Gizmodo

How many alien species do you imagine there are in the original three Star Wars movies? Surely not that many, right? Sure, there’s the Mos Eisley cantina scene, but for all its space opera energy, these movies are mostly about plain old human beings. Right?Read more...

Authorities on Friday announced the arrest of one of the founders of Bulgarian cryptocurrency business OneCoin, saying it was nothing more than a pyramid scheme designed to defraud users. While crypto scams are disturbingly common, according to a Department of Justice press release, prosecutors allege that this…Read more...

Amid two ongoing measles outbreaks on both sides of the United States, New York City health officials say an unvaccinated student who was permitted to attend school was linked to 21 other cases of the virus. Dozens of people have been infected since last fall in the city’s ongoing outbreak, one of particular magnitude.Read more...

The latest fossil discoveries and paleontological research continue to revise our view of the world’s most famous dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus rex. An updated depiction of the extinct giant is now on display in a New York City exhibit that’s bound to ruffle some feathers.

It’s a topic that’s polarizing for techies and Luddites alike: Is it ever truly okay to touch your laptop or desktop screen?Read more...

Mouse Guard, written and illustrated by David Petersen, is the story of an order of mice sworn to protect a medieval realm from all enemies and threats. It’s wonderful, has won two Eisner Awards, and courtesy of Fox is getting a long-overdue film adaptation.Read more...

Pilaʻa, Kauai — Last Sunday morning, more than a dozen cars were parked along a six-foot wall built around Mark Zuckerberg’s vast retreat on the northeast corner of Kauai, a small, remote Hawaiian island that’s home to 70,000 people. The gate, which is almost always locked shut, was open, so you could walk right past…Read more...

The anti-vaccination movement has more than earned its latest round of bad press. The U.S. is currently dealing with several outbreaks of measles, a disease effectively wiped out by routine childhood vaccination in the country two decades ago. And just this week, Oregon doctors reported that a six-year-old boy had to…Read more...

Everybody loves to compare the new Samsung Galaxy Buds to Apple’s AirPods. It’s pretty obvious. Samsung and Apple make popular phones, and now both companies have truly wireless earbuds to pair with them. I’ve spent two weeks with the $130 Galaxy Buds. They’re frankly pretty awesome. But are they better than AirPods?…Read more...

LifeStraws are great backpack staples for hiking, or nice gifts for the outdoorsmen in your life. And right now, they’re just $10, which is about as cheap as you’re likely to see them.Read more...

At what point is it time to just log the hell off?

One of 2019's most anticipated films, Jordan Peele’s Us, just had its world premiere at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and already the reactions are popping up online.Read more...

Love ’em or hate ’em—and many, many do—e-scooters are taking cities across the globe by storm. But amid ongoing reports that people are seriously messing themselves up on these things, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention decided last year to take a closer look at why this is happening.Read more...

With the upcoming Twilight Zone reboot keeping the anthology structure of the original series, actors can join without a long commitment. It’s a few weeks to make their episode and then that’s it. Which is a small part of why, with every single piece of casting you read, the show keeps sounding so unbelievably…Read more...

Oath the brand may be dead, but Oath the web store is alive and full of deals.Read more...

Last night’s fantastic episode of Star Trek: Discovery had a bunch going on—but one of the most fan-pleasing events was a trip back to where Star Trek began over five decades ago with its fabled original pilot. But that required bringing back more than just a certain planet.

Chelsea Manning is not accused of committing any new crime. But she is now a prisoner of the U.S. government once again and may remain one for up to 18 months.

Minnesota has become a hotbed of labor unrest within Amazon’s ranks, where a contingent of workers organized via local East African community group Awood Center first pressured the company’s brass to sit in on negotiations in November and staged a mass protest outside their facility a month later.Read more...

Breaking up the tech giants is one of the few major issues that cuts across party lines in Washington, D.C., and it even reaches into Silicon Valley itself.

Earlier this week, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured a strange series of images in which the Moon appears to go rogue, crossing the Sun as usual but then briefly pausing to change direction. No, it’s not a sign of cosmological armageddon, but an optical illusion familiar to astronomers.

After a woman in Florida experienced a “chance brief encounter” with a police officer in a parking garage last year, authorities say the officer showed up at her parents house in an effort to see her again. The woman then filed a complaint, and the department says it discovered the officer had been misusing a police…Read more...

Concussion research is usually the domain of medical science, but a group of physicists in France decided to tackle the subject in a very... tactile way. They banged a beaker full of water with a hammer, hoping to better understand the forces and motions involved in head trauma.

In 1955, 17 killer whales were found stranded on a beach in Paraparaumu, New Zealand. Scientists thought they looked weird, but they shrugged it off as some type of genetic deformity. Since then, the whale has been something of an urban legend until fishermen and tourists began capturing rare images of the animals.Read more...

Two drivers have filed a class-action lawsuit against their employer, Waitr Holdings, Inc., alleging the company violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to meet minimum wage requirements. The suit also claims that some drivers had been misclassified as contractors while performing the work of employees.

Alaska Airlines announced yesterday that it would start direct flights from its hub in Seattle, Washington to Columbus, Ohio. But the airline might want to take a quick peek at a real map. Because the graphic that the company posted to Twitter doesn’t show them traveling to Columbus. That’s Cleveland.

