Gizmodo

A domestic terrorism briefing the FBI gave to law enforcement agencies in 2017 warned them about the threat of “pro-abortion extremists.” That would be fine, except—as the FBI’s own briefing materials subsequently admit—violent pro-abortion extremists barely exist, and in no universe do they constitute an organized…Read more...

Scientists working with the Curiosity rover used a piece of its navigation equipment—an accelerometer like the one in your cellphone—in order to make an important measurement about Mars’ mysterious geology.Read more...

The debate over the potential harms and benefits of vaping has raged on for years. But the results of a large trial in the UK have provided the pro-vaping side its biggest win yet. It found that people trying to quit smoking were almost twice as likely to succeed over a year’s time if they used electronic cigarettes…Read more...

How do you make a disgusting, destructive, digital virus into a character, but still make it okay for a Disney film? It was a tough task, but eventually, the team behind Ralph Breaks the Internet created Double Dan.

Week 4: Microsoft

Antarctica is the font of bad news that just keeps on giving. Thwaites Glacier, among the most threatened hunks of ice on the continent, is in even more dire straits than previously reported. Its melt from above and below is being aided by newly discovered cavities below the ice, as chronicled in Science Advances on…Read more...

Amazon is set to bring thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars to New York City. This marks the most promising opportunity in history to actually unionize Amazon. But that will only work if our city’s most powerful unions don’t stab one another in the back. Some are already failing the test.Read more...

It’s a heartbreaking photo. But it doesn’t show what you think it does.

If there’s one thing consistent in this world, it’s how companies are always finding new and creative ways to shove ads in your face. Hulu’s latest experiment involves a less abrasive strategy than the usual video ad break—it’s going to place static banner ads on the screen when you pause your video starting in the…Read more...

The fossilized remains of an early reptile dating back some 250 million years have been uncovered in the unlikeliest of places: Antarctica. The discovery shows how wildlife recovered after the worst mass extinction in our planet’s history, and how Antarctica once hosted an ecosystem unlike any other.

A northern California beach has been invaded by strange creatures. They awkwardly waddle with their long, slinky noses hung high. About 60 of them have been lounging on the sandy shores of the Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco with their mini-mes. These aren’t any ordinary beasts—they’re elephant seals.Read more...

In early January, Google systems reliability engineer Liz Fong-Jones announced she was leaving the company after 11 years, leaving behind, by her account, a half million dollars in stock, to work at the startup Honeycomb.io. An outspoken advocate for inclusion and diversity, Fong-Jones quit citing dissatisfaction with…Read more...

Tom Hanks has recorded his last lines for Toy Story 4. Doctor Sleep and The Witches have been given release dates. Get a new look at Amazon’s take on Hanna. Plus, The Flash dredges up some turmoil for Sherloque, new Star Trek: Discovery pictures, and another clip from Alita: Battle Angel. Spoilers now!Read more...

The Department of Energy shipped half a ton of weapons-grade plutonium across the country from South Carolina to Nevada, despite concerns raised by state officials in Nevada about safety and worries that the state would become a dumping ground for nuclear waste.Read more...

When Mario Kart Tour was first announced last year, it was slated for release on Android and iOS sometime before March 2019. Now, in Japan, the smartphone game has been pushed back to summer.

In a somewhat unbelievable feat considering Facebook’s absolute shitshow of a year in 2018, the social media company—freshly off of a new scandal involving a teen-targeting “research” app—reported record profit in its Wednesday earnings call.

On Tuesday, news broke via TechCrunch that Facebook ran a sketchy “Research” program involving paid participants who downloaded an app onto their phones that was capable of monitoring virtually everything that they did—including in some cases teens as young as 13, who were recruited via social media ads that appeared…Read more...

The New York Attorney General’s office has announced a settlement with Devumi LLC, a social media-marketing firm whose tactics were exposed by the New York Times last year, in what the office wrote is “the first finding by a law enforcement agency that selling fake social media engagement and using stolen identities…Read more...

As phishing scams become increasingly sophisticated, Google’s engineers have been exploring ways to help users better identify potentially nefarious URLs. Google Chrome is currently testing a new warning to flag these types of domains, CNET reported Tuesday.

The next Batman movie has its release date: June 25, 2021. And the franchise is saying goodbye to Ben Affleck.Read more...

It’s been 25 years since Stephen King’s 1978 novel The Stand was adapted into a live-action format. Since then Hollywood has continually been trying to do it again. Now, it’s finally happening. The CBS All Access streaming service has ordered the epic story of good and evil as a 10-episode limited series.Read more...

Surprise surprise, Overwatch—which players have taken to declaring a veritable dust bowl of new content in the wake of yet another seasonal event retread—is getting a new map. This one’s set in Paris, the city of romance (and now, romance’s close friend, Death) just in time for Valentine’s Day.

A big part of the Tesla mythos is that you’re always being promised a brighter future. When so much of it comes through, you forget about the stuff that doesn’t, like battery-swap stations or full self-driving or highways lined with... well, these things. And now, here’s a full list of everything Tesla is telling us…Read more...

Breakfast is often said to be the most important meal of the day, but according to a new review out Wednesday in the BMJ, it won’t help you lose weight. The study found no good evidence that regularly eating breakfast helps us cut down on calories or avoid weight gain. More damning, it even found some evidence that…Read more...

Windows 10 has had dark mode settings for a quite some time, and Apple added it to macOS with its Mojave update last year. But strangely, neither iOS nor stock Android offers a true system-wide dark mode option right now.Read more...

Researchers used a grainy photograph of a toppled train combined with an eyewitness account to analyze the deadly earthquake that struck San Francisco over 110 years ago.

