Gizmodo

Folks, we’ve got a real dilemma on our hands, and that dilemma is whether or not we should ban fracking. It’s a very complex issue, you see.

Does George Miller finally have the green light for the next Mad Max? Chris Chibnall teases Doctor Who’s Cybermen-packed season finale. Star Trek: Picard teases more Romulan mystery. Plus, what’s to come on Riverdale and Nancy Drew, and Vin Diesel is already talking about Fast 10. Spoilers get!

The first two episodes of Star Trek: Picard have carefully laid the groundwork for a future where the Federation, tired and beaten back by tragedy after tragedy, is embroiled in an existential crisis. Now, one of its most tireless advocates, the veil lifted from his eyes, is ready to do something about it—and has…Read more...

A high school math teacher in Australia who recently visited China has found a novel way to keep his students engaged while he sits in self-imposed quarantine over concerns that he visited a country with high concentrations of the new coronavirus. He’s conducting his class through videochat while sitting 5 miles away…Read more...

It’s tough for most of us to recall what life was like before the invention of Google Maps. Remember printing out your MapQuest directions and trying to read and drive at the same time? Totally safe! For its 15th birthday, Google Maps is getting a fresh look on iOS and Android, along with more information for public…Read more...

The New York Police Department is replacing the memo books used by over 30,000 officers to track everything from patrol assignments and 911 calls to arrest records with an iOS app, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.

I’m Han Solo in the trash compactor!

What happens when PayPal, the Treasury Department, and a New York magazine walk into a bar together? Nothing good!

One of the fathers of the modern comic book film may be making his triumphant return to the Marvel universe. Sam Raimi, who directed Sony’s first Spider-Man trilogy, is reportedly in talks to replace Scott Derrickson in the director’s chair for Doctor Strange: In the Multiverse of Madness. Variety first reported the…Read more...

The phone app at the center of the clown-shoe exercise in democracy known as the Iowa Caucuses was not only riddled with technical issues and potentially susceptible to being hacked, it appears to have been designed by a greenhorn programmer in the process of learning the code. That’s according to the analyses of…Read more...

Fresh off his surprise cameo in the latest season of Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor Who, Captain Jack Harkness is heading out on a new voyage in the latest audio adventure series from Big Finish. Anybody who’s eager for a certain Doctor Who pairing will be in luck because guess who’s coming aboard? “Hello, sweetie.”Read more...

The Food and Drug Administration is warning the public to stay far away from supplements, touted as a cancer cure, that are made with an ingredient linked to irregular heartbeats, seizures, and even deaths.

Google is bringing the hammer down on websites trying to stuff their video content with infuriating advertising beginning in August, specifically taking aim at three particularly maddening types of offenders.Read more...

A review of data taken over the course of the two-year Rosetta mission shows that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was sometimes reddish in appearance, while at other times it assumed a bluish hue. Sounds weird, but scientists have come up with a sensible explanation that doesn’t involve aliens with paint guns.

Two women with a very solid plan to make money and perhaps a shaky grasp of Pennsylvania gambling law were foiled last month in a glorious but short-lived Facebook raffle scheme. Recently-filed criminal complaints estimate that admins Brittany Winings, 32, of Northern Cambria and Tiffany Dupas, 26, of Patton, made a…Read more...

The next generation of atom smasher could be a 100-kilometer-round ring, costing over $10 billion, with no promise of finding something as glamorous as last decade’s Higgs boson. But does the future of physics need to be so large? What if researchers could probe the secrets of the smallest particles using technology…Read more...

In the first issue of House of X, an envoy of the X-Men made their way to New York City to apprehend the villain Sabretooth. They wanted to send a message to the Fantastic Four about how mutants’ positions in the world were changing following the founding of Krakoa. Not only were mutant criminals like Sabretooth the…Read more...

Xbox Elite Series 2 Controller | $160 | Amazon Prime

The Trump administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) is holding onto nearly $1 billion of funds allotted for a clean energy program research and development program, congressional Democrats said at a hearing on Wednesday.

Apple usually waits until its annual Worldwide Developers Conference to make huge App Store changes, but software Christmas came early this year. The company just announced that effective March, devs can offer one app across all platforms. If you buy an app in the iOS App Store, you won’t have to buy a separate…Read more...

Fantasy Island is a horror movie now, thanks to the crafty upcyclers at Blumhouse—though, let’s face it, that TV show was already kind of creepy to begin with. Since our reality is silly now, we decided to round up some other vintage TV series ripe for transformation into big-screen horror movies.

Early last year, then-Twitch streamer Jeremy “Disguised Toast” Wang received an email from a fan who’d donated $200 to him in 2018. “Hey, I donated money to you a year ago,” read the email according to Wang, who spoke to Kotaku over the phone. “I’m having hard times right now. Do you think you could return that…Read more...

Now that most of the world’s major problems have been resolved, science is turning its attention to the less pressing issues plaguing humanity, including how to mix up the perfect soapy solution for making gigantic bubbles that don’t immediately pop.Read more...

The Internet of Things is full of insecure and somewhat dubious gadgets, but Philips Hue has generally had a decent reputation—a big reason why it’s one of the more popular brands in the space. However, researchers from Check Point Software have found that an already-known vulnerability with Hue lightbulbs could still…Read more...

Ever since visiting Davos for the World Economic Forum last month, Trump has been obsessed with trees. He continued going on about them at the State of the Union on Tuesday night.Read more...

