Gizmodo

Everlane’s popular Choose What You Pay Sale, a TurboTax Premier Download + $10 Amazon Gift Card, and an Orgain Protein Gold Box lead off Saturday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Choose What You Pay Sale (Men’s and Women’s) | EverlaneRead more...

More than 260 billion people Wiki’d something or other in 2019, and the overwhelming majority of them apparently shared a similar question: What the hell did I just watch?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has officially raised the legal smoking age from 18 t0 21. The measure marks a culmination of a monthslong, bi-partisan campaign aimed at curbing the use of tobacco products— particularly electronic cigarettes—among youth amid rising concerns about the health effects of vaping.

If you’re interested in game design, you’ve probably made a few side projects or prototypes. If you were lucky, you might have had the means to start early in life and made a few games as a kid. These usually end up deleted or lost on rotting hard drives. You definitely don’t expect them to show up twenty years later…Read more...

A harrowing medical case reported by doctors this month should remind everyone to keep their teeth away from each other’s genitals. It details how an accidental love bite during sex left a man’s penis on the verge of rotting away, though thankfully doctors intervened in time to save it.Read more...

Scientific societies and publishers are angry about a rumor that a White House executive order might make all federally-funded research open access.Read more...

This week, hacktivist and security engineer Lance R. Vick tweeted an enticing proposition along with a gut-punch headline: “Colleges are turning students’ phones into surveillance machines, tracking the locations of hundreds of thousands,” read the Washington Post link. The report revealed nearly instantaneous and…Read more...

Streaming giant Spotify will ban all political advertising in early 2020, Ad Age reported on Friday, saying in a statement to the site that it does “not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our process, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content.”

Ahead of the launch of NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service launch in April, its parent company is reportedly in “advanced talks” to buy ad-supported streaming service Xumo.Read more...

Technologists have long speculated on the privacy implications of largely ungoverned, camera-enabled vehicle fleets roaming the roads of America. Now we’ve finally bumped up against the tip of that particularly worrying iceberg.Read more...

If there was any year to honor the youth, 2019 sure as hell would be it. Around the world this year, young people took to the streets and demanded their governments take action to address climate change. Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg has been held up as the face of the new youth movement, but even she’s…Read more...

A new Star Wars movie is out, and for better or worse, that always means there’s also a host of new tie-in material released which can explain or clarify some questions left lingering after the credits rolled. The Rise of Skywalker is no exception, and its own “Visual Dictionary” guidebook is jam-packed with little…Read more...

China is close to launching the last two satellites that will complete BeiDou-3 Navigation Satellite System—the nation’s rival to the United States’ Global Positioning System.Read more...

While 2019 was filled with all sorts of content—television, movies, comic books, video games—that kept us busy, there were a lot of major franchises meant to wrap up some pretty epic stories this year. Did they all succeed in telling emotional tales that resonated with the fans who’ve been along with them for the long…Read more...

People dealing with painful migraines will soon have a new treatment available. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved a unique drug meant to shorten acute migraine episodes. It’s the latest treatment for a condition that’s historically had few.Read more...

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has vetoed a state bill that would have legalized electric bikes and scooters the New York Post reported on Thursday. The bill passed with overwhelming support from legislators this summer, The move is a blow to delivery workers in NYC, who have been targeted by police for seizures and…Read more...

There are signs Antarctica just experienced its highest melt extent ever recorded in the satellite era. The big meltdown hit on Christmas Eve and is bad news for a continent already dealing with a lot. With summer is just getting started there, this is a serious case of Summertime Sadness.Read more...

Ring and its parent company, Amazon, are facing a class-action lawsuit over allegations of negligence, invasion of privacy, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment for the allegedly lax security standards that have left thousands of cameras vulnerable to hacking. This comes on the heels of several high-profile…Read more...

Residents in northern Montana reported a string of strange lights dotting the sky. What looked like UFOs from an alien invasion has turned out to be another consequence of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation.Read more...

When Google announced the Pixel 4, one of the things we were most excited for was the new Google Recorder app. It could transcribe your recordings live and offline! Around the world, journalists, students, and anyone who might need meeting transcripts raised their eyes heavenward and whispered a quiet “Thank you,…Read more...

YouTube has restored hundreds of videos from dozens of channels that focus on crypotcurrency after they were removed earlier in the week. YouTubers like Chris Dunn report that their videos were flagged by YouTube for “harmful or dangerous content” and “sale of regulated goods.” YouTube now says that the deletions were…Read more...

PowerBlock Personal Trainer Adjustable Dumbbell Set | $230 | WootRead more...

A Jachs’ Sweater Sale, a Google Nest Learning Thermostat Bundle, and a Series Gold Box lead off Friday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

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...

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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...