Gizmodo

In the shadow of Mount Rushmore on Friday, President Donald Trump decided to celebrate the nation’s Independence Day by launching a diatribe against liberals, cancel culture, and the “angry mobs” of protestors toppling statues of colonizers and white supremacists. While that may just sound like another Friday at this…Read more...

Happy Fourth of July?Read more...

New Zealand is handling covid-19 better than most, with ongoing cases in the country down to a handful. That makes it a promising place to resume production on all those TV shows and movies we love, and the country has recently authorized a handful of productions to resume or begin inside the country’s borders.Read more...

Phineas and Ferb, the well-liked Disney cartoon with the extremely angular-headed protagonist, has been off the air for a solid five years now, which makes the impending release of a movie very welcome. Now that movie has a release date.Read more...

We’ve all heard the story. A family comes from the old country. They work hard. They hope. They dream. One of them… gets preserved in pickle brine.Read more...

Depending on where you live, you might have zero appetite for fireworks shows right now. It’s been a rough year, so why not unwind this Independence Day (or regular Saturday for non-Americans) with nature’s fireworks with the assorted creatures of the deep sea?Read more...

Final Fantasy VII Remake: World Preview | $22 | AmazonRead more...

Logitech G610 Backlit Mechanical Gaming Keyboard (Refurbished) | $73 | Daily Steals | Use code KJORIONRead more...

On Friday, YouTuber Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson cut off a massive competition that saw more than 1 million players face off for a $25,000 prize for whoever could keep their finger attached to their phone screen the longest. After more than 70 hours and with the last four contestants showing no signs of giving up,…Read more...

It really should be obvious at this point, but with America continuing to surpass previous records for daily new coronavirus cases, a warning seems warranted: If you plan on getting together with people to celebrate the Fourth of July this weekend, wear a mask.Read more...

Scientists have detected snake-like dental glands in caecilians, which means these serpentine creatures might actually be venomous—an unheard of trait among amphibians.

A house with a sprawling lawn might be the aspiration of anyone stuck in a tiny apartment, but there’s a downside to that dream: your lawn doesn’t cut itself. To make the weekly chore more bearable, Jason Hibbs of Bourbon Moth Woodworking turned his riding mower into a miniature tank that mows down everything in its…Read more...

Over 350 elephants have died in Botswana since March, sparking a government probe to investigate the mysterious deaths.

Somehow, 2010's Inception has suddenly become topical again—an idea that seems like it was mysteriously planted in our minds by Leonardo DiCaprio himself. In reality, though, people are talking about Christopher Nolan’s trippy hit for a few good reasons: the film has been a Netflix staple for all of 2020 (when lots of…Read more...

Over the years, Festo, a German automation company with a penchant for robots, has designed countless Mother Nature-inspired automatons that swim, hop, and fly like their real-world counterparts. That includes robotic birds, which have now been upgraded with fake feathers that allow the robots to soar through the air…Read more...

Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone is back, an occasion that made us think of another 1960s anthology series that’s been put through the remake machine: The Outer Limits. With its emphasis on sci-fi—especially aliens and uncanny tech—the original episodes of The Outer Limits excelled at preying on Cold War fears. We’ve…Read more...

An amateur astronomer in South Africa has detected a bright new surface feature rising above the cloud tops on Jupiter.

Doom Patrol’s always had a habit of coming on a bit strong (in a good way) by doing away with the narrative pacing that most other cape shows tend to stick with over the course of a season in favor of getting to the point. Though “Sex Patrol” is only the fourth episode of the show’s second season, it feels very much…Read more...

A United Nations council of 36 countries has agreed on a major change to the main global scheme addressing the climate impact of aviation, a move expected to remove requirements for airlines to offset emissions for several years.

Countless companies have tried to dethrone Sony from its noise-cancelling headphone throne, but none have succeeded. Now Razer is taking a different approach with its first pair of headphones designed for a wider consumer audience—not just gamers—by paying homage to the Queen with a look that emulates Sony’s excellent…Read more...

Apple has finally announced its long-rumored transition away from Intel chips and will now make its own homegrown CPUs based on the ARM architecture for future Macs. The company’s goal is to shed its dependence on Intel so that it can control even more of its production and development pipeline. It’s an interesting…Read more...

Lifewit 17" Military Laptop Messenger Bag | $25 | Amazon | Use code VDHKQ638Read more...

Razer Blade 15 Gaming Laptop | $1,100 | Amazon

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to advance the EARN IT Act, a ruinous waste of bipartisanship that once threatened to destroy online platforms should they refuse to grant federal agencies unfettered access to the private communications of their users. The bill was designed to preclude…Read more...

Google announced Wednesday that it had implemented its SmartReply system for YouTube creators, which will give those users access to suggested replies based on what someone has commented. Unlike the SmartReply system Google currently uses for Gmail, SmartReply on YouTube required some further tweaking because of the…Read more...

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot announced today in an email to employees that the game publisher will be revising the composition of its currently all white male Editorial Department which oversees creative decisions across all of its global studios. He also outlined other measures to try to address a recent wave of…Read more...