Birds of Prey is not a Suicide Squad sequel. It is not DC and Warner Bros.’ follow up to Joker. It’s really not even particularly a comic book superhero movie, outside of the fact that it stars comic characters. Hell, depending on your point of view, whether or not it’s a Birds of Prey movie might be an argument. But…Read more...

An REI Winter Clearance Sale, a RAVPower Charger Gold Box, and Olivers Mystery Box lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Less than 200 miles from the North Pole in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, the German icebreaker Polarstern sits frozen into the ice and shrouded in darkness. Several times a week, a handful of crew members venture forth from the relative safety and warmth of their vessel into a realm of bone-chilling temperatures,…Read more...

Clearview AI, a controversial face recognition start-up, whose customers include hundreds of U.S. law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, has been served cease-and-desist letters by Google and its subsidiary YouTube.

A Canadian man who announced he was infected with the new coronavirus during a WestJet flight from Toronto to Jamaica on Monday says he was trying to make a viral video, according to a new report from Canada’s Global News. The plane turned around after the man, identified as 28-year-old James Potok, stood up and told…Read more...

In recent days, some public health experts and scientists have begun uttering the P-word in reference to a surging outbreak of the new coronavirus that’s already infected at least 24,000 people and killed over 400: pandemic. But when will we know if the Wuhan coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV, has spread far and wide…Read more...

Despite what some might think, PC gaming is thriving. Companies like Corsair are gobbling up smaller outfits in order to create massive gaming hardware empires, while streamers are getting signed to big money contracts across multiple platforms. However, as gaming has outgrown its basement-dwelling image, the price of…Read more...

Dwayne Johnson continues to hype up Black Adam (and his back). Gemma Chan has finished her time on The Eternals. Is Joaquin Phoenix up for an iconic Disney villain role? Plus another new look at Birds of Prey, and what’s to come on The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. To me, my spoilers!

You may well use your phone to help you get out of bed in the morning, but have you tried using it to get to sleep? A plethora of apps are ready and waiting to bathe your bedroom in all kinds of music and sounds, and many of them come with a built-in sleep timer that means you don’t have to leave them playing all…Read more...

SanDisk 512GB Extreme MicroSDXC UHS-I Memory Card | $110 | AmazonRead more...

The U.S. tested a nuclear-capable missile overnight, launching an unarmed Minuteman III from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, according to the 30th Space Wing, which is now part of the newly organized United States Space Force.

RAVPower Filehub | $36 | Amazon | Clip the $4 coupon and use promo code KINJADFG

CEO Gerard Niemira of Shadow Inc., the developers of the unfortunately named election app that caused Monday’s Democratic presidential caucus in Iowa to turn into a much bigger shitshow than it usually is, told Bloomberg on Tuesday night that he’s really sorry about all that. But he argued that the app was actually…Read more...

Defense lawyers for former CIA software engineer Joshua Adam Schulte say that the CIA and federal prosecutors don’t actually know for certain who was behind a 2017 leak of cyber espionage documents, let alone whether it was their client, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday. Instead, they said he really pissed…Read more...

Hoan Ton-That, the CEO and founder of a face recognition company that he freely admits could help lead to a surveillance “nightmare” and a “dystopian future or something,” says he has a First Amendment right to scrape whatever images he damn well pleases off public websites like Twitter to pad out his company’s…Read more...

Apple is looking for a new exec to lead its Apple News+ business, because no one wants to pay $10 a month for magazines when there are so many things to watch on TV.Read more...

Margot Robbie has been hoping to get a movie like Birds of Prey on screen for years—and this Friday, that dream will finally be achieved. But in the time since Birds of Prey first became an idea over at DC, the superhero cinema landscape has slowly but surely begun to change. From Wonder Woman to Captain Marvel,…Read more...

When the summer movie season ends this year, Disney+ heats up. Disney CEO Bob Iger announced today that Marvel Studios’ first streaming show, The Falcon and Winter Soldier, will debut in August. It’ll be followed by season two of The Mandalorian in October, and WandaVision in December.Read more...

Having delivered the last of this season’s letters to Santa, the United States Postal Service marches into bad winter determined to ferry bundles of wishlists from the wide-eyed children of the College Avenue Student Loan Company, who really really wanted a couple to pay their bill this quarter. The company addressed…Read more...

The proliferation of doctored or misleading images that manage to spread like wildfire has required that newsrooms, fact-checkers, and journalists be especially wary of disinformation and targeted campaigns in various media. Jigsaw, an Alphabet-owned company, has announced a new tool aimed at helping journalists…Read more...

Two butterfly activists have been found dead in Mexico in less than a week.Read more...

Mobile World Congress, the biggest phone and wireless industry trade show of the year, is just weeks away, but the coronavirus outbreak is causing at least two companies to put their announcements on hold.Read more...

It’s been said that, despite a robust transit system, all New Yorkers do is complain about the subway. This is true! We like complaining. But every bit of bile stored for the next unplanned service outage is nothing compared to the gallons of piss and vinegar that should deservedly be poured onto the MTA’s pilot plan…Read more...

The UK is going hard in its game to ban cars. Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced at the launch of talks related to COP26, the next chapter of international climate talks, that his government would accelerate its ban on the sale of gas- and diesel-run vehicles from 2040 to 2035. Leaders are even adding hybrids to…Read more...

Few Star Wars characters are more difficult to cosplay than General Grievous. He’s a skeletal being, more machine than anything else, with four arms and a very distinctive way of moving. It’s simply not something a normal person can do.Read more...