Gizmodo

The BBC—which is more and more evidently becoming a tech company—is developing a voice assistant to offer consumers of its content a “whole new way to interact with BBC programmes and services,” the company announced this week.Read more...

Following a pair of successful touchdowns onto the surface of Ryugu, Japan’s Hayabusa2 probe is packing its precious cargo as it prepares to bring samples of the asteroid back to Earth.

Now that weed is being decriminalized across the country, a startup is trying to make it easier for cops and bosses to figure out who’s actually high.

A school in northern Sweden experimented with facial recognition as a system to document student attendance, and the Swedish Data Protection Authority (DPA) fined the municipality 200,000 SEK (about $20,699) for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It’s the first time the country has been fined for…Read more...

NASA’s atomic-clock-in-space officially began its year-long mission on Friday, according to a NASA release.Read more...

Google is facing a flurry of backlash after announcing plans to protect user privacy by continuing to allow cookies in Chrome in a proposal it calls the Privacy Sandbox. This felt like a surprise, since the company suggested in May that it would “update how cookies are handled in Chrome.” Since Apple, Mozilla, and…Read more...

On Monday, an Oklahoma judge found Johnson & Johnson culpable for having sparked growing rates of opioid misuse and overdose deaths in the state, ordering the company to pay out $572.1 million in damages. The verdict will likely be appealed by the pharmaceutical giant, but it nonetheless represents the first major…Read more...

In October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to escalate into global thermonuclear war. The United States and Soviet Union both mobilized over nuclear missiles in Cuba, and a single spark could have effectively ended civilization. But what’s not well-remembered today is that at the height of that dispute, a…Read more...

These days, some cars can help you parallel park with the touch of a button, but it wasn’t alway so easy. Back in the 1930s you had to parallel park the old fashioned way, and this short clip from a newsreel shows how one inventor in California came up with a plan to let drivers squeeze into parking spaces with ease.Read more...

As someone who bought a Nintendo Switch at launch, I’ve been quite curious about the upcoming Switch Lite. After all, the standard $300 Switch can do everything the Switch Lite can (and more). The $200 Switch Lite loses the ability to output video to a TV or detach the controllers in exchange for a price tag that’s…Read more...

Mario Tennis Aces [Digital] | $40 | AmazonRead more...

On Tuesday morning, the National Hurricane Center issued a forecast with words nobody on Puerto Rico wants to see: hurricane watch.Read more...

Saying goodbye to the warm summer months is a little easier when it also means the war against mosquito bites is coming to an end. They’re not just an itchy annoyance, however, mosquitoes can spread dangerous diseases and viruses, but researchers at Brown University might have come up with the perfect mosquito…Read more...

Mortal Kombat adds a mysterious lead. Robert Richardson says Woody Harrelson is why he signed on for Venom 2. Could the New Mutants film have a chance? Plus, new teases for Joker, what’s to come on The Terror, and new looks at Terminator: Dark Fate and Doctor Sleep.

The U.S. Air Force’s Boeing X-37B spaceplane broke a record yesterday for the most amount of time in orbit around the Earth. But we still don’t know when the uncrewed plane is going to land or even what it’s doing up there. All of the details about the X-37B mission are classified.

Brazilian president and far-right climate denier Jair Bolsonaro won’t even accept the paltry $20 million that G7 countries pledged towards creating a fund to “help Amazon countries fight wildfires and launch a long-term global initiative to protect the rainforest,” Bolsonaro’s chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni told Globo…Read more...

After being placed on a so-called Entity List by the U.S. federal government, severely restricting its access to American technology, Chinese tech giant and world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer Huawei is investigating using the Russian-made Aurora operating system as a replacement for Google’s Android OS on…Read more...

Instagram is working on a new messaging app called Threads “meant to promote constant, intimate sharing between users and their closest friends,” the Verge reported on Monday, in what seems like yet another attempt by a Facebook-owned property to edge in on Snapchat’s turf.

The 2019 D23 Expo is now in the books and if you’re a fan of pop culture, your head may still be spinning.

She was just the first one announced.Read more...

In a landmark ruling, Oklahoma judge Thad Balkman ruled against pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson today in the first trial meant to extract retribution from drugmakers for fueling the unprecedented wave of opiate-related overdoses and deaths in the U.S.

The Federal Aviation Administration probably isn’t a fan of the drone flamethrower attachment that went viral last month.Read more...

In early August, sailors in the southwest Pacific Ocean began to see their environment transmogrify. As far as the eye could see, the ocean turned from an azure delight into a colossal gathering of clinking, floating rocks. And then came the foul, sulfurous odors.

Roughly a week after it was reported that Apple’s iOS 12.4 update unpatched a vulnerability that allowed for jailbreaking (and was previously fixed in an earlier update), the company has released a patch to again fix the bug after the issue was flagged by security researchers.

Thanks to groundbreaking science, conservationists could save the critically endangered northern white rhino. Only two animals of this species remain—Najin and Fatu, both of which are female—and an international team of scientists have come together to harvest 10 eggs from the hopeful rhino mamas in the Ol Pejeta…Read more...

