Gizmodo

Last year, nearly 210 million Venmo transactions were downloaded by a Berlin-based researcher, leading many privacy experts to question the PayPal-owned company’s claim that its users prefer to be social about their spending habits. In the wake of that study, Venmo apparently made a few changes to its API, hoping to…Read more...

Harvard and Japanese scientists say they’ve made a “landmark” discovery in cancer drug development. In a new study published Monday, they say they have finally found a way to synthesize in bulk a complex class of promising cancer-fighting molecules derived from sea sponges. Their new strategy has already helped speed…Read more...

Data suggests that the vast majority of Americans have never slept on the roof of a midsize Japanese SUV, but almost everyone has stayed in a hotel. I’m here to tell you that you’re all suckers, and a 2019 Honda Passport is proof.

The way we interact with our devices is to an increasing extent an extension of our innermost selves. It’s no wonder startups view the data gleaned from these behaviors as a window into our mental health—and the foundation for their business model.

No, Shaukat Yousafzai is not a furry. The regional Pakistani minister just happened to be on the wrong (perhaps right?) end of a social media snafu. During a press briefing that was streamed on Facebook Live, an AR cat filter was left on, leaving Yousafzai with dainty pink ears, whiskers, and a bit of a blush.Read more...

For the first few years of its existence, Genius (formerly Rap Genius) featured annotated song lyrics on its platform without permission of music publishers. Now Genius is accusing Google of stealing its content without permission. And it’s used an ingenious mechanism to catch Google in the act.Read more...

When University of Reading climate scientist Ed Hawkins released his warming stripes visualization for the globe last year, people freaked (in a good way). The minimalist graphic stripped out unnecessary clutter and told the story of global warming in blue and red stripes.Read more...

Have you seen that viral video of a robot getting its ass kicked by humans? The robot is forced to perform a variety of agility drills and gets hit with a hockey stick, enduring quite a bit of abuse before the robot finally pulls a gun on its human tormentors. But the video is completely fake—well, the one with the…Read more...

iPhones have had NFC chips since the iPhone 6, but previously, Apple only allowed NFC to be used for making purchases with Apple Pay. But in iOS 13, Apple is expanding the use of NFC to other apps, and even though iOS won’t officially be available until later this fall, countries including Japan and Germany are…Read more...

Refurbished Logitech MX Sound Computer Speakers | $39 | AmazonRead more...

A fresh Martian crater has been detected in a stunning new image taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

There’s affordable, and then there’s cheap. At $64, Walmart’s exclusive 8-inch Onn Android Tablet is cheap with a capital C. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—the Amazon Fire tablet is similarly inexpensive and there’s something to be said for comfortably disposable tech. What it really comes down to is what sort of…Read more...

A lot of amazing technologies developed at universities or corporate R&D labs never see the light of day because they’re just too expensive to turn into consumer-ready products. But by copying how bats navigate the world at night, researchers have come up with a way to see hidden objects around corners using cheap…Read more...

Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) once wrote his popular children’s books atop Mount Soledad in San Diego, California. From there, he could see a single Monterey Cypress tree that sat within Ellen Browning Scripps Park in La Jolla, California. That tree is thought to have helped inspire The Lorax.

The internet of things, in which all of our gadgets are plugged into data connections, will bring some terrible downsides along with its conveniences. We were blessed with a reminder of this uneasy future this morning when Samsung’s Twitter account for customer support tweeted a guide to performing a security scan on…Read more...

There won’t be a new Pixar short in front of Toy Story 4. Peter Parker suits up a whole bunch in new Far From Home footage. Child’s Play’s weirdly hostile poster campaign reaches its inevitable conclusion. Jessica Parker Kennedy discusses the odds of her Flash return. Plus, what’s to come on Fear the Walking Dead.…Read more...

With de-extinction hovering on the edge of being a thing, it is worth asking at least one question. That question is not “why?” or “is this a good idea??”—if it can be done, it will be, and that’s that. No—the question is: which formerly extinct animals should we domesticate? The cat/dog paradigm has reigned for far…Read more...

Anker PowerPort Atom PD 2 | $44 | AmazonRead more...

Huawei hosted a public relations event in China today called “A Coffee With Ren,” a made-for-TV special with CEO Ren Zhengfei. And while there were plenty of newsworthy moments, including the confirmation that Huawei phone sales are expected to slump 40 percent in coming years, the media spectacle was pretty…Read more...

To thank President Trump for recognizing the annexed Golan Heights as a part of Israel, embattled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today inaugurated an empty patch of dirt as a new town called “Trump Heights,” according to the BBC.

Apple and CEO Tim Cook have always branded the company as fundamentally different from its competitors on privacy. iOS devices collect and use less data on their users than companies like Google and are generally considered more secure than their Android equivalents, and the company has been loudly tooting its own…Read more...

Even a couple decades later, a lot of it is very impressive.Read more...

The Government Accountability Office is warning federal agencies including the U.S. Postal Service, the Social Security Administration, Veterans Affairs, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in a report this week that they should stop relying on credit agencies to verify identities after a devastating…Read more...

