Gizmodo

Hurricane Dorian’s devastation has killed at least 30 in the Bahamas. All this death has a distinct smell, Sam Teicher told Earther. The founder of Coral Vita, a coral-growing operation based Grand Bahama, had that awful, hair-raising stench in his nose all day on Thursday as he drove around trying to help those in…Read more...

The number of people stricken by acute lung disease linked to e-cigarettes continues to grow, with nearly 500 suspected cases reported across the U.S. as of this week, along with two more deaths in Oregon and Indiana. But while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others are still saying there are…Read more...

We’re days away from Apple’s big annual iPhone party. It’s safe to assume we’re about to learn a whole lot more about this year’s models. But what else is there to learn? This Apple event doesn’t have the massive groundswell of hype September Apple events usually do. We know we’ll get phones with a big camera bump…Read more...

Volcanic eruptions are typically associated with death and destruction, but the recent eruptions on Hawaii’s Big Island resulted in an unexpected biological boom—a gigantic plume of algae extending for hundreds of miles into the Pacific Ocean.

A middle-aged man, holding a tool from the machine shop, looking forlorn and wistful. That’s what we might call the stock image of automation fears. It’s the picture that graces the news story about grim job-loss forecasts or think pieces about whether the robots are ‘coming for our jobs.’ (It’s either that or a…Read more...

An aircraft mechanic has been charged with tampering with an American Airlines airplane before a flight of 150 passengers was scheduled to take off.Read more...

Ocean temperatures have skyrocketed in the northeast Pacific, ushering in conditions reminiscent of 2015. In other words, the Blob is back, and it could spell trouble for wildlife and fisheries from Alaska to California, according to data scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) …Read more...

Do you use an antenna to watch TV? Whether you never adopted cable to begin with, or only recently cut the cord you may have noticed some of you TV stations have vanished in the last month. It’s all to make way for 5G, the next generation of cellular networks that promises speeds as fast, or often faster, than…Read more...

Roku Streaming Stick + 4K Streaming Player | $49 | Walmart and AmazonRead more...

The Guardian is reporting that internal documentation governing Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, was rewritten to specifically avoid the word feminism. The company told the Guardian “[o]ur approach is to be factual with inclusive responses rather than offer opinions.”Read more...

New York Attorney General Letitia James launched a multi-state antitrust investigation into Facebook on Friday, applying a new layer of pesky regulatory scrutiny to the scandal-ridden social network.Read more...

Richard Madden says there are more intriguing additions to come to the cast of The Eternals. Ghost Draft continues to cast more mysterious roles. A script might finally be done for the new Batman movie. Jon Favreau discusses how the rise of the First Order could play into The Mandalorian. Plus, meet Legacies’ newest…Read more...

Gone are the days of poking people on Facebook that you wanted to poke in real life. Facebook officially debuted its new dating service in the U.S. yesterday, and that very sentence should cause privacy advocates a bit of alarm—especially since it was only a few days ago when the news hit that another security gaffe…Read more...

Bitsbox is one of the most popular STEM toys for kids, and today only, you can get your first delivery for $15, down from the usual $30.

Samuel Kempf was riding a roller coaster in Spain when he saw an iPhone hurtling through the air. Lesser men may have simply watched helplessly as the phone plummeted to Earth, no doubt getting destroyed in the process, but Kempf is not lesser men. He jumped into action, and like a figure from a Renaissance painting,…Read more...

In honor of the original Walkman’s 40th birthday, Sony is releasing an anniversary edition of the iconic cassette player that first made music portable, the company revealed at IFA on Thursday. Only, it doesn’t actually play cassettes, so don’t go breaking your collection out of storage. And it’ll set you back about…Read more...

Ring’s controversial relationship with police departments nationwide has landed the Amazon-owned home security company in the crosshairs of congressional concern.Read more...

Let’s get one thing straight right now: “crypto” means “cryptography.” It does not mean “cryptocurrency.” Unless you’re a person who thinks the blockchain is the future, that is, which is how we ended up with the dumbest news cycle this side of a measles outbreak.

A satirical women’s site that lambasts clickbait content is being suppressed on Facebook because the social media platform determined Reductress was sharing clickbait.Read more...

Even after Boeing’s beleaguered Boeing 737 Max jets return to the skies, some Stephen Brashearwary passengers won’t be expected to board them—at least if they’re flying United Airlines.Read more...

More than thirty organizations on Thursday called for a nationwide ban against government use of face recognition calling the technology “unreliable, biased, and a threat to basic rights and safety.”

The name says it all: LG G8X ThinkQ Dual Screen. It’s an updated LG G8 phone with an additional screen that effectively operates as a second device tethered to the main one. In a briefing at IFA in Berlin, the company framed the dual-screen phone as the inevitable solution to our multitasking inclinations. After…Read more...

Ahead of Apple’s big event next week a new beta has popped up at the URL https://beta.music.apple.com. The beta gives you access to Apple Music, the rebranded, music-focused element of the entity formally known as iTunes.Read more...

A new report from the UK seems to confirm vets’ worst fears, suggesting that pet vaccination rates in the country have dropped off substantially in recent years.Read more...

In response to Hurricane Dorian arriving in the South, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has begun to temporarily shutdown operations at some of the region’s most toxic facilities.

