Gizmodo

Why did it take a lawsuit, multiple investigations, and three years of promises for Facebook to change its ways?

Scientists with the New Horizons mission gathered together in Texas yesterday to discuss the latest findings about MU69. This distant Kuiper Belt object—which bears a striking resemblance to a flattened snowman—is turning out to be even weirder than we imagined.Read more...

Employees at Kickstarter, the decade-old crowdfunding platform, are planning to unionize—potentially making them the first organized labor force among major tech firms.

Apple just announced that its iMac lineup will get a meaningful update thanks to 8-core 9th-generation Intel Core i9 processors and a Vega graphics option. This is a big deal for iMac power users, but for me, an almost iMac power user, I’m feeling sheepish. Is Apple just going to keep stuffing new chips into its…Read more...

Last year, an English child protection worker was assigned a case where a mother was deemed a high risk to her baby’s safety. It’s the worker’s job to protect the child and, if necessary, separate the mother from her kid.Read more...

30 years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee penned his original proposal for what would become the World Wide Web. At the time, he was working at CERN, the high-energy physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland best known these days for operating the Large Hadron Collider. In many histories of the web, this fact is treated as a…Read more...

So, Google’s Stadia game streaming service is here. Along with it comes the all-new Stadia-specific controllers. And on that nifty controller is a button that allows you to launch Google Assistant. What?

Today, Google announced its new Stadia game streaming platform that lets gamers play games on pretty much anything with an internet connection. Laptops, desktops, phones, and even TV’s with a Chromecast Ultra attached are all supported. That means there’s no need to go out and buy a new console to get access to…Read more...

For years now, scientists have sounded the alarm about a potential nightmare for astronauts on the International Space Station: antibiotic-resistant superbugs that could be even more dangerous in space than they are on Earth. This week, research say they’ve found a way to better prevent such hardy bacteria from…Read more...

Google is taking on the big guys. In a keynote at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco today Google announced a new service, Stadia, that will allow gamers to play the biggest games on any Android or Chrome-based device (including any device with a Chrome browser).

There’s no perfect way to manage massive quantities of emails, but everybody has their preferences. Some people are Gmail purists, who might be sad to know that the Google’s free supercharged email management app Inbox will stop working on April 2. Others are Outlook devotees, who probably get the app free through…Read more...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission has released its first batch of scientific results on asteroid Ryugu—and it’s revealed a bunch of surprises about the small, spinning rock.Read more...

Netflix’s next step in interactive storytelling brings the format closer to bridging the gap between film and video games, as it will allow viewers to decide how the adventurous character gets through each level before moving on to the next chapter. Now, the company’s latest news has us wondering: Will the next…Read more...

In the pantheon of climate change solutions, some are more fraught than others. Reducing carbon emissions? Not so risky. Blocking the sun or banking on sucking carbon out of the air? Pretty dicey.Read more...

Yes, Patreon is making adjustments again—as some creators have suspected and feared. The recurring crowdfunding site agonized over a relatively small change in how it does business, and in doing so it’s setting an example few other platforms live up to.

Trailblazing mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck from the University of Texas at Austin has been awarded the 2019 Abel Prize—regarded as one of the highest accolades in mathematics. She is now the first woman to receive the illustrious award.

A pair of bills that limit speech online were signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, promising harsh penalties for those who criticize the nation and its officials or post fake news.

When Samsung announced the Galaxy Watch Active smartwatch at its Unpacked Event a few weeks ago, I was cautiously optimistic. Sure, it did away with the company’s signature rotating bezel, but otherwise, it was sleek, had all the right specs, and honestly, Samsung has consistently put out some of the best…Read more...

An 18-year-old man who shared a video of Friday’s terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand has been charged with distributing the video and inciting violence. The man allegedly posted a photo of one of the mosques targeted in Friday’s attacks with the words “target acquired.” He faces up to 28 years in prison,…Read more...

If you’ve ever browsed through your Instagram feed and thought “Oh that shirt is cute but haha, thank god that’s way too much effort for me to actually leave this app and buy it”—bad news, friends. Instagram announced that starting today, it’s introducing an in-app checkout feature.Read more...

The VR revolution hasn’t swept the world like a lot of people thought it would, and though I still have confidence in the medium as a whole, modern VR also has a lot of room for improvement when it comes to comfort, optics, and affordability. Enter the Reverb. Designed for both commercial and home use, while HP’s…Read more...

The Dune remake finds a familiar composer. Get a look at the twin threat of Men in Black: International’s new villains. More Avengers: Endgame images give us a look at the team’s new looks. Try not to be surprised about Star Trek: Discovery’s upcoming exits. Plus, Lex Luthor’s plans unfold on Supergirl, and what’s…Read more...

The toys are back in town—and the world beyond bedrooms has only gotten weirder and more wonderful since their last adventure.

On November 11, 2018, a deep rumble ricocheted around the world, one that humans couldn’t feel but that registered quite clearly on seismometers. A new pre-print paper about the event is now suggesting that it was caused by the largest offshore volcanic event in recorded history.

New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, gave a powerful speech in that country’s parliament today expressing solidarity with the victims of Friday’s terrorist attack that left 50 dead and dozens injured. Ardern also had strong words for the social media companies that enabled the shooter to broadcast his…Read more...