On Monday, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang put out his climate plan. And Yang Gang, I am sorry, but your man is still the most dangerous Democratic presidential candidate.Read more...

The International Astronomical Union has approved new names for five recently discovered moons around Jupiter.Read more...

City living is producing something new for you to worry about: high crow-lesterol (sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying to delete it).

This morning, Lucasfilm gave us our latest, shocking glimpse at the final chapter in the Skywalker Saga. Although fairly light in content, that doesn’t mean the footage wasn’t jam-packed with clues and hints about what to expect—or what to prepare yourself for—in The Rise of Skywalker.

Airport security is famously dehumanizing, and reports reveal that for transgender travelers, this can be an especially intrusive and traumatizing experience given the current status of screening. From January 2016 through April 2019, nearly 300 civil rights complaints were filed regarding TSA screening of transgender…Read more...

The creator of a curious encryption technology was heckled on stage during a bizarre presentation at the recent Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, and now the company has filed suit against the conference organizers for allowing them to be roasted.Read more...

Despite what companies like Apple and Facebook claim, you don’t need a giant corporation telling you what news stories you should read every morning. Nearly every website (worth reading) still operates an RSS feed. And now one of the oldest and most robust RSS readers, NetNewsWire, is back from the dead and worth your…Read more...

The true identity of last week’s purported neutron star-black hole merger may never be known, as follow-up searches for a source of the signal have turned up nothing.

We say this every year, but damn we’re excited for fall’s thrilling crop of genre TV shows—be they airing on old-school network TV, a cable channel, or one of the ever-growing number of streaming services. Here’s our guide to what’s new, what’s returning, and when you can start watching!Read more...

You used to know a cheap HP laptop just by glancing at it. There’d be a lot of plastic painted to look like metal, and it’d probably be too thick. But the new HP Envy 13 is a shockingly good deal of a laptop. It looks good, it’s fast, and boy is it cheap. But as with many devices that seem too good to be true for the…Read more...

Did Samsung’s still-not-released but definitely-really-coming-sometime-next-month Galaxy Fold influence Rey’s flashy folding lightsaber in the next Star Wars film? Probably not. But it’s undeniable that flippy gadgets are having a moment. Rey’s lightsaber would look a lot more silly if that weren’t the case.Read more...

In July, an Uber driver we’ll call Dave—his name has been changed here to protect his identity—picked up a fare in a trendy neighborhood of a major U.S. metropolitan area. It was rush hour and surge pricing was in effect due to increased demand, meaning that Dave would be paid almost twice the regular fare.Read more...

Nintendo Switch Online Family Membership 12 Month (Digital) | $28 | TargetRead more...

We’ve got a little more than two months before the launch of Disney+, meaning many of us may be weighing whether to pull the plug on some of our other streaming services and instead opt into Disney’s enormous catalog of movies, television, and originals—particularly given that its subscription price comes in lower…Read more...

New satellite imagery shows gigantic plumes of noxious carbon monoxide wafting over Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and surrounding areas—the result of massive forest fires currently raging in the region.Read more...

Many journalists are very indignant that Trump allies are reportedly combing through social media to identify embarrassing things they may have posted long ago that can be used to discredit them. In this case, I’m afraid, the outrage seems to be missing the point.Read more...

Nathan Fillion joins James Gunn’s Suicide Squad. The Snake Eyes spinoff has found its Storm Shadow. James Wan’s betwixt-Aquaman horror project fills out its cast. Plus, what’s to come on Fear the Walking Dead and The Purge’s new season, and Taika Waititi denies a Thor: Love and Thunder rumor in very Taika Waititi…Read more...

Dark times call for dark measures.

Animals that think and talk like humans have long enchanted the public—in the form of myths, children’s books, and overrated TV shows. Somehow even the most mundane aspects of daily life—paying taxes, or preparing sandwiches, or staring at yourself in the mirror with a drained, sallow look and thinking, who am I, how…Read more...

Antlion ModMic Wireless | $100 | AmazonRead more...

President Donald Trump is denying a report from Axios that claimed he wants to nuke hurricanes in order to neutralize them. Trump has called out Axios by name and insists that he “never said this,” according to a tweet sent earlier today from the G7 summit in France.

Seven of the biggest names in publishing filed a lawsuit against Audible on Friday, arguing that its recently announced AI-generated captions feature breaks copyright law.Read more...

This week at Gizmodo, we took a long, hard look at what could have been with our Alternate Internet series, cataloging some of the ways the web could have been different—or still could be. While we didn’t have the time to write a sweeping, The Wheels of Time-length series on what would happen if I was given absolute…Read more...

Residents in Boca Chica Village, Texas, near a SpaceX facility in Brownsville received a warning from the Cameron County Office of Emergency Management that tests of the company’s Starhopper prototype on Aug. 26 could break windows in their homes, according to the Brownsville Herald.Read more...