Gizmodo

Archaeologists from South Africa have uncovered rudimentary beds that early humans made by placing bundles of grass onto a layer of ash. Sounds basic, but these Stone Age beds were more sophisticated than they appear at first glance.

In two years, Greta Thunberg went from anonymous teenager to international spokesperson for the youth climate movement. To be clear, Thunberg’s role as global phenom is an unwanted one, and she’s often used her platform to highlight other young adults fighting for a habitable planet. Yet the world remains fixated on…Read more...

AMC will reopen more than 100 of its theaters next week, and to lure otherwise wary moviegoers to its cinemas, it’s offering promotional ticket pricing of just 15 cents. You’ll still have to cough up for new releases, though.Read more...

Earlier this week, the Midwest got absolutely pummeled by a powerful derecho. But the impacts were most severe in Iowa where winds cranked to 112 mph and torrential rain fell. Now, it’s becoming clear it was a disaster for farmers’ corn and soy fields that were flattened by the destructive storm.

The start of the covid-19 pandemic in the U.S. may have been earlier and far larger than official records indicate, according to a new study. Researchers found that a substantial portion of people, including children, in Seattle who were suspected of having the flu this past winter likely had covid-19 instead. It also…Read more...

For 30 years, savvy pixel-pushers have been using Photoshop to manipulate and edit imagery, but now that computers can create doctored photos all on their own using advanced AI, Adobe wants to leverage its image-editing tools to help verify the authenticity of photographs.Read more...

There are a zillion reasons why I have been mourning the Bon Appétit Test Kitchen. The one that hurts most is that the slow, drawn-out death of one of the most joyful YouTube channels on the internet could have easily been prevented.Read more...

The Most Magical Place on Earth might be open during a global pandemic, but at least its cast members now have a place nearby to see if it’s impacted them. Walt Disney World finally has a covid-19 testing center that can serve park employees and their families, following repeated demands from one of the park’s unions.Read more...

Just months after launching a tentpole service that touts Crunchyroll as one of its premium offerings, AT&T may be exploring a sale of the anime streaming property.Read more...

A wise colleague once told me I should never have anything on in the background just to have it on. He’s probably right, but I still like to pop on a show while I’m cooking dinner, tidying up, or working on home improvement projects. The noise is soothing to me, but cable, with its weird programming choices and…Read more...

Hurricane season and mismanagement are fucking with utilities up and down the East Coast and continuing nationwide lockdowns are causing people’s energy bills to soar. More than 165,000 Americans have died from covid-19 and some states are setting worrisome records. But there’s a bigger threat out there to our…Read more...

Whether you believe that Neil Young is the lord of Luddites or a clear-eyed prophet of our impending digital destruction, most of us can probably agree that Facebook sucks. But not all of us take action to entirely disentangle ourselves from Facebook, and this is the difference between mortals and Neil Young. The…Read more...

Following the debut of the Galaxy Note 20 Ultra, Samsung Display has officially announced commercial availability of its new mobile screens with support for variable refresh rates which offer both improved smoothness and lower power consumption.Read more...

As Uber publicly grapples with the moral dilemma of having built an entire-ass company around exploitative wage practices, the CEO Dara Khosrowshahi now says that if California forces the company to reclassify its contractors as full-time employees, Uber will temporarily shut down in its home state. Conveniently, it…Read more...

Blade Runner’s jaw-dropping aesthetic runs deep in the modernized world of Denis Villeneuve’s follow-up, Blade Runner 2049, making for one of the most gorgeous sci-fi movies in recent memory. Now, a new book wants to dive into the art that helped envision that world, and its parallels to the original film.Read more...

David Applegate runs a site called WrestlingMart. It’s an ecommerce store dedicated to, well, wrestling. In his five years in business, he always wanted to know where his suppliers were getting the gear he sold, including singlets, shoes, and mat tape.Read more...

The veepstakes is over. Let the analysis begin!Read more...

The world can be utterly bleak nowadays. A government that seems to actively hate health and science, an economy ruled by a handful of lying billionaires, and continued state-sanctioned violence against Black people have ushered in a modern dystopia. But as I finished Deathless Divide, Justina Ireland’s stellar follow…Read more...

There was a time when compromising on hardware for your DIY PC build meant seriously compromising on performance. But with AMD able to shrink down its transistor size to 7nm on its Zen 2 architecture, and Intel able to squeeze more and more out of its 14nm process for several generations, even the most budget of…Read more...

Scientists have identified the pheromone responsible for turning individual locusts into the swarming variety. They also found a way to “turn off” locusts’ ability to respond to this pheromone, in a breakthrough that could lead to new control strategies for preventing the spread of these voracious and extremely…Read more...

Leaves from the vine. Avatar: The Last Airbender co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko have announced they will no longer be involved in the live-action adaptation due to a lack of support from Netflix. The series could still happen, but both creators said it would not represent the show they wanted…Read more...

In a tale of an allegedly crooked sheriff caught abusing his power, the New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that forcing a suspect to unlock their iPhones doesn’t run afoul of the Fifth Amendment.Read more...

Billionaire tech legend Bill Gates says testing for coronavirus in the U.S. has been a “screw-job” that’s providing very little value because test results aren’t coming back quickly enough. Most Americans are waiting several days and sometimes weeks to get their covid-19 test results, something that Gates says can be…Read more...

Six years ago, SnapPower introduced its original Guidelight which cleverly turned plastic outlet covers into LED nightlights without requiring any wiring. A few iterations later, the company’s new ConnectLight introduces motion sensing and wireless connectivity that can be installed without an electrician, or even a…Read more...

