Gizmodo

In a new report out Monday, health officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have acknowledged that the wave of lung illness cases and deaths linked to vaping has a main bad guy: Products that contain THC sold on the black market. But to the disappointment of some experts, the agency is still…Read more...

Facebook and subsidiary WhatsApp have filed suit against shadowy Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group, saying that it exploited a vulnerability in the encrypted messaging app to infect over 1,400 phones with malware.Read more...

HBO Max just put on a fancy ring and created some shows no one was expecting.Read more...

Last night we got another look at The Mandalorian, Lucasfilm and Disney’s intriguing entry in the realm of live-action Star Wars TV. While it still left us with plenty of questions about what the titular mercenary will actually get up to in the series, it did give us a few sneaky connections to the wider world of Star…Read more...

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive came out all the way back in 2012—though it still has a large player base and its tie-ins with the Steam Community marketplace have remained active long after developer Valve’s attention mostly went elsewhere. Patch notes from Monday flagged by Vice News indicate that may have become a…Read more...

The Galaxy Fold just went on sale a month ago, but at Samsung’s 2019 developers conference, the smartphone giant just released a teaser for its next foldable phone.Read more...

E-cigarette company Juul billed itself as an evolution in smoking cessation and has largely been recast in the court of public opinion as a wildly effective new tool for addicting kids to nicotine. The Wall Street Journal today reported that the company is trying to cut back, though.Read more...

Sean Hodgins has come up with the perfect solution for anyone struggling to choose just one costume for Halloween. He designed and engineered a face-changing projection mask that allows you to disguise yourself as anyone or anything—at least until the battery in your back pocket runs out.Read more...

Samsung knows that its recent laptops haven’t quite made the impact it wanted, so for its next batch of notebooks, Samsung is trying something new: borrowing the QLED display tech used on Samsung’s high-end TVs and putting them on the upcoming Galaxy Book Flex and Galaxy Book Ion.Read more...

As long as people want to lose weight, there’s always going to be some sort of fitness grift—be it $4,000 treadmills with on-demand classes, a mirror that guides you through workouts, or the army of Peloton knockoff bikes. It’d be fair if your first impulse would be to group Nintendo’s Ring Fit Adventure for the…Read more...

Here’s an opportunity for the charitable scientific enthusiasts among us: please photograph your poop today in order to help train artificial intelligence.

Using satellites and ground stations, scientists have documented an epic lightning flash from 2017 that zipped above three states in the U.S. Southwest. Incredibly, scientists say discoveries of even bigger “megaflashes” are likely.Read more...

The Untitled Goose Game that became a viral phenomenon right after its launch a month ago has been vulnerable to hacking, according to a report from a security researcher.Read more...

It’s that time of year—leaves are turning, pumpkins are being carved, and costumes are being prepped. But among all the usual Halloween festivities is another tradition: watching scary movies. However, if you were scarred from watching one when you were too young—or perhaps when you had Scarlet freakin’ fever—you may…Read more...

The five videos showed women showering and changing their clothes in a locker room at South Carolina’s Limestone College. Apparently, a camera had been hidden in a sink to secretly capture athletes from visiting schools. The clips, running between 90 seconds and three minutes in length, were uploaded to Pornhub, one…Read more...

Among the new features onboard the Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL phones is a Recorder app that can transcribe spoken audio in real-time—a tool that could prove hugely useful in lectures, interviews, and more besides. It works offline too, but it’s not your only option for converting speech into text.Read more...

While the HomePod delivers the impressive audio quality, it hasn’t quite enjoyed the widespread success of competing smart speakers like the Google Home Mini and Amazon Echo. And now, things have just gotten worse now that Apple’s iOS 13.2 patch has reportedly started bricking HomePods.Read more...

It’s hard to stay focused on a task when even the watch you’re wearing can distract you with video games and internet access. But a company called Narbis has come up with a smart device that promises to keep you focused by physically preventing you from seeing the distractions all around you.

Fifty years ago today, on October 29, 1969, the internet was born. It was a humble beginning—a single login from a computer terminal at UCLA in Los Angeles to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in the Bay Area. But it was a tiny baby step that would eventually catapult the world into the information age.

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Nearly 50 years ago—before Interstellar, A Brief History of Time, and certainly the Event Horizon Telescope—postdoctoral researcher William Unruh was attempting to explain black holes to a crowd at an Oxford University colloquium. There were no reference points with which to compare an object so dense that light…Read more...

Unlike humans living today, our distant ancestors exerted a very small footprint on the planet, leaving barely anything behind to chronicle their time on Earth. With the discovery of each new skull fragment, femur, and stone tool, however, archaeologists are methodically piecing together the fractured history of our…Read more...

Edgar Wright reveals a timey-wimey twist to his new horror movie. Bill Condon is making a Christmas Carol adaptation for Disney. Lucifer’s final season will come in two parts. Plus, David Leitch waxes lyrical about the chance to work on The Matrix 4, what’s to come on Black Lightning, and new Mandalorian posters.…Read more...

Adobe has been slowly upgrading Photoshop with better tools to make the worst photo editing task—close cropping complex objects—less of a pain. The Magic Wand, the Magnetic Lasso, and the Quick Selections tools were all big improvements, but Photoshop’s AI-powered “Select Subject” tool was the quantum leap pixel…Read more...

