Gizmodo

Shitty tablets helped screw up California’s March 3, 2020 primary election in big time, according to a previously unpublicized Los Angeles County report flagged by Politico on Wednesday.

Much as the Candyman film franchise focuses on the stories of people foolish enough to summon a murderous ghoul into their midst by chanting his name, the films have always been, at their cores, gruesome reflections on the American legacy of anti-Black racism that led to the lynchings of thousands over the centuries.Read more...

The world is facing a make-or-break moment for climate policy. Without unprecedented action, we’re all but guaranteed to see catastrophic climate breakdown by the end of the decade.

You remember the Segway, the two-wheeled device that required a gymnastics-level of balance to ride standing upright? Its inventor is currently working on an incredibly ambitious project to create a massive lab for growing human organs—once the FDA approves lab-grown organs for human transplant, of course. There’s…Read more...

After weeks of watching hypnotoad Mark Zuckerberg attempting to smush logic to accommodate a threatening conspiracy theorist, meanwhile allegedly firing critics, Facebook has produced an offering that could maybe take some of the heat off without fixing any of the aforementioned problems. In a rare USA Today op-ed…Read more...

The World Health Organization has, for the second time in less than in a month, decided to suspend its clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine for covid-19 patients. The decision was made following a review of the latest evidence as well as its own preliminary data, which concluded the drug would likely not help save…Read more...

Next Monday, Apple is kicking off its annual Worldwide Developers Conference, where, as usual, the company will reveal the features coming to iPhones, Macs, and more this fall. But things are a little weird this year due to [gestures at everything]. Instead of showing off demos to excited developers in a San Jose…Read more...

The Last Great Time War. Those five words have hung over Doctor Who ever since it was revived in 2005: an earth-shattering conflict that saw the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords, pitted against the Daleks. It’s been started, ended, revived, and discussed across Who media for years, and will be explored once more this…Read more...

Sen. Josh Hawley, one of Facebook’s most vocal critics on Capitol Hill, introduced new legislation on Wednesday that would purportedly chip away at the limited liability shield that protects social media giants from being sued for content moderation decisions.

Last Friday night, thousands defied New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo’s curfew order and marched in the rain, the fifth evening in a week marked by beatings and mass arrests after dark. It was now common for police to leapfrog ahead of the crowd, assemble a chokepoint, and ambush with mass…Read more...

Before Doom Patrol’s Danny the Street was reduced to a single brick, the extradimensional being used to delight in throwing wildly extravagant parties for their friends—all of whom were social outcasts in need of a compassionate community. Danny might not be at their full power just quite yet, but in the latest…Read more...

Evidence of incest and inbreeding has been uncovered at an elite prehistoric Irish burial site, in a new paper that reads like a Game of Thrones subplot.Read more...

In the last year, some big banks have committed to protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska through withholding their investments from the Arctic as a whole. Seems like Alaska’s elected officials are pretty pissed about it. In fact, they’ve formally made a whole stink about the new environmental…Read more...

Apple’s butterfly keyboard will go down as one of the biggest tech blunders of recent years, but there’s another egregious sin the company has committed against its MacBooks that hasn’t been properly addressed yet: the elimination of the built-in SD card slot. There are lots of workarounds for the loss, but…Read more...

Last week, Amazon made a terse announcement that it would institute a “one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology,” known as Rekognition, in response to the wave of global protests against police brutality spurred by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At least one…Read more...

There are now more reasons than ever to hide faces and protect the privacy of people and bystanders in photos and videos being shared to social media. But some approaches are more effective than others, as researchers from Duke University have demonstrated with a new tool that can perfectly reveal faces that have been…Read more...

The Red Planet has a touch of green, according to atmospheric observations performed by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. It’s the first time this effect has been documented on a planet other than Earth.

After releasing a line of new outdoor lights earlier this year, Philips Hue has returned with some new lights better suited for indoor use including an updated Lightstrip Plus and Hue Bloom lamp, along with a new 1600 lumen bulb which is now the brightest smart light out of Hue’s entire portfolio.Read more...

Oil giants are coming to terms with their impending doom. That’s especially true these days for BP, the London-based multinational fossil fuel corporation most notorious for causing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The company announced Monday it’s writing down up to $17.5 billion on its assets in the second…Read more...

The daring adventures of our loveably traumatized pilot heroes in Alphabet Squadron are continuing this month with the release of Shadow Fall, the second in Alexander Freed’s planned trilogy of tales giving us starfighter action in the early days of the New Republic. But our latest look inside the novel offers a…Read more...

A widely used and cheap steroid treatment appears to be the first to show a definitive lifesaving benefit for people with severe covid-19. In a large clinical trial funded by the UK government and others, the drug dexamethasone was found to reduce the odds of death in patients who needed a ventilator to breathe by a…Read more...

Last September, after debuting several years prior, Boston Dynamics’ impressively agile robotic dog Spot was made available to a select number of companies as an experiment to see how the robot would perform outside of the company’s R&D labs. A year later, Spot is now officially available for sale, although not…Read more...

New Zealand has identified two new cases of coronavirus after going 24 days without a single active case, according to an announcement by New Zealand health officials on Tuesday. The two cases have been identified as two women from the UK who were granted exemptions to travel within New Zealand to attend a funeral…Read more...