It’s been a while since we last heard from the Parker Solar Probe, the NASA spacecraft voted most likely to end up as a blistered chunk of molten metal. An update from the space agency suggests it’s now all systems go for the Sun-bound probe, which recently began its second of 24 planned stellar orbits.Read more...

“It’s a cold day in New York,” Stuart Applebaum told a crowd of shivering protesters that included members of Make the Road, the Tech Workers Coalition, the Democratic Socialists of America, Desis Rising Up and Moving, and the group he presides over, the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union, “but it’s not as…Read more...

When the National Enquirer published alleged text message exchanges between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and media personality Lauren Sánchez in January, many people immediately began cooking up a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was involved with the leak. According to a new report, Bezos’ investigators actually think …Read more...

Facebook may not be the only tech giant violating Apple’s developer program policies.Read more...

With BuzzFeed’s latest round of mass layoffs over, CEO Jonah Peretti hosted an all-hands meeting on Wednesday to face questions about his handling of the past week, as well as what the future would bring for a company that only a few short years ago was valued at $1.7 billion dollars.

Following news yesterday that Facebook paid teens in order to monitor their phones via an unsettling “research” app, Apple has pulled Facebook’s Enterprise Certificate. As a result, Facebook can no longer access its internal iOS apps, such as pre-release versions of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, “as well as the…Read more...

If you tried to turn on your Xbox One today only to be greeted with a borked boot up sequence and a series of black screens, you’re not the only one. Apparently, there’s an issue with Xbox Live that’s stopping some consoles from being able to start up normally.Read more...

A steady hand is needed to play a game like Jenga without toppling the tower, but being a successful block-stacker also requires a fine-tuned sense of touch as you try to find the perfect piece to remove. Until recently it meant robots relying solely on visual data weren’t actually great at playing Jenga (yay,…Read more...

The deployment of facial recognition technology by government bodies in cities around the world continues to spread, even as lawmakers and technologists point out the ethical issues still plaguing these systems. That’s why a San Francisco elected official’s recent proposal is so important—it effectively bans the city…Read more...

In 2013, marine scientists witnessed a real-life, aquatic version of Contagion. Over the summer, divers in Monterey, California were treated to a horror scene of sea stars with limbs torn asunder and bodies disintegrating. Soon, major aquariums up and down the West Coast reported their sea stars went from paragons of…Read more...

With the iPad Pro and its tight integration with the Pencil stylus, Apple’s tablet finally became a legitimate content creation tool for artists—and legitimate competition for Wacom, whose tablets have been a staple among designers and pixel pushers for decades. Wacom’s hardware, particularly its touchscreen Cintiq…Read more...

You might have noticed that it’s pretty cold throughout much of the United States—frostbite-inducing, school-closing, scald-yourself-with-boiling-water-while-attempting-that-stupid-instant-snow-trick cold. You might wonder what that means, scientifically.

Denisova cave in southern Siberia was home to Neanderthals and Denisovans for thousands of years, but questions remain about the timing of their stay. A pair of new studies traces the history of archaic human occupation at the site, showing who lived there and when—including a possible era during which the two…Read more...

As Apple developers scramble to fix a disturbing bug in FaceTime that allowed users to eavesdrop on the people they call with the Group FaceTime function, we’ve learned the company was allegedly notified about the issue before it was widely known, repeatedly. At least one lawsuit has already been filed against the…Read more...

Foxconn, one of the largest electronics manufacturing companies in the world, received $4 billion worth of subsidies and infrastructure spending from the state of Wisconsin to build a new factory there. But the plan for that factory seems to be unraveling by the day. In fact, Foxconn now admits that they’re no longer…Read more...

Even though base storage on phones has increased from 8GB to 16GB to even 64GB on some newer handsets, with the ever increasing size of photos, videos, and apps, sometimes it still feels like there’s never enough room.Read more...

Apple’s surprisingly terrific smart iPhone battery cases just made an unexpected comeback for the latest generation of iPhones, and the XS, XR, and XS Max cases are already $10-$11 off on Amazon.

If you don’t pick up the phone anymore because each time it seems to be one of those annoying robocallers, you’re not alone. A newly released report found that 26.3 billion robocalls were made to U.S. phone numbers in 2018, up 46 percent from 18 billion in 2017. Yikes.Read more...

While hundreds of schools in the American Midwest are shut down due to freezing temperatures, hundreds in another part of the world are facing closures for a different reason entirely: air pollution.

“If you try hard enough, any popular line of toys can be turned into a successful cinematic franchise.” - Old Hollywood proverb.

Jordan Peele discusses how The Twilight Zone inspired Us. The Babadook’s Jennifer Kent is working on something scary with Guillermo del Toro. Donna Troy could be getting a costume on Titans. Plush, what’s to come on The Flash and Supergirl, and Billy Eichner talks Lion King duets. To me, my spoilers!

Fox News is no longer tweeting from the cable network’s main account, but that doesn’t mean that President Trump’s favorite channel has abandoned Twitter altogether. In fact, Fox News still relies on Twitter to harvest free content that airs on its network all day long.

Facebook has stealthily launched a service similar to Onavo Protect, its vampiric psuedo-VPN that claims to protect users’ privacy but actually collects and analyzes their data. This time it’s worse—Facebook is targeting teens to install a similar app via third-party beta testing services, in possible violation of…Read more...

After years of rumors, iRobot’s finally announced its robot lawnmower: the Terra. Now, instead of getting up early and mowing and annoying the neighbors, you can sleep in and let the robot do it for you. On top of being able to mow your lawn, it seems the Terra will borrow quite a few features from iRobot’s successful…Read more...