Gizmodo

The best gadget of the year is neither phone nor laptop nor smartwatch nor headphones. It’s not even something most people need. It is, instead, an automatic chicken door, a simple piece of tech that not only changed my family’s life for the better, it may have also saved my marriage.

We could all use a break from the constant flurry of phone notifications that roll in every day, but there’s always the worry that we’re going to miss something important—an urgent call from a family member, maybe. The answer is Do Not Disturb, which will block incoming alerts from everyone except a select few…Read more...

Google Nest Learning Thermostat E + Nest Mini (Gen 2) + 2-Pack Deco Smart Plugs | $130 | eBayRead more...

We’re in a pretty stable place right now when it comes to gadgets. For the most part, we’re currently stuck in a cycle of continuous, minute iterations to the same ol’ tech and it’s hard to get excited about that. But the gadgets below didn’t just end up being our favorites, they also did a good job of getting us…Read more...

According to Fox News, the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) deleted Donald Trump’s five-second scene from their recent broadcast of the 1992 movie Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. It was all anyone could talk about on conservative media yesterday, with one host on the show Fox & Friends calling it “censorship.”Read more...

Local authorities are dumbfounded by a flock of drones that recently began performing nighttime flights over northeast Colorado with no apparent purpose or operators (at least, none they’ve been able to identify so far).

YouTube promised to deal with the copyright thugs, and it’s trying, god bless its heart. The company has announced that it will be providing an “Assisted Trim” tool for vloggers to remove the allegedly infringing content in their video with one click and automatically release a content ID claim. YouTube previously…Read more...

The Federal Aviation Administration has proposed new rules for unmanned aerial vehicles that would require virtually every drone in the country to broadcast its location when flying, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. The proposal would create a de facto nationwide drone tracking network that offers the faint, misleading…Read more...

So many movies are just “fine.” Movies you sit down, watch, enjoy, and subsequently forget about. You don’t hate them, you don’t love them, they’re just OK. That’s the majority of movies. These are not those movies.Read more...

People riding electric-powered bikes are more likely to risk serious injury than those on conventional bikes and motorized scooters, according to a recent study. But e-scooters have their own unique health risks, too.Read more...

Despite the privacy concerns, labor strikes, and reports that Amazon is selling literal trash on its platform—in the face of all of the myriad reasons shoppers should have avoided buying through Amazon this year—the company still made a killing this season.Read more...

Scientists have linked two silicon quantum bits with photons over a relatively large distance. The new advance could end up being a watershed moment for a lesser-known quantum computing processor architecture, bringing silicon quantum computer a step closer to reality.Read more...

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” is a staple call-and-response of worker protests for good reason. Even without a clear antecedent, the meaning is obvious to bosses: these are out demands. Meet them, or you may find the usual means of extracting profit difficult. This week, Amazon saw the outcomes it set itself up…Read more...

The planet is in rough shape due to rising carbon emissions, and the world’s governments don’t seem to be in any hurry to change course. That has us on a collision course with dramatic climate change, and that has at least some scientists looking at a dramatic, last resort: dimming the sun to cool the Earth.Read more...

There’s a big, if unintentional, consequence of Baby Yoda’s existence. Because we were told how old the little guy is (50) and we think we have a decent understanding of how old Baby Yoda is developmentally (approximately 18 months) considering what we’ve seen of his actions so far in The Mandalorian, we can infer how…Read more...

A woman’s years-long beauty regimen caused severe mercury poisoning and irreversible neurological damage, say her doctors in a recent case report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month.Read more...

Status Audio BT Structure Wireless Earphones | $40 | Amazon | Use coupon code INVENTORY50

Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled 10-6 on Thursday that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government violated civil liberties with its April 2017 ban on access to Wikipedia, the Associated Press reports.

Peacock is getting more movies. Unfortunately, not all of them will be great.Read more...

Back in the 1960s, Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev claimed there was a secret project going on deep in the country. It had a ship—this half-plane, half-boat contraption—that was capable of breaking the land speed records of the era while carrying an unprecedented amount of cargo. These projects were called…Read more...

Social media and news headlines are ablaze with talk of the red giant star Betelgeuse since astronomers noted that it’s growing fainter than ever before. Yes, the red giant star is growing closer to the end of its life, and that end will likely be explosive.

You can get comprehensive lists of everything coming to streaming services anywhere. But half of those titles you don’t care about, and the other half are terrible. Where’s the good stuff? io9 is here to help.

Reader, I’m sure you came to Earther expecting news of the impending climate apocalypse just as I woke up today expecting to write about it. But instead we’ve both improbably arrived here, at a blog where I am about to explain that Cats is, in fact, a documentary. Or at least there’s one thing that’s not totally made…Read more...

A Holiday Decor Gold Box, EVOO 11.6" Ultra-Thin Laptop, and a Walmart Toy Clearance Sale lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

There’s a lot of reasons why you should probably chuck that DNA kit you got for Christmas in the trash. That’s doubly true for military personnel, the Pentagon warned in an internal memo.Read more...

In 1962, John F. Kennedy predicted, wrongly, that his administration would ultimately be measured by its contribution to the human spirit. Fifty-seven years and about 3,000 Wikipedia revisions later, history has proven that the only presidential measurement that matters is height—a president’s height relative to the…Read more...

In an ideal world, you’ll connect all of your devices up to fast, free-flowing wifi wherever you happen to be, but away from home you’ll often run into restrictions: Maybe only a certain number of devices can be connected per user, or maybe wired Ethernet access is free but wifi comes at a premium.Read more...

Dangerous, toxic chemicals are everywhere: in your furniture, on your walls, and even on your dinner plate. These harmful substances should’ve been banned long before they made it into anyone’s home, but perhaps they’ll finally meet their fate in the roar this new decade will bring.

Software Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

You can’t buy Tesla’s electric Cybertruck yet, but you can get a vehicle that looks pretty close. All you need is 666,666 rubles ($10,800) and a laidback attitude. Why a laidback attitude? The fake Tesla-branded hubcaps are probably going to fall off, judging by a new video of the thing tearing through a parking lot…Read more...

Holiday Decor Gold Box | Amazon

Scientists cooled LEGOs to nearly absolute zero—and hope to one day incorporate a LEGO-style material into a quantum computer.

The last solar eclipse of the decade—and the only annular solar eclipse of the year—will be visible in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa starting just a few hours after this article’s publication.

Nothing in life is as boring as email, so I’ll make this quick: If you want to achieve inbox zero—that is, no unread emails in your inbox—the best way to do it is to just click “select all” and “mark all as read.” Boom, inbox zero.

As one decade ends and another stretches out before us, it’s time to put old debates behind us and start anew. Today, we settle the debate on how long content should be.Read more...

The Green New Deal is visionary approach to climate politics and American life. If passed, it would completely transform how Americans live from where we call home to how we get our power to the fundamental outlines of the economy. It’s no small thing, and frankly, I get why it can be scary to some.Read more...

Put aside any notions that research is a dull cycle of routine. For scientists who do field work, collecting data means taking risks, exploring remote areas, sleeping outside, and encountering wild animals and extreme weather.Read more...

At least two tech review sites are discussing whether to rescind their positive recommendations of Ring’s home surveillance cameras, a leading digital-rights organization announced this week.

In a recent interview with Out, Dame Judi Dench mused about her relationship to Cats and described how she sees her character, Old Deuteronomy as trans because the role has traditionally been portrayed by male actors. Actors really do say the darnedest things, don’t they?Read more...

Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has reportedly severed ties with a company that used prison labor to place calls on behalf of Bloomberg’s presidential campaign, the Intercept reports.

A Bloomberg report on Monday evening said that ByteDance is considering selling off a majority stake in its incredibly popular and fantastically annoying music app, TikTok, amid intensifying U.S. government concerns that the China-based company is a security and espionage threat. However, the firm has denied the reportRead more...

Even viewed from a distance on Twitter, business news has developed its own subgenre of macabre spectacle: the disgrace of the corporate goon. It’s 2019, the Theranos documentary has come and gone, but not a day passes without a new tale of executive melodrama. We look on with amusement at their berserk 2 AM Twitter…Read more...

Christmas Eve news dump: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the man behind the ride-hailing company’s meteoric global rise despite its highly speculative business model that’s never turned a profit, is leaving its board of directors, Uber said in a statement on Tuesday. He’s also dumped all of his remaining stock in the…Read more...

My computer needs are different from pretty much all of my coworkers at Gizmodo. I’m not a gamer, I’m not looking to build my own PC. I don’t even need to use it to word process all that much—I’m a social editor, only occasionally moonlighting as a blogger. So when the 2012 MacBook Pro I had shat the bed two years…Read more...

It can take a new technology decades to fully mature into a product that’s reliable and genuinely useful. Computers and mobile phones have arguably reached that point, but the smart home is barely a teenager by comparison, and as it starts to go through puberty it’s revealing a troubling, rebellious side.

I love the holidays. I love the coquito, the lights, and Christmas music. In fact, I’m listening to Kacey Musgraves’ Christmas album as I write this.Read more...

It’s time to look ahead to the coming year and all things that will be happening in space exploration. With new missions to Mars, a probe returning to Earth with samples taken from an asteroid, and even more batches of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites going into orbit, it’s going to be another fascinating year.Read more...

Beleaguered taxi giants Uber and Lyft won a break on Monday, scoring victory in a New York state court dispute over a law that would have dramatically slashed the number of cars between jobs that the firms let clog up Manhattan streets, Reuters reported.

Former New York City mayor, billionaire, and longshot presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg—who is definitely, totally not just a clueless rich guy running a widely unpopular vanity campaign—is pouring a considerable portion of his gratuitous wealth into a digital advertising firm he founded this year, CNBC reported.

This past weekend, Geralt of Rivia got moody, got on his horse, and “hmmed” his way onto Netflix for the first season of The Witcher. While our review got into a few of the things that worked or didn’t over the first five episodes, with the full season out, we took a spoiler-filled look at a few of our biggest likes…Read more...