Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
Sodium, you know what that is. Water, you know what that is. Now watch one of the oldest chemistry class tricks, the combination of two things you already know for an explosion you might have forgotten: if you throw sodium metal into water, it basically sparks up real big and blows up nicely. Here’s Crazy…
It has all the makings of those ASMR triggering videos we all love to feel on our scalp and spine but it’s also a little bit unsettling too since the whole video moves in reverse. We’re not watching a tomato get chopped up but rather seeing it get unsliced and that reversal of action throws…
Turn it up to 8K if you can (you can’t), because this truly awesome video of master bladesmith Tony Swatton working on a Roman Gladius Sword made from damascus steel is a treat to watch. Damascus steel is basically art in a material as the layers get built, this sword is especially awesome because it…
Dutch history meets modern energy initiatives in artist Daan Roosegaarde’s latest installation, which uses beams of green light to visualize the movement of the country’s windmills. Blades on these mills can reach 170mph, but special tracking software and a thermal camera mounted behind the blades keep the light beams pointed at their targets, connecting each…
Fall is probably the most picturesque season but there’s always something beautiful about seeing the stillness of winter give way to the color of spring. Here’s a collection of photographs from photographer Jim Brandenburg that documents the transformation from winter to spring. According to National Geographic, Brandenburg took a photo everyday in Minnesota from the…
It’s magnets! Seriously. There’s a layer of iron underneath the cue ball that gets nudged and pulled by a strong magnet inside the pool table so that it gets put on a completely different track from the rest of the balls in pool. That track is the one that spits out the cue ball. The…
Marvel’s Civil War arc is both legendary and insanely convoluted, involving just about every hero you’ve ever heard of (and a ton you haven’t) over 50 issues published across over a dozen titles. Even though there’s a collected edition now, nothing beats the brevity of a four minute animated explainer to catch you up on…
Nutella is good on toast, with ice cream, or eaten by the spoonful while gently sobbing. But as it turns out, add a dash of potassium permanganate and a little heat, and you have yourself a good little fire. The mixture of potassium permanganate and Nutella (about 1:4) gives a sticky, slow-burning reaction that would…
While most people see a hammer and just see a hammer, The Art of Weapons sees the potential to turn the brute hardened steel into an axe. Basically, the head of the hammer turned into the axe blade and the claw side of the hammer got forged together to form one spike. The whole process…
Time traveling back into the past is almost always a bad idea. Everybody is racist, everything is dirty, and you’ll probably get some terrible disease and/or get stabbed with a sword that everyone is carrying but you. The world is generally dumber and worse off. And on top of that! You might not even be…
You can now add lemons to the long list of random objects that can be used to start a fire. But unlike just generating friction and heat by rubbing two sticks together, the process of starting a fire using a piece of citrus fruit involves first turning it into a working battery with copper and…
And the kick is good! I always think of a field goal in football whenever something splits the uprights of two standing posts only in this instance, it’s not a football and a goalpost but a human being in a wingsuit that’s flying through the narrow opening of two antennas. Watch as Guillame Galvani jumps…
It’s a technique that’s used around the world to show off the meals available in restaurants, but artists at a small factory in Japan are absolute masters at making the plastic demo meals look almost more delicious than the real thing. It’s definitely better than looking at faded photos in a printed menu, that’s for…
Radiation is all around us and too much of radiation is a bad thing so… are we all just screwed from all the radio waves and microwaves and ultraviolet radiation and rainbows and x-rays and radon and nuclear radiation in the world? Not exactly. Ted-Ed explains in the video animation below how not all radiation…
In the years after World War II, Berlin saw a number of new skyscrapers erected to provide the burgeoning middle class with affordable housing. Even though many were designed by famous architects they were eventually viewed as concrete monsters and moldered in disuse, until recently. In a recent series, 36-year-old photographer Malte Brandenburg sought to…
Movie CG gets better every year, and that’s bad news for the blockbusters of yesteryear which have a tendency to age really, really poorly. WhatCulture rounded up some of the most embarrassing CG in Hollywood, from I Am Legend to The Mummy Returns. Remember when Will Smith fighting zombie-like creatures was as good as visuals…
This is absolutely gorgeous. For the music video for Ralf Hildenbeutel’s Disco, director Boris Seewald had animators and dancers come up with 1,250 paintings on paper that moved like one continuos dance but also had them draw it in a style that was different each time so it feels like you’re watching something completely mind…
Need a weapon? Grab some magnets and some nails and you got yourself a hell of an arrow launcher. The magnets push out the nail darts so fast that it’s basically a mini crossbow mixed with a nailgun, no batteries necessary. Magnetic Games said that in order to get this powerful shot, the arrow and…
Terminator Genisys might not have been the most popular movie of 2015, but it did include a memorable fight scene where the old and young versions of Schwarzenegger’s T-800 have an epic street brawl. But how was Arnold able to fight himself? Cutting edge CG, obviously. The Moving Picture Company was one of the many…
Personal computing has changed a lot in the last 30 years, as this episode segment from 80s tech show Database will no doubt prove. For example, what the heck is the Micronet? Micronet was an early Information Provider available through the Prestel service in the United Kingdom during the 70s and 80s. URLs hadn’t been…