Anker Soundcore Life P2 | $40 | AmazonRead more...

The Boys recruits an Iceman to play with fire. Netflix is making a new sci-fi “eco-fable” for kids. Nickelodeon’s weird plans for Spongebob expand with another new spinoff. Plus, Agents of SHIELD looks back ahead of its grand finale, and a new tease for Hulu’s take on Clive Barker’s Books of Blood. Spoilers now!

When most people think of Apple, video games aren’t the first thing to come to mind. Photo- or video-editing, of course, or some other type of creative work, but not gaming. That’s because of the way Apple designs and markets its products.Read more...

TCL has revealed the prices for its new 2020 5-Series and 6-Series TVs, and like other newer models from many of its competitors this year, the company is definitely attempting to woo gamers.Read more...

Featured Deal: Sonos One (Gen 2, Used) | $169Read more...

Google is giving its little-used Chrome apps functionality—which many users might not even remember exists—a reprieve from its execution date.

Microsoft has stopped mincing words, and in a statement shared with Gizmodo, claims that Apple is entirely to blame for the lack of cloud gaming apps and subscription services on iOS.

Earlier today, a Twitter user leaked 20GB worth of confidential Intel documents stored on a file-sharing service—documents that the Twitter user claims they received from an anonymous hacker. According to the leaker, the folder contains classified information under NDA, and the hacker who provided the documents to…Read more...

Lightning and hailstones exist on Jupiter, but they’re of a very different sort than the ones we’re familiar with on Earth, as new research suggests.

Microsoft’s cloud gaming service, Project xCloud, seems to be running into the same issues as its competitors have—specifically, Apple’s guidelines are reportedly making it difficult for xCloud to get into the App Store. So Microsoft has decided to end its Project xCloud preview period using the iOS TestFlight app, …Read more...

In its latest spin around the misinformation merry-go-round, Facebook has temporarily restricted a pro-Trump super PAC that’s spent nearly $10 million in the 2020 election cycle from placing ads for repeatedly sharing lies, the company told Gizmodo in a statement.

Your car’s dashboard is a smorgasbord of information when it comes to the health and performance of your vehicle. But the one thing it can’t warn drivers about is when the tread on their tires has worn out. It’s a safety risk that researchers from Carnegie Mellon University are focusing on with a new real-time…Read more...

When Microsoft officially emerged as the frontrunner for a potential acquisition of the teen-fave-turned-national-security-concern TikTok earlier this week, tech critics ‘round the globe found themselves with an endless set of questions that seemingly nobody could answer. Why would a company as corporate as Microsoft…Read more...

Late last year, Intel sold off its smartphone modem business to Apple for around $1 billion, but that still left Intel with the problem of figuring out how to add 5G connectivity to its laptop and PC business. So in an effort to support next-gen connectivity, Intel has teamed up with MediaTek to bring 5G to a wider …Read more...

The authors of a high-profile study published earlier this year, in which the scientists claimed to have discovered the world’s smallest dinosaur, have now retracted the paper in response to new fossil evidence.

Anything is possible when it comes to ice these warming days: disappearing ice caps, newly discovered penguin colonies, and now, crumbling glaciers threatening the lives of dozens of people.Read more...

The U.S. Senate passed a bill on Thursday prohibiting federal workers from downloading TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app the White House has recently threatened to ban citing national security concerns.

It can be hard to resist the impulse of sharing your fitness progress on social media. Who can say no to the dopamine rush of random people and friends cheering you on? You. That’s who. Don’t be the dingbat who advertises where you’ll likely be on a regular, reoccurring basis!Read more...

The cartoons of the 1980s produced some of the most iconic villains of all time: Skeletor. Cobra Commander. Megatron. Shredder. How could a less-intriguing ‘90s cartoon like Captain Planet and the Planeteers ever hope to create bad guys so memorable, so significant as to compare with these pillars of animated evil?…Read more...

For the past few months, a lot of folks—this reporter included—have watched their favorite local bookstores, pizza joints, and coffeeshops get systematically gutted by the economic tumult that came with the current pandemic. Back in April, academics predicted that this economic carnage would result in over 100,000 of…Read more...

If you’re anything like me, you have multiple Apple devices in your home and have become accustomed to seamlessly handing off tasks between them. I can start searching for furniture on my phone and then click Safari to pick up the search on my larger MacBook screen. Or I can send a text on my iPad and then resume the…Read more...

A man’s encounter with covid-19 likely led to him experiencing life-threatening catatonia that erased days of his memory, according to doctors in Sweden. Though the man was able to recover without serious brain damage thanks to prompt treatment, the doctors warn that the man’s case may highlight a never-before-seen…Read more...

It’s been two days since Hurricane Isaias swept over the East Coast, but thousands of people are still without power. In Massachusetts, National Grid estimates some may not have their utilities back on until Saturday afternoon. In parts of New York City, which is facing its largest power outage since Hurricane Sandy,…Read more...

Apple has just announced the availability of the Public Beta for macOS Big Sur. This new version of macOS does away with a lot of the old and familiar design tropes associated with OS X and leans more heavily on touchscreen-style interfaces - a nod to the slow convergence of macOS and iOS.Read more...

The U.S. Army says it will restore Americans’ God-given right to shitpost on its esports channel, the premier destination for watching your favorite former sniper shoot up digital Middle Eastern villages. The Verge reports that the Army has decided to unban pesky anti-war Twitch commenters, with caveats ensuring that,…Read more...

Perhaps you, like me, are done with the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season. Well, sucks to be us, because the heart of the season is still ahead, and a new forecast issued Thursday calls for the already hyperactive season to ramp up.Read more...