And the script is online to read right now.Read more...

What a precious child.Read more...

Almost the entirety of the nations of Argentina and Uruguay, were “completely without power” following a “massive failure” in an electrical system on Sunday, Bloomberg and CNN reported, with parts of Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil seeing outages as well [see update below]. The Associated Press estimated over 44…Read more...

Memory cards are already a strange and soon to be forgotten artifact from gaming’s past. How many kids growing up with consoles that include hard drives will remember or care about memory cards in a few years? Probably very few. But I bet even less will remember what strange things could be found on old memory cards.…Read more...

Doing so might have spoiled one of the plot’s big reveals.Read more...

Donald Trump mumbled his way through a response to a softball question on UFOs and extraterrestrial life in an interview with Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos in a clip released on Saturday. Trump told Stephanopoulos that he had attended a “very brief meeting” on the matter, but that he is not in fact all…Read more...

Massive lines and an inability to make purchases were reported across the country at Target stores after the retailer’s cash registers malfunctioned due to a “systems issue,” though hours later Target announced it had resolved the issue.

Our hearts were broken recently when Amazon’s The Tick, a well-deserved revival of a classic franchise, was cancelled after only two seasons.

The U.S. has deployed “American computer code” into Russian systems operating the nation’s power grid, the New York Times reported on Saturday, as part of the Donald Trump administration’s efforts to “deploy cybertools more aggressively.”

InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is back in the news after he alleged on Friday that someone sent him malware that embedded child pornography on his InfoWars servers. He’s offering $1 million for the arrest and conviction of whoever did it, if true.Read more...

With Galaxy’s Edge a success, it’s time for Disney to move forward on its next franchise-incorporating theme park project: a Marvel park.Read more...

Hundreds of current and former police officers and other law enforcement personnel are members of “Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups” on Facebook, according to an investigation by the U.S. Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal News posted on Friday.

Time is everything, and it happens to be Daredevil’s worst enemy where the Emmys are concerned.Read more...

Whisper it quietly, but a few holes are starting to appear in Apple’s walled garden: AirPlay on TVs. Apple Music on Android. iCloud on the web. And now, a revamped, updated iCloud app for Windows. As Apple shows hints of being more cross-platform-friendly than it has been in the past, is its iCloud suite now usable…Read more...

Roughly 553,000 Americans are currently experiencing homelessness, according to the latest figures available from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. But that doesn’t mean those people should be judged for owning technology like laptops and smartphones, no matter what various assholes have to say on the…Read more...

E-cigarette giant Juul is looking at a fresh investigation into whether the company “actively” marketed its products to children, an allegation that has dogged the company even as it now says it’s working to cut off kids’ access to its products.Read more...

A Texas woman says she recently witnessed an alligator with what appeared to be some kind of knife stuck in its head swimming in a local lake, a situation she says she believes may have been a purposeful act.

One of the common tropes in fiction is the “lost girl,” where a young woman goes missing and the majority of the film or series is spent trying to find out what happened. This can make for suspenseful viewing, but it also forces the female character to be more of a plot device than a person. In After Her, a new sci-fi…Read more...

Buying almost anything is ridiculously easy in 2019. I can wave my phone at a contactless payment terminal to buy groceries, order my groceries online and have them delivered to me, and my therapist just told me there’s an app that’ll deliver your meds to you.Read more...

There have been countless Raspberry Pi builds over the years that have sought to cram the little boards into a handheld device. Yet nearly every single one required not just a basic grasp of coding, but also an understanding of soldering and sometimes a touch of electrical engineering. Adafruit’s new PyGamer looks…Read more...

Facebook is a disease, but it’s still trying to be “more meaningful.”Read more...

Here’s a little morsel of horror to carry you through the weekend. Scientists at North Carolina State University say they’ve discovered disease-causing Salmonella bacteria in the U.S. that can resist one of the few remaining antibiotics available for certain infections. What’s worse, the mutation responsible for this…Read more...

Every day, the Earth rotates. The Sun appears on the horizon in the morning, and then some time later, it sets. We’ve built our lives and societies around this periodicity, with days that are divided into hours, minutes, and seconds, all kept track of by clocks. But in some places on Earth, the Sun rises only once…Read more...

On Thursday, a new study in Scientific Reports found just two hours a week spent in nature can help improve a person’s health and well-being. The widely-reported findings reinforce what many instinctively know: nature can be rejuvenating. But a less-publicized aspect of the study is the finding that not everyone…Read more...

Since the beginning of February, over 260 bottlenose dolphin strandings have been documented along the northern Gulf Coast, prompting the declaration of an “unusual mortality event.” The reason for the strandings isn’t entirely clear, but indications point to excessive freshwater from rain—and even the Deepwater…Read more...

U.S. Congressman Will Hurd has been disinvited to the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas this year where he was set to deliver a keynote address after questions were raised about his voting record.

Lawmakers on Friday continued to press for answers about the breach of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data reportedly stolen by hackers, an incident said to affect as many as 100,000 individuals who crossed the U.S. border over a month-and-a-half period.