Though Matt Smith was recently spending time playing royalty in Netflix’s The Crown, he’s headed back to genre territory soon. Just maybe not in the project you were hoping to see him in.Read more...

Want to feel old? The year 2009 was 10 years ago. No, really. And if you want to feel really old, here’s a video where fourth-grade kids explain what jobs they think will exist in the future.

It wasn’t long ago when premium smartphones cost around $700. But after suffering through several release cycles littered with $1,000 flagships, it’s clear those days aren’t coming back. To fill in the gap, phone makers have started putting out streamlined, slightly more affordable versions of the flagship devices,…Read more...

SpaceX’s new commercial astronaut capsule, the Crew Dragon, has completed its first test flight, falling into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday morning.

New York’s new KGB Museum is, suffice it to say, a very strange place. The cinderblock-walled space occupies the ground floor of a pricy condo complex, and it recently underwent its “ribbon-cutting” ceremony, with a metallic rope serving as ribbon, which was cut through with a power saw. Inside the museum sit dozens…Read more...

The city of Philadelphia has banned cashless stores, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, in a move that “will require most retail stores to accept cash” as opposed to credit cards or mobile devices.

Rumors also swirl about the casts of Marvel’s Black Widow and the long-in-the-works reboot of Mortal Kombat. New footage descriptions for Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars: Episode IX offer tiny snippets from each movie. Plus, see Lex Luthor’s arrival on Supergirl, and Bane heads to Gotham. To me, my spoilers!

Your personal data—be it financial spreadsheets or web searches—is not something you want to be leaving behind for other people to find, and totally wiping your activity off devices or the web takes a few more steps than you might have realized. Don’t worry though, as we’re going to walk you through the process.Read more...

If you’re already a mechanical keyboard convert, the next logical step in the hobby is to start buying fancy keycap sets. PBT keys don’t get as worn down and shiny as the ABS keys that probably came with your keyboard, and these NPKC black and gray sets are marked down to $26 on Amazon right now, from the usual $30.

The U.S. Air Force has released the first images of its latest combat drone, the XQ-58A Valkyrie. The new aircraft, which went from concept to first test flight in 2.5 years, “behaved as expected” on its first test flight this week, according to the Air Force.Read more...

A little more than a month after the Wall Street Journal reported that Airbnb was in talks to buy HotelTonight, the two have sealed the deal on an acquisition.

Federal Communications Commission chair Ajit Pai’s assessment of how rapidly broadband deployment has accelerated across the country may be hot bullshit, Ars Technica reported on Thursday.

The next film in the DC Universe, Shazam, won’t open until April 5, but Warner Bros. decided to show it to critics early. Why? To hopefully build some buzz and anticipation for the film using social media. It’s a gamble, to be sure—but judging from a large majority of the reactions, it’s a gamble that paid off.Read more...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—who used to be concerned about maintaining a low public profile until mounting scandals forced him into the limelight last year—understandably has a rather hefty security detail. As the CEO of a company with billions of users across the globe, a fair number of whom are presumably are less…Read more...

As Mark Zuckerberg’s privacy parade carries on, a researcher has revealed his findings of a since-patched Facebook vulnerability in Messenger that could potentially expose information about who users had been communicating with.Read more...

Two senior Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are raising concerns about potential violations of the Federal Records Act committed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is being sold to the U.S. military and the air forces of thirteen allies under a program worth approximately $1.4 trillion worldwide. It’s all been an utter boondoggle, but we’re stuck with it, even as there have been some signs of progress, with the latest variant going operations…Read more...

A new case report from the Centers for Disease Control released Thursday starkly highlights the costs of not vaccinating children. It details a unvaccinated 6-year-old boy’s encounter with tetanus—and the hugely expensive, two-month-long effort it took to save his life.Read more...

By combining data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, an international team of astronomers has come up with the most accurate estimate yet of our galaxy’s mass.

Do you know where you’ll be on April 6, 2019? If you heavily rely on GPS, you may not be able to determine where you are when that date rolls around. That’s because GPS navigation technology was originally built with a short-sighted timekeeping system that will reset next month and has the potential to cause chaos.Read more...

On Thursday, I clicked on a link that promised to show me a snail “playing” with a baby carrot. The video was nice, but I wanted to know more. After speaking with multiple snail specialists, I have inched toward the truth about “Snails Can’t Get Enough of Baby Carrot,” dear readers, and it’s either fun in a different…Read more...

A team of scientists are using their training in physics to solve some real-world problems—like the optimal strategy for detangling long hair.Read more...

Facebook, the very open platform that would like to be the opposite of that in the near future, announced a big change this week: It will no longer be a dumping grounds for the anti-vaccination conspiracies of a few misinformed clowns.

Last September, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia gave a bizarre lecture at CERN in which he argued—to an audience of young women scientists—that women are less qualified to conduct physics than men. On Thursday, CERN officially severed its association with Strumia.Read more...

Gail Gygax and I were sitting in the living room of a lace-trimmed, flower-filled bed and breakfast in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin when she told me about the time she discovered what she believed was a plot to kill her.Read more...