Yamaha YAS-207BL | $170 | Amazon

Uber has announced it’s developing a new drone it hopes to use for Uber Eats deliveries one day. Eric Allison, the head of Uber Elevate, talked about the new drone in Detroit yesterday at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. And while the mock-up design looks pretty cool, with rotating wings and six rotors, the details…Read more...

The Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with new restrictions on doing business with tech giants Huawei and ZTE, with chairman Ajit Pai setting a Nov. 19 date for vote on a proposal to bar U.S. firms that receive federal subsidies from purchasing the Chinese firms’ telecom equipment.

Being a werewolf is generally messy—there’s that agonizingly painful transformation process, the total loss of self-control, and just having to deal with all that fur everywhere. Lycanthropes are full of angst, and movies—including these 10 essential picks—have always appreciated that about them.Read more...

James “Jimmy” Olsen got a raw deal. The character found on Supergirl was never the character from the comic books, and often never the same character from season to season of Supergirl. He was a soft and sweet love interest who wanted to keep Kara safe, until suddenly he was a grim vigilante or a weird duo with Lena…Read more...

Researchers at MIT are helping autonomous cars deliver on the promise of safer roads with a new trick that lets driverless vehicles see around corners to pre-emptively spot other vehicles or moving hazards that human drivers would never see coming.

Natalia Reyes is the personification of the two biggest questions going into Terminator: Dark Fate. Reyes plays Dani, a young Mexican woman being hunted by a brand new Terminator. So question one is, what makes Dani so important? The second question comes from the man himself, Terminator star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The subscription wars are in full-swing but today, Microsoft offered a compelling reason to give it more of your money. The company reintroduced its Xbox All Access program for players in the U.S., UK, and Australia—which also includes the option to upgrade to its new console, Project Scarlett, once it hits shelves in…Read more...

A 10-inch painting that hung in a French woman’s kitchen for so long she had no idea how it came to be in her family’s possession was found to be the work of Italian artist Cimabue earlier this year. It was expected to sell at auction for upwards of $6 million, but this weekend it ended up selling for $26.8 million…Read more...

A ghostly countenance is glaring back at us through 704 million light-years of interstellar space, in what’s actually a galactic collision of epic proportions.

Japanese scientists have discovered a new species of crustacean in the gills of a shark, according to a recent paper.Read more...

We have received a great deal of feedback from you, our readers, about the sound-on autoplay videos that have been inundating our sites. We want you to know that we hear you, that we take those complaints seriously, and that we, the writers, editors, and video producers of Gizmodo, are as upset with the current state…Read more...

South African residents are being urged to use their water sparingly as hot, dry weather pushes the country toward another water shortage. The South African Minister of Human Settlements, Water, and Sanitation Lindiwe Sisulu made the announcement Monday at a press conference to address the issue.

Looks like Google is getting ready for a serious dive back into wearables. Both Reuters and CNBC are reporting that Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has made an offer to acquire Fitbit. Yes, that Fitbit.Read more...

Mark Zuckerberg has been roundly criticized by the press and lawmakers for his company’s incongruous new policy allowing politicians to make false claims in advertising on the platform. Adding to that growing wave of dissent, according to the New York Times: some of Facebook’s own employees, who call the move “a…Read more...

Instagram announced on Sunday that it’s banning drawings, memes, video, and comics that portray self-harm and suicide, as well as “other imagery that may not show self-harm or suicide, but does include associated materials or methods.” This adds to its preexisting policy of prohibiting content which promotes or…Read more...

Two years ago, GoPro took its first stab at a 360-degree action camera with the GoPro Fusion. It wasn’t a particularly good stab. It was bulky, it required two micro SD cards, and the footage was a royal pain to work with. In the intervening years, we’ve seen decent 360 cameras from the likes of Garmin, Insta360, and…Read more...

After people discovered hints about new AirPods in code for iOS 13.2, it seemed like the arrival of Apple’s next wireless earbuds were imminent. And today, Apple removed all doubt when it announced the AirPods Pro in a new post on Apple’s online newsroom.

Halloween offers so many opportunities for our favorite genre shows to play with the spooky, strange, and supernatural…but it’s also an opportunity for all these interesting storytelling elements to crash and burn.Read more...

Apple Powerbeats Pro | $200 | WalmartRead more...

A new telescopic survey of Hygiea—the fourth largest object in the main asteroid belt—suggests it’s a dwarf planet, due to its surprisingly spherical shape.Read more...

Finally, my favorite email app is getting dark mode. And if you’re lucky, you’re already able to take advantage of the new feature within Gmail on iOS and Android. We’ve already written about the latter, and now we’re here with a quick guide to enabling dark mode on the former—if you can access it.Read more...

A satellite that Samsung used for a PR stunt in which it sent a selfie of model and actor Cara Delevingne into space has crash-landed on a farm in Gratiot County, Michigan.Read more...

California’s wildfire season arrived with a fierceness earlier this month and conditions have once again become dangerous up and down the Golden State. On Monday, residents near Los Angeles, including basketball star LeBron James, awoke to mandatory evacuation orders as the Getty Fire exploded. Fires also continue to…Read more...

The 130,000 gig workers who serve as personal shoppers for grocery delivery platform Instacart are, according to the company’s own figures, overwhelmingly female. And of that 73-percent-female workforce, an estimated 65,000 are working moms.

Sure, you love your dog/cat/currently trendy animal people are keeping as pets, but is there a chance you might like it more if it were a different breed? You can’t simply trade in your Golden Retriever for a weekend test drive with a Schnauzer, but with Nvidia’s new GANimals tool, you can at least see if your beloved…Read more...