Popular Information recently exposed how the Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s right-wing news aggregator, was able to get an unusually high engagement rate on Facebook, even though the website publishes far fewer articles than other major publications and does no original reporting of its own. Through a network of five large…Read more...

This week, Democrats on the House Select Committee for the Climate Crisis put out their big ol’ climate plan. There’s plenty in the report to show Democrats’ priorities on climate should they retake the White House and Senate this fall, including how they would approach a controversial topic.

It’s safe to say that white America’s general image of police officers has taken a bit of a nosedive. A role that some folks respected more than members of Congress just last year has, in the span of about a month or so, become one that they’re terrified of, if not actively fighting to abolish altogether. And rather…Read more...

With so many people now video-conferencing while working from home, webcams have suddenly become hard to find—a number of top models are sold out or have seen massive price hikes. So to help make video calls a little easier to setup, today Olympus is introducing a new app that can turn your mirrorless camera into a…Read more...

Korolev crater on Mars—the largest ice skating rink in the solar system, basically—has never looked more enthralling than it does in this impressive new visualization.

The Great Barrier Reef has been having a rough year. Warm waters have led to record coral bleaching this year and could hasten the reef’s die-off. But while surface corals are suffering, nearly a mile beneath the surface, deep-sea corals near the Great Barrier Reef are thriving.Read more...

Facebook is facing new allegations of racial discrimination by an African American manager and two Black job applicants whose qualifications reportedly exceeded the requirements but were nevertheless rejected, according to the Washington Post.

For a long time, different people would typically give you different answers about which Silicon Valley giant is, definitively, The Worst. Recently though, Facebook seems to be the name that comes up first in a lot of people’s minds, for any number of reasons. Maybe it’s the way the company’s CEO just stood there…Read more...

When news broke earlier this year that Apple had snapped up Dark Sky, the weather app said at the time that while the app would continue working for iOS users, it would be shut down for Android and Wear OS users and subscribers beginning July 1.

If you’ve got a mountain of digital data to store but don’t necessarily need to access it every day, tape cartridges are the way to go. Twelve terabytes of storage will set you back about $100 these days, but in the coming years, Fujifilm believes it can push the technology to 400TB capacities in a single cartridge.

New research this week describes some of the harrowing and possibly long-term neurological complications that can happen in children who develop a mysterious condition linked to covid-19. They can suffer everything from headaches to muscle weakness, along with visible signs of damage to the brain.Read more...

Cue up “Mad World” and reflect on the folly of having more money than sense: Facebook confirmed today that it’s shitcanning Lasso and Hobbi, two sad products you’ve probably never heard of.Read more...

At least 40 school administrators in Santa Clara County, California—the heart of Silicon Valley—have been forced to self-quarantine following an in-person meeting last month attended by someone who later tested positive for covid-19. Ironically, the subject of the meeting was how to safely reopen K-12 schools in the…Read more...

The Pixel 3a has been one of our favorite phones over the past year, but it seems its time has come to an end as Google has confirmed that the Pixel 3a has been officially discontinued.Read more...

Hello. My name is James. I am ostensibly an adult. And, like The Mandalorian’s Din Djarin before me, I am the proud adoptive father of Baby Yoda. And Baby Yoda. And the other Baby Yoda. In fact, I have seven of them so far and have no intention of stopping.

A new bird song is spreading like wildfire among Canadian white-throated sparrows, at a scale not seen before by scientists.

Are you a frontline worker dealing with new stresses or irresponsible management? Is working (or not working) from home starting to take a psychological toll? How are you coping with reopening? Submit a story using this Google form or send me an email with the subject line “My Covid Story” and provide as…Read more...

The wildfire crisis in Siberia continues unabated. This year’s blazes have smashed records, including the northernmost fires on record and the highest total of Siberian carbon emissions. If you want to know what a climate emergency looks like, this is it.

Earlier this week, MIT permanently pulled its 80 Million Tiny Images dataset—a popular image database used to train machine learning systems to identify people and objects in an environment. The reason? It used racist, misogynistic, and other offensive terms to label photos.Read more...

Cheap smartwatches have come a long way in the last few years. If you wanted a good-looking watch with a color AMOLED touchscreen and built-in GPS-tracking, it would’ve once set you back at least $300. Now, there’s a whole slew of devices that offer a range of basic smartwatch features for under $200. Timex’s new…Read more...

As movie theaters struggle to re-open and attract patrons again, even while the Covid-19 pandemic rages on, they’ll be facing yet another obstacle to financial recovery this summer as Walmart has revealed plans to turn its parking lots into drive-in movie theaters starting in August.

Jason Momoa is the reason for the season in Warner Bros.’ new... Frosty the Snowman movie? The Conjuring 3 might just conjure itself out 2020 entirely. Power Rangers’ new showrunner discusses adapting Ryusoulger for the west. Plus, what’s to come on the next Agents of SHIELD, and Lovecraft Country sets a start date.…Read more...

Pre-order Cyberpunk 2077 (PS4, Xbox One, PC) | $50 | AmazonRead more...

New Zealand’s top health official stepped down on Thursday following a relatively minor scandal that shows the enormous difference in how the U.S. and other wealthy countries are dealing with the covid-19 pandemic.Read more...