Approximately 40,000 years ago, back in March when time still had meaning, Lego and Nintendo made nerds weep with joy when the companies announced their first collaboration: a high-tech Super Mario that lets you build real-life video game levels for out of Lego bricks. A real-life Mario Maker, if you will. Since then,…Read more...

Top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the agency’s scientific integrity rules when they debased themselves to back up Donald Trump’s incorrect assertion that Hurricane Dorian could strike Alabama last year, an internal investigation has shown. Regardless, everyone involved…Read more...

Watching a hockey mask-wearing killer murder dozens of campers in the Friday the 13th franchise may not scream: “We need his point of view!” But it turns out horror icon Stephen King’s “best novel idea” he never penned was the story of, you guessed it, the indescribably immortal Jason Voorhees.

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a flexible smartphone that would rival some of the experimental devices we’ve seen from Samsung and Motorola—though presumably more refined, one would hope. But today in Apple rumors that make you go “...what the fuck?” the foldable iPhone might have two displays separated…Read more...

T-Mobile customers across the U.S. are reporting that they cannot send or receive phone calls, and sometimes text messages. According to TechCrunch, the outage starting around 9-10 a.m. PT (12-1 p.m. ET) this morning, and at the time of this writing, is still the No. 1 trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter.Read more...

We know that the cops surveil us at protests, which is why you generally should be cautious about posting crowd photos and get a burner. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Democratic voter registration groups have jumped on the BLM surveillance bandwagon, collaborating with the tech firms in order to identify…Read more...

Donald Trump’s ridiculous and likely unenforceable executive order demanding the Federal Communications Commission begin punishing internet companies insufficiently subservient to conservatives is drawing skepticism from his own side.

Roughly 42,922 pounds of ground beef products that were shipped to stores across the United States are being recalled over concerns that the meat may have been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.Read more...

Continue to give Tessa Thompson a sword, Hollywood. It’s the only way.

Even by the Arctic’s increasing erratic standards, it’s been a weird spring and summer in Siberia. The region of the world that’s considered a bastion of frigid temperatures and frozen landscapes is buckling under the intense pressure of the climate crisis.

Microsoft has had one heck of a time fixing bugs in its last couple of Windows 10 versions. Many users, myself included, stuck with version 1809 longer than we anticipated because of all the bugs in version 1903 when it rolled out last year. One bug prevented users from upgrading to version 1903 if they had a USB…Read more...

Both the newspaper Tulsa World and a local health official have urged Donald Trump to cancel his cursed Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is sure to be a memorable stop in his Superspreading Across America tour. The president has effectively announced, under the Trump 2020 banner, that he’s done with covid-19,…Read more...

An unfortunate reality of journalism is that, while anyone in the industry for long enough has gotten their share of death threats, some coverage—reporting on white supremacists, taking photos in a war zone, exposing deep-pocketed oil companies—simply tends to be more emotionally, physically, financially dangerous to…Read more...

A greenish-blue fireball streaked across the skies over Australia last night, in an event captured by awe-struck observers on the ground.

Github is preparing to overhaul coding terminology that has long been criticized for being racially insensitive, the company’s chief executive said.Read more...

The end of the road for a potential covid-19 treatment once heralded as a “game changer” by President Trump seems to have arrived. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency use authorization of the related drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for covid-19, after a review of the evidence led…Read more...

Money—what is it? It’s 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing website, whose official URL is moneyfactory.gov. If you’re in America, it’s green. In other countries it can be a different color, maybe even a different shape.Read more...

A few months ago, rumors started making the rounds that Microsoft’s upcoming dual-screen phone—the Surface Duo—might go on sale significantly earlier than Microsoft’s original late 2020 release date. But now, based on new rumors, it appears that one of Microsoft’s main goals for Surface Duo’s early arrival is to beat…Read more...

The fossil fuel industry rightly gets a lot of flack for how it contributes to the climate crisis, but a recent report show that greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy industry can go toe to toe with some major fossil fuel companies. Not only are emissions from dairy high, they’re also on the rise.Read more...

The Solar Orbiter project, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, has begun a critical new stage of the mission after the probe’s first close encounter with the Sun.

We’re all just going to have to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back from the comfort of our own homes.

It may not be immediately clear why a cyber libel case from the Philippines matters in the U.S., but the guilty verdict for Maria Ressa, the chief executive of an independent news site called Rappler, has serious implications for the free press and free speech worldwide.Read more...

The Lanmodo Night Vision system won’t turn your car into the Batmobile, but it definitely has that halo of techno-magic worthy of a Batman comic. It’s a night vision system in color for your car. It literally turns night into day and is so easy to use that you don’t even have to professionally install it. Which is…Read more...

All wings, report in.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have discovered a rare bone, called the os cordis, in chimpanzees with a common heart condition. The implications of this finding could extend to humans, who share a close genetic relationship to chimps.

Book-loving kids in Christiansburg, Va., are about to get a special delivery to ease the boredom of summer quarantine (and months of being stuck at home). Google will soon start dropping books to kids via its drone delivery service, Wing, according to the Washington Post. Now they can get their hands on a copy of The…Read more...

Addressing climate change will require massive investments in everything from shoring up dams that aren’t ready for future rainstorms to wind farms and workers. It’s a huge shift that will require reorienting the economy and the way the world works.Read more...