performance where he danced alongside a perfectly choreographed Kuka robotic arm that he programmed himself. Humans already work alongside robots in factories and other industrial…
Last month Nvidia revealed its work on using competing neural networks to generate random, but convincing, photos of non-existent celebrities. A website called MakeGirlsMoe does almost the same thing, but instead of celebs, it churns out never-ending headshots of anime characters. https://gizmodo.com/watching-this-neural-network-render-truly-photorealisti-1819957128 Nvidia’s photo-realistic celebrities require a bit of graphical horsepower to generate, but if…
Your typical New York timelapse follows the city as it progresses from the sunlit day, to the twinkling windows of skyscrapers at night, and right on through until morning when the sun rises back into the sky. But filmmaker Julian Tryba throws that timeline out the window, with this bizarre timelapse of the Big Apple…
When people fantasize about being ninjas, they’re not day-dreaming about sneaking up on their enemies; it’s all about the sword play. The Slow Mo Guys are no exception, and realized that playing around with a katana sword would result in some spectacular slo-mo footage. It takes a few harrowing practice swings to get the sword…
Using iron powder to teach kids about the magic of magnets has been a staple of grade school science for decades. The tiny iron particles are seemingly brought to life in the presence of a powerful magnet; an effect that filmmaker Roman De Giuli manages to turn into a moving masterpiece with closeup photography and…
If you’re looking for a relaxing way to run out the work clock on a Friday afternoon, I highly recommend Tucker Gott’s flying videos on YouTube. He takes to the air using a parachute and a propeller strapped to his back, which gives him the freedom to try fun stunts like launching and catching a…
Sometimes a unique camera move can produce fascinating footage without the need for special effects or weeks of post-production. For its short film, Low Earth Orbit, Visual Suspect, a Hong Kong-based video production company, simply had a camera drone fly in a giant orbit to capture dizzying aerial footage of Folegandros island in Greece. The…
I couldn’t even accurately trace a photo of myself to create a self-portrait that looked anything like me. But artist Ewan McClure manages to make a masterpiece by looking at his face and the canvas in a mirror, which must have been incredibly frustrating as all of his brush movements would have been reversed as…
The big advantage to compact action cams like the GoPro is that they’re tiny enough to capture shots in places where regular cameras can’t fit. And as Hawaii volcano guide Erik Storm discovered, they’re also remarkably resilient, even to the point of surviving an 1,100+ degrees Fahrenheit lava flow. PetaPixel has the whole story of…
We could all probably use a little more time in our days, whether it’s to get some extra work done, spend some quality time with the family, or in the case of YouTube’s MadGyver, to engineer and build a special glove that makes time actually appear to slow down and stop. The glove, which genuinely…
