Gizmodo

Aquatic, worm-like animals capable of crawling through mud appeared at least 550 million years ago, according to new fossil evidence. The discovery is helping to resolve a longstanding question as to when segmented, mobile animals first appeared on the planet.

Casually browsing the web comes with the expectation that you’re probably going to be tracked by data brokers who are thirsty for your internet habits, but one might also expect that on certain corners of the web, your information is treated with more sensitivity. But a new report found that even on mental health…Read more...

In the digital age, hoaxes and disinformation pop up whenever there’s severe weather. But in the dark hellscape of 2019, the president is now a prime purveyor of weather disinformation.

Gaming laptops were out in force today at IFA in Berlin, as both Acer and Asus held their main press conferences just before Europe’s biggest consumer electronics show opens to the public. But while I was buried in computers of all shapes and sizes, two beefy gaming laptops caught my eye: The Acer Predator Triton 500…Read more...

Lab animals are used in all sorts of bizarre experiments, but a new study this week is definitely one for the scrapbook. A team of researchers in Korea and the U.S. got rats addicted to alcohol, then attempted to alleviate their withdrawal symptoms using acupuncture. And according to their data, the treatment was…Read more...

Very little is known about the Denisovans—a mysterious group of hominins that lived alongside early humans and Neanderthals during the last Ice Age. New research has revealed a Denisovan finger bone that’s unexpectedly human-like in shape—an odd observation, given the close relation of Denisovans to Neanderthals,…Read more...

Washington Governor Jay Inslee may have ridden off into the sunset away from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, but his influence continues to manifest itself—if you know where to look.

Less than a week after CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account was compromised by hackers, actress Chloë Grace Moretz—the 22-year-old actress of Kick-Ass fame—briefly lost control of her account as well.Read more...

Michigan on Wednesday became the first state to ban flavored e-cigarettes in a measure that Governor Gretchen Whitmer said is meant to help curb the use of the products by youth—and one that comes as teen vaping continues to skyrocket.Read more...

We’re back with a new season of Show Me Your Nerd, the show that documents the biggest nerds with the biggest collections. And there are few phone fans as passionate as the self-styled Motorola King of Montevideo, Uruguay. Felipe Berhau fell in love with Motorola when he was just 8 years old. He didn’t care that the…Read more...

Fallen AirPods are a plague upon New York City.Read more...

A particular type of app is back in the news on the back of the Hong Kong protests: Mesh messaging apps that allow users to keep in touch without relying on wifi networks, cell networks, or any other type of infrastructure controlled by the authorities... and these apps can be useful whether or not you’re trying to…Read more...

We’ve mentioned it before, but here’s a gentle reminder: Amazon isn’t the only company making ereaders. Sure, Amazon has a huge chunk of the market for ebooks, and its ereaders sync seamlessly with Amazon’s services creating an addictive and difficult-to-escape ecosystem. But other companies make great ereaders that…Read more...

The story of Gilead will continue. Hulu and MGM have signed on to adapt Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, the upcoming sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, a fresh look at life both in and out of Gilead that stars two new protagonists...along with a very familiar face.Read more...

The 2020 Porsche Taycan electric performance sedan is here, delivering on just about every promise of the stunning Mission E concept car. The Turbo name confusingly carries over from Porsche’s normie lineup, but who cares when the Taycan Turbo S puts out 750 horsepower.Read more...

Over the weekend, Abaco and Grand Bahama islands took a direct hit from Hurricane Dorian when it was at its peak intensity. Its winds of 185 mph and powerful storm surge washed over the Bahamas’ islands, destroying or damaging an estimated 13,000 homes. Seven people are confirmed dead, and the death toll is expected…Read more...

James Gunn talks about one of the most requested songs for Guardians 3. Scooby and the Gang wax lyrical about Elvira in a new Return to Zombie Island clip. Plus, new posters for It Chapter Two and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, what’s to come on Killjoys and Batwoman, and a very emotional set of Riverdale pictures.…Read more...

Roku is charging further into the home audio zone with a new soundbar that also works as a Roku set-top box. In other words, the new Roku soundbar turns any TV into a smart TV that’s running Roku software supporting 4K HDR content. Oh, also, Roku made a beastly subwoofer to round out its speaker lineup.Read more...

AUKEY Power Strip Surge Protector with 8 Outlets and 2 USB Charging Ports | $24 | Amazon | Promo code 4JKEH4A8Read more...

With the Light Phone 2, the team behind the minimally-minded Light Phone that blew up on Kickstarter in 2015 continues to explore the balance between being connected and preserving your mental health. It’s a spare, standalone handset that rethinks how smart a smartphone actually needs to be.Read more...

Building on the success of Max-Q design, its guidelines for slim laptops sporting powerful graphics, Nvidia announced a new reference design today dubbed “Ace.” Reference designs are blueprints for building specific devices with a lot of the engineering guesswork already done by someone else. The Ace reference design…Read more...

Lockdown drills have become the norm as schools across the U.S. are forced to grapple with the threat of potential mass shootings every single day. But these schools are also being designed in new ways to minimize the number of deaths during a mass shooting. And this segment from NBC News shows just how strange things…Read more...

Growing up in the 1980s, I was a huge Star Wars fan. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was The Empire Strikes Back. I loved it. Like everyone else, I eagerly awaited Lucas’ overdue return to the director’s chair. And in 1994, I wrote him a letter asking about the then-unmade future episodes.

Thanks to PC gaming, fancy mice with high with DPI sensors and tactile mechanical keyboards have become a lot more popular. Yet when it comes to productivity, Logitech’s MX-series mice are pretty much unmatched, nd with the new MX Master 3, Logitech has propelled its flagship mouse into a class of its own.Read more...

