Gizmodo

Before the public even gets a glimpse at a new console, it’s made available to developers in prototype form so they can have new games ready for its launch. Thanks to strict NDAs and contracts those prototypes are rarely revealed, but Shane Battye, a retro gaming preservationist, managed to get his hands on an early …Read more...

The so-called “transcript” of a July 25 phone call between President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart serves as a poignant reminder of how absurd conspiracy theories—even ones widely and thoroughly debunked for many years—have come to influence daily life in the Oval Office.

The Oculus Quest has been out for a few months, and while Mark Zuckerberg told the crowd at Oculus Connect 6 that Facebook is selling its standalone VR headset as fast as the company can make them, Facebook is planning to add some major features including hand tracking and PC tethering in two separate future updates.Read more...

One woman’s wedding wasabi—apparently mistaken for avocado—ended up sending her to the emergency room with a strange medical condition called broken heart syndrome, according to a new case study.Read more...

A chemical analysis of pottery feeding vessels from the Bronze and Iron Ages suggests prehistoric European babies and toddlers had diets supplemented with, and possibly replaced by, animal milk, in what’s potentially the earliest archaeological evidence of infant weaning.

The Apple Watch is hands-down the best smartwatch out there. There, I said it. It’s a boring conclusion that is nevertheless the cold, hard truth. You can prefer a round face, or a different operating system. You can scream about better battery life and third-party watch faces until you die, purple-faced from…Read more...

Govee Waterproof LED Outdoor String Lights | $50 | AmazonRead more...

Megabots, a startup that was dedicated to bringing behemoth battle-robot entertainment to the masses, is selling off its assets before filing for bankruptcy.Read more...

Untitled Goose Game effectively ended for me when I found the boy who would run away if you honked at him. I didn’t need to achieve any more goals. I had reached peak goose.

Yesterday, a group of Google contract employees in Pittsburgh voted to unionize. Their move is one more small step forwards in a relentless wave of labor activism in the tech world. You know what’s missing here? A TECH WORKERS UNION.Read more...

NASA will begin developing a space-based telescope to track the asteroids near Earth, according to a statement by NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen.

Listen up, ya dinks! The Good Place is about to begin its final season. It’s a bittersweet situation: The best comedy on TV will be no more, but it also means the show will be ending exactly as its creators intended. Ahead of this week’s season four premiere, here’s your catch-up crash course in all things Good.

With the iPhone 11 likely marking the end of Apple’s current three-year design cycle, we’re due for new-look-iPhones in 2020. And if well-respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is correct, the next iPhone could feature a boxier design with flat stainless steel sides reminiscent of the iPhone 4.Read more...

A serious flaw in Google Keystone, which controls Chrome updates, is capable of doing major damage to macOS file systems on some computers and has been linked to data corruption that struck Hollywood video editors and others on Monday evening, Variety reported.

Juul Labs CEO and cofounder Kevin Burns is stepping down from the San Francisco-based e-cigarette giant, according to a press release published on the company’s website. Juul also announced that it will stop all print, digital, and broadcast advertising in the U.S., effective immediately.

Linksys Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivered a bizarre late night speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, warning that technology could make our world a dystopian hellscape if it’s not properly constrained—a place where mattresses monitor our nightmares, heartless algorithms deny us…Read more...

Humans live on land, but it’s the watery parts of the planet that dictate our fate. The frozen ice at the poles and in high mountains and the vast swath of ocean that covers nearly three-quarters of the planet mean this place is primarily earth in name only. The ice—dubbed the cryosphere by scientists—and the oceans…Read more...

Data analytics firm Comscore and its former CEO, Serge Matta, was charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations of widespread fraud at the company and have settled for over $5 million, the agency announced on Tuesday.

After the Centers for Disease Control warned of hundreds of cases of potentially lethal vaping-associated pulmonary illness (VAPI) across the country and growing backlash over skyrocketing teen use, Massachusetts has gone much farther than other states and totally banned the sale of all vaping products for four months.

All Hulu reveals about Wounds is that it stars Armie Hammer, Dakota Johnson, and Zazie Beetz, and follows “disturbing and mysterious things [that] begin happening to a New Orleans bartender after he picks up a phone left behind in his bar.” The trailer sheds a little more light, or should we say darkness?

In news that seems to have soured Sprint’s bid for a mega-merger with T-Mobile, the Federal Communications Commission announced this week that it’s investigating the company over millions in misappropriated subsidies. Sprint, meanwhile, says it improperly collected funds because it was confused about a rule change.Read more...

If the guys in The Hangover learned to travel through time and ended up in Waking Life, it would be a little like The Wave.Read more...

One of the weirdest medical tales to unravel in recent years—the wave of U.S. and Canadian diplomats in Cuba stricken by unexplained, concussion-like symptoms as well as hearing loss—has taken another turn. A group of researchers in Canada say they’ve found evidence that pesticides, not sonic energy weapons, might be…Read more...

After more than seven years of production, the Tesla Model S finally has another high-performance electric sedan to compete against: the 2020 Porsche Taycan. In Turbo S form, it’s a 750-horsepower all-wheel drive EV that can rocket from zero to 60 mph in 2.6 seconds. It isn’t perfect, but after driving it over 400…Read more...