In a dusty plastic bin under my bed lies at least four laptops, six cellphones, and a half-dozen hard drives. I have no idea what’s on any of them. Most of these devices predate the cloud-storage era, and so likely contain solitary copies of photos, texts, and emails, among other confidential files (porn?) that I’d…Read more...

The pro-Donald Trump National Enquirer obtained nude and other intimate photos of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez—which Bezos says it used as leverage in a blackmail attempt—by paying $200,000 to Sanchez’s brother Michael Sanchez to hand over text messages between the two, the Wall Street…Read more...

Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent out a baffling tweet saying that he had “funding secured” to take the company private at a share price of $420 (which some readers may recognize as the weed number). It turned out no such deal had been finalized, the Securities and Exchange Commission slapped Musk with fraud…Read more...

A Google exhibit at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday appears to be teasing some sort of hardware related to its widely rumored video game streaming service, albeit with a logo that looks like Doritos and the wifi symbol had a monstrous love child.Read more...

“Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Rita Skeeter makes move from Hogwarts to Westeros!”Read more...

Our favorite California GOP Congressman Devin Nunes is in the news again, this time for suing Twitter for what he insists is anti-conservative bias, according to Fox News. Nunes will sue the company for $250 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. The suit also targets several individual…Read more...

If you thought ray tracing was only going to be possible on Nvidia’s pricy line of Turing GPUs, you would be wrong. Today the company has announced ray tracing support for a wide range of GPUs ranging from the Nvidia GTX 1060 all the way up to the super beefy Titan V. The 1060 can notably be found for as little as…Read more...

Despite dozens of heroes from across time and space venturing in and out of the TARDIS doors, not a lot of Doctor Who’s companions have actually left via the grim exit of death itself. You might cast your mind back to someone like Adric, but the first companion kill goes back much further...and is about to come back…Read more...

Mirai malware, which can infect and grant even unsophisticated actors control over hundreds of thousands of IoT devices, is responsible for some of the most devastating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks ever seen.Read more...

Semen frozen back in 1968 has been used to impregnate dozens of Merino ewes, resulting in healthy lambs. The Australian scientists who made it happen say it’s the oldest sperm ever used to produce offspring.

Back in December, New York City approved the nation’s very first minimum wage pay floor for app-based drivers—a historic victory Lyft undercut almost immediately by challenging its implementation in court. Today, drivers got more good news when a judge denied Lyft’s motion for an injunction that would block the…Read more...

New York City’s newest luxury neighborhood, Hudson Yards, officially opened on Friday and visitors are already scrambling to photograph or mock its gilded pinecone landmark structure dubbed the Vessel.

The second-largest asteroid to hit Earth in the last 30 years went undetected, until now.

The growing reality for social networks is that they will perpetually be exploited in new and terrorizing ways and there may not be a sweeping solution for bad actors. The hope is that solutions outpace abusers. This race was on disturbing display over the weekend as a horrific video of a gunman opening fire on…Read more...

When last week’s bomb cyclone hit the Midwest, it was hard to imagine the inundation it could bring amid whiteout conditions and more than a foot of snow. But the warm weather that wrapped in behind it quickly melted out all that white stuff and unleashed historic flooding across parts of Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota,…Read more...

A company called Tombot thinks it’s come up with a way to improve the quality of life for seniors facing challenges when it comes to being social: a robotic companion dog that behaves and responds like a real pup, but without all the responsibilities of maintaining a living, breathing animal. The company even enlisted…Read more...

I became unreasonably passionate about fantasy sports for the very first time in my life. Not fantasy football or baseball or anything like that. I got into fantasy birdwatching.

The ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field—a trait known as magnetoreception—is well documented among many animals, but researchers have struggled to show that humans are also capable of the feat. Until now.

This six-port USB charging hub doesn’t have USB-C like some others we’ve seen, but it does include a Quick Charge 3.0 port. That can charge certain Android phones more quickly, obviously, but what you may not realize is that QC 3.0 is required for any Qi charger that outputs the maximum 7.5 for the latest iPhones. For…Read more...

MySpace, one of the first social networking sites that allowed bands to share their music directly with fans, reportedly lost years of songs during a server transfer last year. Tellingly, however, the world only seems to have taken notice this week.Read more...

It’s no secret that the 1980 comedy movie Airplane! is a parody. But for some reason, I’ve spent my entire life believing that Airplane! was a broad parody of 1970s disaster movies. And while the movie clearly took inspiration from some of those films, it’s actually a very specific parody of a movie from 1957 called …Read more...

With the imminent arrival of Apple’s new streaming video service scheduled for next week, the tech giant is on the cusp adding content creator to its traditional hardware-making and app store-managing duties. However, in an effort to stock its upcoming service with shows, it seems Apple’s secretive Silicon Valley-esque…Read more...

On March 15, a rare, giant cyclone made landfall in Mozambique before making its way west to Malawi and Zimbabwe. By Saturday, Cyclone Idai had dissipated, but not before causing widespread infrastructural damage throughout eastern Africa and claiming more than 200 lives, reports Al Jazeera.Read more...

Last week, a heavily-armed 28-year-old entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and opened fire, killing at least 50 in the country’s worst modern shooting. Prior to attacking dozens of Muslim worshipers, the killer posted a manifesto, outlining why he planned to commit mass murder, and he livestreamed a…Read more...

Cardiologists delivered some surprising news over the weekend: Contrary to previous recommendations, most healthy people should not be taking low-dose aspirin to prevent heart disease, according a report from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.Read more...