The Razer Blade Stealth is an outstanding laptop. There are few laptops under $2,000 that deliver its combination of attractive, compact design, performance, and available inputs. But they do exist, and a 13-inch laptop with a wimpy discrete GPU is no longer nearly as impressive as it once was. Huawei and HP make…Read more...

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that “more than half of the nation’s state attorneys general” have signed on to and are preparing an antitrust investigation against digital titan Google, with the paper writing the inquiry is “scheduled to be announced next week, marking a major escalation in U.S. regulators’…Read more...

Amazon is “quietly testing scanners that can identify an individual human hand as a way to ring up a store purchase” with the aim of rolling it out at retail locations, specifically its subsidiary Whole Foods, per a Tuesday report in the New York Post.

It is September, which means we are firmly in the grasp of Big Pumpkin Spice until at least March. Krispy Kreme has decided to celebrate the onslaught of pumpkin spiced everything (and I mean everything) by “bringing back” its “famous” Pumpkin Spice Donut, and now there’s fucking cheesecake inside it for some reason.Read more...

After the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reversed a policy prohibiting officers from creating fake social media profiles to monitor people entering and leaving the country last week—something that would amount to a middle finger pointed directly at many tech firms’ terms of…Read more...

The fact we’re getting lavish collections of classic Doctor Who seasons on Blu-ray is already a very good thing. But the BBC’s choice to market them with what are essentially little short films catching us up with where heroes of Who’s past are now is perhaps the greatest part of it all.

Facebook says it’s giving the ax to one face-scanning tool and introducing a wider rollout for another—this time by giving users a heads up about it first.Read more...

The government agency known for developing wild technology like a penny-sized vacuum, enigmatic sky balloons, and a shit-ton of robots is now tasked with solving perhaps the greatest threat to democracy—misinformation.

Senator Cory Booker’s got his eye on the White House, but the Democratic presidential candidate’s roots stretch back to the suburbs of Newark, New Jersey. This city is now facing a massive water crisis as lead leaches into its water supply. In his newly released climate plan on Tuesday, Booker vows to prevent such a…Read more...

Some Tesla users who rely on the app to gain entry to their Model 3 were temporarily unable to get into their electric cars on Labor Day.

Back in January, a 2014 Tesla Model S crashed into a parked fire truck, and while no injuries were reported it did raise questions as to whether the car’s semi-autonomous Autopilot driver aid was engaged before the wreck. Today, the National Transportation Safety Board released its report on the incident and the facts…Read more...

We don’t talk a lot about Europe here, but this week, Gizmodo will be in Germany, drinking beer, mangling Teutonic languages, and covering IFA, the biggest electronics show in Europe. Here’s what you can expect to see based on rumors, pre-announcements, and a little educated guesswork. Be sure to check back for all…Read more...

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that the Richard Gere drama, Bastards, is out at Apple’s new service, TV+. Scrapping a show before the first episode even airs isn’t uncommon in the realm of TV. But scrapping a show because it didn’t focus enough on being aspirational and exploring the joys of friendship sure as…Read more...

Even before landfall, it was pretty clear Grand Bahama and the Abaco Islands would never be the same after Hurricane Dorian. Now, after 36 hours of pummeling winds and waves from the Category 5 hurricane, the world is getting its first glimpse at what that devastating transformation looks like.

The European Space Agency was forced to perform a “collision avoidance maneuver” to prevent its Aeolus spacecraft from potentially smashing into one of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, in what is quickly becoming an all-too-common occurrence. According to SpaceX, it never received the expected alert that a collision…Read more...

A UK teenager’s diet of potato chips and other junk foods led to shocking health consequences, according to a new case report out this week. The boy’s doctors described how his disordered “fussy” eating led to chronic nutritional deficiencies that left him with a variety of symptoms, including permanent partial…Read more...

If you’ve ever been dizzy without a cause—no alcohol in your system, no blunt trauma to the head, no ear infection—you may have experienced benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. It’s a common condition: approximately 10 percent of people will experience BPPV before they die.Read more...

Early Tuesday morning, six people broke into two Apple stores in Australia by smashing the glass enclosure with a sledgehammer, according to surveillance footage.

The “loose network of conservative operatives” collecting damaging information on journalists who criticize President Donald Trump are now reportedly raising $2 million to help them better look through old tweets, probably.Read more...

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Taken at face value, It Chapter Two is a strange title for a film because it reads like a declaration. “Hey, look. It chapter two.” You understand that the movie’s a sequel to Andy Muschietti’s It, but the title’s grammatical oddness jumps out when you read it, and it makes you wonder why the studio decided to run…Read more...

Hurricane Dorian landed in the Bahamas with unprecedented ferocity this weekend. At its peak, the storm lashed the Abacos Islands and Grand Bahama with sustained winds of 185 mph, making it the strongest storm to ever hit the island nation and one of the strongest to ever form in the Atlantic.Read more...

The CEO of an energy firm based in the UK thought he was following his boss’s urgent orders in March when he transferred funds to a third-party. But the request actually came from the AI-assisted voice of a fraudster.Read more...

Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance has arrived, and the 10-episode season has left us lighting the fires of resistance and curiosity. We chatted with the creators and writer of the first season to get all of your most spoiler-friendly questions answered, and find out which two characters were modeled after …Read more...

The Galaxy Fold is an innovative device, even if many reviewers broke it almost instantly. It’s more a tablet that folds down into a phone-sized device. As someone with tiny pockets, I’d probably prefer a phone-sized device that folds down into something even smaller when not in use. Bloomberg reports that Samsung has…Read more...

Imprisoned hacktivist Jeremy Alexander Hammond, a former WikiLeaks source once regarded as the FBI’s most-wanted cybercriminal, has been called to testify before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gizmodo has learned.