If you had asked me yesterday if there is a circumstance in which you should bite a camel’s testicles, I would have said, “No, there is absolutely no reason anyone should ever bite a camel’s testicles.” Today, I’ve learned that indeed, there might be a good reason for just such an act.Read more...

Greta Thunberg changed everything on Monday: She lit into the United Nations and then joined 15 other kids in filing a complaint against the world for screwing her life.

A walrus attacked and sunk a Russian naval boat with scientists and media on board last week, according to a Russian Geographical Society press release.Read more...

The U.S. military has warned service members about the potential for a mass shooter at screenings of the Warner Bros. film Joker, which has sparked wide concerns from, among others, the families of those killed during the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado.

A group of Pittsburgh-based Google contractors is among the first in the company’s history to unionize, following a successful vote this afternoon, 49 to 24. The 80 or so analysts and machine learning trainers will become part of the United Steelworkers Union.Read more...

Laptops have seen tremendous improvements in performance over the last few years, but for a professional animator and creative video producer like myself, they’re rarely if ever as powerful as the desktops companies equip me with. Yet after five months with the HP Zbook x360 G5 Studio, I feel comfortable saying…Read more...

The second known interstellar visitor to our solar system has been named 2I/Borisov, in honor of the amateur astronomer who first detected the rare object.Read more...

For a brief time at the turn of the millennium, few things might have scared the average New Yorker more than the words “West Nile,” the name given to the mosquito-borne virus that, in 1999, began killing birds and eventually people for the very first time in the U.S.

Adam Neumann, the co-founder of temporary office space unicorn WeWork, is stepping down as CEO. Let’s remember the good times.

The Good Place may be about four previously unpleasant people trying to avoid eternal damnation in the pits of hell, but it’s also chock full of sweetness—that every-flavor frozen yogurt deliciousness that shows just how forking awesome our deceased (and demonic) protagonists actually are.

Apple just dropped iOS 13.1, and while these iterative versions tend not to be as fun as the big numbered ones, you should update your phone right now.

Seemingly every region of the world has been breaking temperature records these days. The oceans absorb much of this heat, and it’s threatening the world’s corals.Read more...

Kik Interactive plans to shut down its popular messaging app following a legal battle with the Security Exchange Commission, and will instead focus on its cryptocurrency Kin, which is at the center of the lawsuit.Read more...

Today Adobe has officially released Fresco for the iPad bringing an impressive set of drawing and interactive painting tools to Apple’s tablet, which will further help legitimize its use as a serious creative tool. The app was announced nearly a year ago in October of 2018, and we spent quite a bit of time with it…Read more...

Apple’s iOS 13 release is crammed with features we’ve been looking forward to getting our hands on for months—I’m looking at you, Arcade and system-wide Dark Mode—but one of the tools that this blogger was most excited for was Apple’s spam-fighting feature to silence those infuriating robocalls driving us all mad. And…Read more...

After debuting just shy of two years ago, Boston Dynamics has finally made its Spot robotic dog available for sale, but don’t expect to find a great Black Friday deal on this bot at Best Buy come Thanksgiving. The company hasn’t made them available to the average consumer just yet—only businesses that can promise an…Read more...

An L.L. Bean sale, Sony A7 III, Amazon Music HD, and a BodyBoss discount lead of Tuesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Last August, the orbital module of one of the Soyuz spacecraft used to ferry astronauts and cosmonauts to and from the International Space Station was discovered to have a small hole. This hole was an issue, as it was causing an alarming leak of the breathable air inside the ISS into space. The hole appeared to be a…Read more...

Recently, phones with “waterfall displays” have become all the rage—we’ve seen them on devices like the Vivo Nex 3 and Huawei Mate 30—but on the Mi Mix Alpha, Xiaomi has taken the idea of a wraparound screen to a whole new side...of the phone.Read more...

Stirring the speculation pot about the company’s long-rumored smart glasses, yesterday Facebook agreed to acquire the CTRL-Labs startup which has been developing a wristband capable of reading a wearer’s thoughts and using them to control computers and other devices.Read more...

Sony a7 III Full-Frame Mirrorless Camera with 28-70mm Lens | $1,998 | AmazonRead more...

Google has won a legal case in the European Union over the so-called “right to be forgotten,” a concept that allows people in Europe to request the removal of old news from the internet which might be harmful to their reputations or otherwise just be embarrassing. The European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court,…Read more...

Another Hasbro toy is ready to make its big-screen debut. A project description we didn’t expect to hear today? “The Avengers of werewolf stories.” Plus new looks at Black Lightning, The Good Place, and more. Spoilers, away!

Since Apple introduced its butterfly keyboard design in 2015, the problems with it have been very well documented—and they’re problems that I’ve experienced as well, with a 2018 MacBook Pro (the one with the third revision of butterfly keyboard, if you’re keeping count). If yours is also acting up, here’s what you can…Read more...

Clive Palmer, an Australian billionaire often called the Donald Trump from Down Under, is threatening to sue YouTuber Friendly Jordies for defamation. The popular YouTube personality and comedian, whose real name is Jordan Shanks, posted a video with the threatening letter he recently received from Palmer’s attorney…Read more...