Gizmodo

The scope of the Australian bushfires is almost too horrifying to even try to grasp. A billion animals: dead. Sydney: shrouded in toxic air. Aboriginal sacred sites: gone. The Southern Hemisphere: blanketed in smoke.

Using a computer-like system made from engineered DNA, scientists have computed the square root of 900.Read more...

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has previously conceded that many of the people whom he desires to send to Mars must be prepared to risk death in the process, has sweetened the deal with the hint of some indentured servitude.

Courier service DoorDash—the company that’s managed with some success to dream up multiple predatory wage models for its independent contractors—has, according to recent data, pulled ahead of rival food delivery companies like Uber Eats and Grubhub. By every indication here, the bad guys are winning.Read more...

Shameful. Irresponsible. Accomplices.

A newly described scorpion dating back to the early Silurian period is answering important questions about the first arachnids and the adaptations that enabled some of the earliest animals on Earth to migrate from aquatic to terrestrial habitats.Read more...

Co-Star, the very best app, is now available to download on the Google Play store. Android users, prepare to have your minds completely blown.

On Thursday, Microsoft CEO Brad Smith made a bold climate pledge: By 2030, he said the company will remove more carbon from the environment than it emits, and by 2050, will remove more carbon than the company has ever produced.Read more...

Democratic presidential contender and former Vice President Joe Biden called the Silicon Valley set “creeps,” said that Facebook and “other platforms” should lose their Section 230 protections under the Communications Decency Act, and argued that Mark Zuckerberg should face lawsuits and possibly criminal charges over…Read more...

There’s no doubt that stepping into Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge feels like you’re stepping into the Star Wars universe. But up until now, that’s been a mostly passive experience. Starting today, it’s anything but.Read more...

The world is terrible and everything is on fire, but heading into the weekend, you can at least try to stifle the urge to scream with two new Pokémon ASMR videos. The first features a cheeky little Chespin nomming on some macarons, while the second stars a snoozy Charmander napping by a crackling campfire.Read more...

New government research paints a dire picture of Americans and their exercise habits. Across all 50 states, at least 15 percent of adults reported being physically inactive, while in some areas of the country, nearly 50 percent of adults said they got no form of exercise.Read more...

On Friday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled to kill the landmark case where youth were suing the U.S. government for taking insufficient action on climate change.Read more...

You enter a cave. At the end of a dark corridor, you encounter a pair of sealed chambers. Inside each chamber is an all-knowing wizard. The prophecy says that with these oracles’ help, you can learn the answers to unanswerable problems. But there’s a catch: The oracles don’t always tell the truth. And though they…Read more...

A collection of innuendo-heavy, Utah-themed condoms that were produced as part of an HIV awareness campaign are getting pulled from distribution for being incredibly horny.Read more...

These days, most video game fans are sympathetic to delays. They recognize that more time makes for better games, and that game development is too complicated for anyone to accurately predict release dates very far in advance. So after a string of high-profile delays this week, including the role-playing game Cyberpunk 2077Read more...

An Electric Water Flosser Gold Box, a Chewy Toy Flash Sale, and temperature-Regulating Sheets lead off Friday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Following a pretty successful trial run in the U.S. and U.K., Microsoft is now opening up its Xbox One Console Streaming Preview to the world, or at the very least, every country where Microsoft supports Xbox Live.

European researchers are working on a system that can churn out breathable oxygen from simulated samples of moon dust.

We’ve all been there as a teenager. What starts as a nerdy afternoon building a fancy new gaming PC ends up with a stint in rehab after your parents assume those tiny syringes full of thermal paste mean you’re doing the drugs. Cooler Master is apparently tired of all the confusion, so it’s redesigned its thermal paste…Read more...

Electric Water Flosser Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

AMC has its eyes on yet another Stephen King adaptation. Legends of Tomorrow finds itself a bloodthirsty new villain. Armando Iannucci talks space jets. Plus, NBC teases a few details for its streaming shows, what’s to come on the Valentine’s Day edition of Into the Dark, and Evil’s got itself a potential baby devil.…Read more...

Everyone’s talking about Windows 7 this week. And even if you have absolutely no interest in the inner workings of your PC’s operating system, your attention has no doubt been drawn by Microsoft’s twist: The company isn’t supporting Windows 7 with security updates anymore.Read more...

Nature offers us some of the most sophisticated technology there is. While scientists and engineers continue to scratch their heads trying to figure out how to develop ways to effectively capture our carbon, trees already cracked the code. They’ve been absorbing carbon forever, man. So have other kinds of flora.…Read more...

15% Off Temperature-Regulating Sheets | My Sheets Rock | Promo code COOL15

Health officials in Thailand and Japan have announced that a strange new virus, which has killed two people and sickened dozens of others in China, has appeared inside their borders this week. The virus, known as 2019-nCoV, was first identified in Wuhan, China in late December and questions remain about how it…Read more...