Introducing Kamuysaurus japonicus—an entirely new genus and species of hadrosaur from Japan. The location of its fossilized remains suggests these majestic herbivores browsed ancient shorelines, expanding our knowledge of this wildly successful group of dinosaurs.

After launching its ridiculous Predator Thronos “gaming chair” last year, a common refrain Acer heard from hopeful buyers was they regretted they couldn’t plop down the $30,000 for the damn thing as it wouldn’t fit in their homes. This year, Acer says its successor, the Predator Thronos Air, is way more “accessible”…Read more...

On Thursday, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams held a press conference to “display 90 rats” caught during a “new rat trap pilot program” around Brooklyn Borough Hall. Strangely, the event involved the public ladling of some kind of soup—which you absolutely must watch:

Your mouthwash could have a bizarre effect on how exercise affects your body, a new study this week suggests. The study found that swigging mouthwash can prevent exercise from lowering your blood pressure as it normally does. Strange as that sounds, the results highlight just how important the bacteria living in our…Read more...

LITOM Waterproof Outdoor Solar Motion Sensor Lights | $16 | Amazon | Promo code VPZOWS6GRead more...

On Tuesday, the automation-focused meme candidate Andrew Yang tweeted, “Fast food may be first.” He was commenting on a new CNBC report that reported annual employee turnover rates of 100 percent at the Panera Bread chain—a figure that is low for the fast food industry, which can see annual turnover of up to 150…Read more...

When I first saw the back of the new Moto One Zoom, I had to pause for a second and ask myself, “Did Motorola put the Bat-Signal on the back of its latest phone?”Read more...

The Breakthrough Prize Foundation has awarded $21.6 million to winners of its 2020 Breakthrough Prizes, including a $3 million prize to 347 members of the black hole-imaging Event Horizon Telescope team.Read more...

A series of animal and human studies published this week are providing a sad footnote to a controversial 2016 experiment in monkeys that pointed to a possible cure for HIV but was later flagged for a glaring omission in its design. The animal studies failed to replicate the promising results of the original paper,…Read more...

The Chinese government is employing hackers to crack both Asian telecommunications carriers and personal devices in an effort to track the Uyghur ethnic population in Asia, according to new reports from both Reuters and CNN.Read more...

Jabra just announced the next generation of its popular truly wireless earbuds. The new Elite 75t look like a slimmed-down version of the 65t earbuds, which we love. Based on our first peek at the product, it sure looks like Jabra took a great set of earbuds and made them just a little bit better.Read more...

The City of New York is suing T-Mobile over what it described as “pervasive” and predatory sales tactics carried out by dozens of the company’s Metro locations, activity the city alleges was not only “abusive” but also illegal.Read more...

Hurricane Dorian is the storm that just won’t go away. After leaving a horrific trail of destruction in the Bahamas over the weekend, the storm has meandered to the northwest where it’s starting to cause rapidly deteriorating conditions in the Carolinas and Georgia where “life-threatening” storm surge and…Read more...

A large monitoring station used to gather important scientific data in the Baltic Sea has mysteriously vanished.

Bloomberg is reporting that a form of Touch ID could be coming to the iPhone as soon as 2020. That’s a little at odds with a report last month from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo that the iPhone would be getting Touch ID in 2021. So what the heck is going on?

I knew that even though Volkswagen ended Beetle (including Beetle-dressed Golfs) production in July, they wouldn’t ever really be able to not build some sort of Beetle, and I think this announcement proves that to be correct. VW is partnering with German EV conversion company eClassics to do conversions of classic,…Read more...

Withing’s long-promised budger rival to the Apple Watch is shipping. Back at CES, Withings gave us a peek at the Move ECG, a $130 activity tracker that offered the same electrocardiogram capabilities as the Apple Watch Series 4. Nine months later at IFA, it’s finally available—but only if you live in Europe.

A 76-year-old woman died after being pecked by a rooster in South Australia, a recent case study reports.Read more...

A ball python in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, is having an excellent beginning of the semester after escaping from its science lab confines right before school started. Kai, the three-foot-long snake, is on the loose in Fond du Lac High School.Read more...

Things could not have been much worse for Uber in the summer of 2017.Read more...

Look closely. That’s a closeup of the new Galaxy Fold, taken at Samsung’s sprawling space at IFA in Berlin. One of the apparently major design upgrades is staring you right in the face. Do you see it?Read more...

Nokia announced two new mid-range smartphones today, the Nokia 6.2 and Nokia 7.2, and it’s a departure from last year’s welcomed solo outing. 2018’s Nokia 7.1 was very nearly an ideal mid-range smartphone. It had a slick, yet understated design, ran a clean version of Android, and featured better cameras than you’d…Read more...

Nokia is keeping the feature phones alive with three new ones announced at IFA 2019. While owning a smartphone often feels like a requirement, feature phones (or dumbphones if we’re being crude) still serve an important role as alternatives to the pricey mini-computers in our pockets.Read more...

Facebook—a company that knows everything about you—is a dating platform now. Seemingly it’s deeply invested in getting you to fuck your friends! You can start screaming now, or in unison with me as I read through their announcement post.Read more...

It’s here! Android 10, once known as Android Q, is finding its way to Pixel phones, with other handsets getting the update when manufacturers get around to it. When you get Android 10 on your device, these are the new features and goodies you can start playing around with.