Gizmodo

As the world struggles to contain covid-19, we’re reminded of the ways viruses aren’t like other organisms. In fact, these tenacious microbes defy traditional notions of life itself.Read more...

Donald Trump claimed on Monday evening that he would be temporarily suspending all immigration to the U.S., ostensibly due to the novel coronavirus pandemic but more likely as an extreme political ploy to rally his supporters amid massive disruptions to everyday life and an economy in the gutter.

The state of Georgia is moving ahead with a plan to re-open businesses shut down during the coronavirus pandemic as soon as this Friday, April 24, Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced on Monday.

High school grad Laurel (Supergirl’s Nicole Maines) packs up her car, reassures her parents, and heads to Los Angeles—where she soon encounters a big-city phenomenon far from her wildest dreams: a bubblegum-chewing, all-girl gang of sarcastic vampires! Horror comedy Bit gives us a taste in its new trailer.Read more...

I fondly remember the days when Apple events were packed with surprises (and “one more thing”), but those are long, long gone. The leaks are now rolling out earlier—and with more detail—then ever before, with a slate of new products reportedly on deck for this fall.Read more...

Last week, DC Comics made waves when it announced its plans to begin shipping a limited number of new titles to select brick-and-mortar comic book shops across the country. This was meant to be independent and ahead of Diamond Comics Distributors, which stopped distributing comics earlier this year due to the ongoing…Read more...

It’s my birthday, I’ll shitpost if I want to. That’s right, I’m the MFing 4/20 baby and we’ve managed to survive an hour past the most epic 4:20 on 4/20/2020 of our lives. In the event that for some reason makes us hungry for savory junk food and/or sweets, somebody needs to make a snack run, and I’m the trash grub…Read more...

Does it really take years of practice and dedication on the basketball court to compete with the talents of NBA players? Apparently not. All you need is some basic knowledge of physics, access to computer simulation software, and enough tools to build a curved backboard that directs every shot through the hoop.Read more...

Reddit, your suspicions are verified: the anti-quarantine movement is largely being spearheaded by a squadron of pro-gun organizers, the Washington Post first reported.

New research shows that exposure to air pollution may be “one of the most important contributors to fatality” caused by covid-19.

Now that they can reliably navigate your home, avoid trouble, and run for hours, we’re starting to see other innovations introduced for robot vacuums. The HaierTab Tabot not only includes a built-in mop and a removable hand vac, it’s also the first robovac that can cut hair so it’s easier to vacuum up.Read more...

Uber recently expanded its services to include grocery deliveries as a direct result of the covid-19 pandemic. Now the company is adding two more delivery services, Uber Direct and Uber Connect, according to an announcement it released yesterday. Both are only available in select cities in specific countries to…Read more...

Given the current state of the world, certain sci-fi stories have begun to feel like they contain eerie predictions rather than speculation. Over the years, io9 has shared a diverse variety of book excerpts and short stories exploring dystopian futures and altered realities. Here are 10 worth revisiting now.

Doctors say a woman’s silicone breast implants deflected what could have been a fatal bullet, stopping it from reaching her heart. Amazingly, this is not the first time such a thing has been reported in the medical literature.

Weeks after announcing that it would provide necessary personal protective equipment to its workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, Instacart has evidently failed to effectively get these vital resources into the hands of its hundreds of thousands of shoppers even as they continue risking their health…Read more...

Tests designed to identify people with covid-19 antibodies, but which sometimes yield negative results even in infected patients, have been falsely advertised by some test makers as effective in the screening of potential covid-19 patients.

A few weeks ago, Facebook began rolling out an opt-in survey for people in the U.S. to self-report their covid-19 symptoms to help Carnegie Mellon researchers identify infection hotspots. Today, the researchers have launched a website for their findings, while Facebook has turned the aggregated data into an …Read more...

There’s a photo of President Lyndon B. Johnson currently circulating on Twitter that purports to show LBJ overcome with emotion at the thought of so many deaths during the Vietnam War. It’s an iconic image, but the photo is being taken out of context. In reality, Johnson probably isn’t mourning the deaths of 40,000…Read more...

Surprisingly, The Flash standalone has been brought forward? About time that movie got news that wasn’t a director leaving.

If you get carried away with setting up helpful reminders, eventually you’ll get tired of your smart speaker’s endless nagging and will start ignoring it. But what if instead of Siri or Alexa reminding you to water the plants or that your Pop Tarts are ready, it sounded like your ficus or your toaster was actually…Read more...

In the same way my tiny daughter looks forward to Christmas all year, all of us who are physically distancing look forward to “things reopening.” Reopening is more a wish than a plan, since most likely we’ll face months of adjusting restriction. We just want things to be back to normal, right? Well, the World Health…Read more...

From airlines flying ghost flights to simultaneous food shortages and overproduction, coronavirus is making the absurdity of how markets function very clear. Now, amid the collapse of the global oil market, traders are spending millions of dollars a day to store a record amount of unused crude oil on giant container…Read more...

There’s a brand new display technology in town, and it’s called mini-LED. Should it be in your next television set? Is it ever going to make its way to your mobile phone? Why, exactly, is it superior to existing screen tech? Here we’ll explain everything you need to know about mini-LED.

Harley Quinn’s season two premiere opened with a dramatic turn of events plucked right out of DC Comics’ massive Batman: No Man’s Land. That event had the U.S. government evacuating the city, destroying all of the bridges connecting it to the rest of the country, and leaving it to be taken over by the whole of Batman’sRead more...