Imagine plopping a contact lens in your eye, and instead of just seeing better, you could see an enhanced view of your environment. That’s what Mojo Vision is saying their new prototype smart contact lens could do. Eventually. It sounds like a concept straight out of a sci-fi movie. But whereas anything is possible in…Read more...

No one wants to believe that a person without eyebrows can’t be elected as president. But there are certain political realities we have to face in the run-up to the 2020 presidential elections.

Not nearly as important to the ecosystem of the American business, but absolutely vital to the UK and other Europeans is the short range delivery van. This commercial van is the lifeblood of small business deliveries all over the Kingdom, and Arrival is among the first to really apply BEV technology to the so-called…Read more...

In many places across America, it’s become harder for women to obtain an abortion. But a study out Thursday highlights an added challenge for teenage girls living in Texas and elsewhere: Judges who refuse to let them get an abortion without the involvement of their parents.Read more...

NBCUniversal has been teasing out details about its forthcoming streaming services for months, but the company today finally dropped the scoop on its ad-supported model and pricing structures.Read more...

If you’ve been planning to buy or return something to a nearby Bose store, you might want to do it soon because the well-known audio equipment maker is about to close 119 stores, including every retail location in the U.S.Read more...

Delivery platform DoorDash has been at the top of the public’s most hated gig economy value extraction firms for some time, owing largely to its prior policy of subsidizing its wages with customers’ tips. According to a study released today, even with that policy repealed, the efficiency of DoorDash’s…Read more...

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the Trump administration’s trade deal, passed 89-10 in the Republican-controlled Senate on Thursday with one high-profile defection: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Scientists have new evidence in their quest to settle the longstanding debate about whether it was a gigantic meteorite or massive volcanic eruptions that triggered the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.Read more...

More than 70,000 photos of Tinder users are being shared by members of an online cyber-crime forum, Gizmodo has learned, raising concerns about the potential for abusive use of the photos. Ominously, only women appear to have been targeted.Read more...

Scientists seeking to understand the mechanics of bird flight have constructed PigeonBot, a robot made from 40 pigeon feathers (and a few other components).

It’s a science lesson you probably learned in grade school: You can only catch certain illnesses, like the flu, from another person. But a new paper argues that many diseases seen as noncommunicable, like most cancers and heart disease, might be transmissible sometimes—thanks to the seemingly harmless microbes living…Read more...

Get yourself a Google Nest Hub or an Amazon Echo Show, and you’ve got a device that can do everything a smart speaker can—plus play videos. It’s not always obvious which video apps work on these smart displays, or what you can do with them, which is why we curated this list of what you can run and can’t run right now.

If you search for videos about climate change on Youtube, you might run into one from PragerU called What They Haven’t Told You About Climate Change. In the video, a Canadian energy consultant named Patrick Moore claims that the world hasn’t been significantly warmer in the 21st century (which is not true) and that…Read more...

Federal officials have called on Apple to unlock a phone belonging to a shooter who killed three people last month at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, but the company has refused to do so, saying there’s “no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys.” But the FBI has managed to unlock iPhones all on its own in…Read more...

For better or worse, it is not unfair to describe either of Star Wars’ most recent major projects—at the box office, the climax of the saga, The Rise of Skywalker; and on streaming, the culmination of years of attempts to bring live-action Star Wars to the small screen, The Mandalorian—as stories that deeply engage in…Read more...

Scientists in Sweden have shown that some wolf pups, like dogs, are capable of playing fetch with humans. It’s an unexpected result, one that suggests the ancestors of dogs were primed for domestication.Read more...

Occasionally, the makers of the junk gadgets you can find at gas stations, convenience stores, and mall kiosks manage to come up with a genuinely useful piece of tech. Such is the case with this 8,000 mAh backup battery featuring its own built-in video game system so you can continue to ignore the world around you…Read more...

Just in the last year, we’ve seen a bunch of big names announcer their first truly wireless earbuds including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and more. And now it’s LG’s turn to give it a try with its new Tone Free earbuds.Read more...

DELOMO Dog Rope Toy, 3-Pack | $12 | Amazon | Promo code 4XKZFXCFRead more...

Australia has been on fire. Perhaps you’ve heard.Read more...

If you prefer racing games like Gran Turismo and Forza over Super Mario Kart and Crash Team Racing then you’re probably after as authentic a (simulated) driving experience as possible. And what’s a more authentic experience than the car you drive to work every day? With this $10 breakout board—and a couple of slightly…Read more...

A Vitamix blender, Huckerry outerwear sale, TCL TVs, and Mike’s Hot Honey lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.

The Wollemi Pines in Australia are like nothing else in the world. These so-called “dinosaur trees” live in northwest Sydney, and they were extremely close to being burned over and lost forever. In a rare victory among all the Very Sad News coming out of the Australian bushfires, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service…Read more...