Nursing is a rather straightforward process for most terrestrial mammals, but the same cannot be said for humpback whales, in which a swimming mother and calf have to carefully coordinate their movements. Unprecedented video taken off the coast of Hawaii shows this delicate process in action.

Despite the Constitution granting us the right to peaceful assembly, many states have been pushing forth laws to make that a crime. That’s not only a bad idea but an incredibly dangerous one.Read more...

Many forms of so-called digital money aren’t actually so new or innovative—nor actual ‘money,’ in most cases—and often have a number of key aspects in common. The ways in which they differ, may be our best indicators for whether this or that payment system or crypto-coin will survive, or simply end up worthless.Read more...

BP’s Deepwater Horizon platform exploded 10 years ago today, but the Gulf of Mexico may never be the same. That’s especially true for the deep seas around the site, where researchers have yet to see any major improvement in the decade following the environmental disaster that saw nearly 5 million barrels of oil gush…Read more...

Patty Jenkins teases Cheetah’s life of crime in Wonder Woman 1984. The surprise next season of Lucifer has hit a roadblock. There’s already plans for a second season of Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop adaptation. Plus, Neil Gaiman offers an update on the Sandman show, what’s to come on Westworld, and Archie and Betty bunker up…Read more...

The Australian government aims to force Google and Facebook to share advertising revenue with newspaper publishers in Australia, according to the country’s top financial authority, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. The details of an ad sales sharing plan still need to be worked out, but if it’s successfully implemented, it…Read more...

A couple years back, a team of research psychologists ID’d a phenomenon called “cute aggression,” wherein the sight of something cute (an infant, a puppy) paradoxically yields statements like ‘I just want to kill it!!’ The term pinpointed something universal and more or less instantly went viral, and a couple of years…Read more...

Amazon Fire TV Recast (1TB, 150 Hours) | $195 | Amazon

This is what we’ve been waiting for. Even more than last week’s excellent enigmatic episode, tonight’s Westworld felt more authentic to the first two seasons of the show in ways that were wonderful—and occasionally jaw-dropping—to behold. It was a violent delight from start to end.

To echo something I’ve been seeing on social media this week: Today is Sunday. Yes, I am very sure. Has anyone else found that their sense of time has been skewed by the lockdown or is it just me? I have been wrong about what the day it was at least twice this week.Read more...

Next week marks the 30th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch, and NASA’s celebrating its birthday with another launch: a new search feature to find out what out-of-this-world photo Hubble captured on your birthday.

The coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly upended our normal lives and wreaked tragedy across the U.S. However, this doesn’t mean we can’t still live and celebrate important moments. In New York, people staying at home can add one more thing to the list of things they can do during the pandemic: get married.Read more...

With so many people turning to video games to while away their newfound time stuck indoors, Facebook is releasing a dedicated mobile app for Facebook Gaming months ahead of schedule to try to capitalize on the recent surge of viewership seen on other livestreaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube.

We’ve see apes rise in the Muir Woods, reign supreme among the treetops, and even travel back in time to our reality. But we often forget that Planet of the Apes is based on a novel, and the Folio Society’s new edition of that novel is filled with beautiful illustrations, which portray the planet of the apes in a…Read more...

Although Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the photo sharing app they created in 2018, which is owned by Facebook, they apparently aren’t done working together. Their latest project is Rt.live, a state-by-state covid-19 infection tracker.Read more...

Spider-Can, Spider-Can, full of moldy pasta-shaped-man...

With cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, at more than 70 of its warehouse and delivery facilities in the U.S., Amazon has started to use thermal cameras to scan for fevers faster. The new measures were first reported by Reuters.Read more...

Several preeminent states in the European Union are backing Bluetooth-based, contact-tracing technology to help map the spread of the novel coronavirus outbreak via smartphone apps, Reuters reported this week. This news comes courtesy of German tech entrepreneur Chris Boos, a major coordinator behind the project…Read more...

As a consequence of comic book stores across the country being forced to shut their doors amongst the novel coronavirus outbreak, the comic book industry as a whole all but came to a stop. Diamond Comics, which essentially has a monopoly on comics distribution, halted shipping and it was unclear how and when the…Read more...

Coronavirus testing is a confusing and challenging topic in the U.S., and Google knows that. That’s why the next time you search for a topic in Google related to covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, you’ll also see information on more than 2,000 testing centers in 43 states in the U.S.Read more...

Infinity Train is a beautiful show that surprised us every episode with its barrage of unique train cars. But it’s not always about how a show looks—what’s also important is how it sounds. We’ve got an exclusive peek behind the scenes at the sound design of Infinity Train, and we also talked with the man behind the…Read more...

Anyone else feel like this week was especially...you know. After over a month of social distancing with not much of an end in sight, things can start feeling overwhelming. So we’ve put together an amazing playlist of lofi beats, ambient sounds, and other calming experiences to keep calm and nerd on.

The current shortage of Nintendo Switch consoles is frustrating many and it seems resellers and bots are partly to blame for the current situation.Read more...

Monday, April 20, was supposed to be the most epic 4/20 of our lifetime: the once-in-a-century date on which 4/20 can refer to either the day of the month or the year. But the spread of Covid-19, which has grown to more than 2.1 million cases and 140,000 deaths, 4/20/20 will be a more subdued day than I anticipated.Read more...

San Francisco residents will now be required to wear face masks when out in public and violators could face fines or even jail time, according to a local health order issued Friday.

Next month, NASA will launch its first astronaut mission from U.S. soil in almost a decade. This mission marks the final test for SpaceX before NASA begins regularly ferrying astronauts into orbit using the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft.