Gizmodo

Kids are already over fidget spinners after adults rapidly made them uncool, but a team of scientists in Taiwan has found a nifty way to repurpose these small toys. They turned them into inexpensive centrifuges that could allow health workers in impoverished areas to carry out certain blood tests with ease.Read more...

As our phones become ever more powerful and smart, their capabilities are increasing—so much so that we’re using them more and more like computers these days (quite literally sometimes). It also means Android and iOS are becoming better at multitasking, and here are the best ways of speeding through whatever it is you…Read more...

Deadspin P.J. Tucker Randomly Decides The Ball Has Cooties, Refuses To Touch It | The Slot Ex-Trump Staffer Says Kellyanne Conway Is the White House’s Leaky Cruella de Vil | TV Club The most shocking thing about Conversations With A Killer is how much faith it has in Ted Bundy | Splinter ‘I’m Struggling Through Every…Read more...

Indiana is better known for sprawling suburbs and cornfields, but near the shores of Lake Michigan, these landscapes give way to something wilder. Beaches grow increasingly grass-anchored as one travels inland, creating dunes that slope into scrub punctuated by gnarled, sandblasted trees, which eventually give way to…Read more...

Between your ears sits perhaps the most complex piece of biological machinery on the planet: an all-in-one computer, simulator, and creation device that operates out of a squishy, folded gray mass. And scientists aren’t quite sure how it works.

Sandra Bullock is returning to Netflix to produce a new Mark Millar project. There’s some truly wild speculation about an obscure Marvel character and their potential role in Avengers: Endgame. Plus, Doctor Who re-enters production, Ed Neumeier on RoboCop Returns, and what’s to come on The Passage. Spoilers, get!

Going for a run in the winter is brutal. Your ears freeze, the air burns your lungs, and if you prefer indoor workouts at the gym, getting out of a warm bed and outdoors to get there requires excruciating effort. But is the convenience of a home gym worth shelling out for a treadmill, let alone one that costs over…Read more...

Kingston’s HyperX Cloud II is one of your favorite gaming headsets, and you can add it to your arsenal for $70 today. That’s a solid $30 off the regular price, and the cheapest we’ve ever seen.

The high-end camera world is in the middle of a revolution. Longtime DSLR makers Canon and Nikon recently jumped on the full-frame mirrorless bandwagon with the new EOS R and Z series systems, with Panasonic joining the party soon with the new Lumix S1 and S1R. Meanwhile, Olympus is taking the road less traveled by.…Read more...

It’s day 34 of President Trump’s government shutdown with no end in sight. And while most of the media’s attention has been focused on the long lines at airport security and food that’s going uninspected, there’s another topic that isn’t getting much coverage: the potential for rampant corruption.

Over 200 employees working on Apple’s self-driving cars project, code-named Project Titan, have been laid off. The move is being positioned internally as an “anticipated restructuring,” according to the earliest reports, though it’s not immediately clear that the job losses were actually expected by the people who…Read more...

This year is already proving to be challenging for Microsoft’s Bing. It appears as of Wednesday that the search engine is no longer accessible in China, even despite the company’s commitment to censoring its search results.

Unions that represent U.S. air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants sent out an alarming joint statement on Wednesday warning that the ongoing federal government shutdown—at 33 days, the longest in history—has caused a situation in which they “cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play”…Read more...

Google Hangouts loyalists, I regret to inform you that the news about your beloved communication tool is not great.

Excuse me, sir. Sir! If you would put down your newspaper forthwith, and grant me your fullest attention for a situation most dire.

Elon Musk’s prototype of the Starship spacecraft—the payload of a system formerly known as the Big “Falcon” Rocket, and the vessel that may one day shuttle SpaceX colonists to their likely deaths on Mars—fell over in strong winds at its facility in Boca Chica, Texas on Tuesday.

Long after it became painfully clear that Facebook was being manipulated as a tool to undermine democracy and cause harm, the social media company still struggles to keep its platform free of the kind of garbage specially engineered to effectively warp reality—even as recently as this month. And previous systems it’s…Read more...

Modern animated films are hugely collaborative efforts that take years to bring from concept to fruition—something that makes it fascinating to look back at a project’s earliest stages to see just how it evolved over the course of production.Read more...

Deadspin Trade Marc Gasol To The Lakers | The Slot The Credibility of ‘Our Boys’ | The Root Donald Trump Said He Was Going to Give His Little Speech Anyway. Shorter Nancy Pelosi: I Said What I Said | Splinter Please Keep Doing This, Rich Scumbags | The A.V. Club The most shocking thing about Conversations With A Killer is how much faith it has in…Read more...

Last month, NASA researchers were gleefully sharing the early returns from their recently launched ice-monitoring satellite, ICESat-2, at the world’s largest annual meeting of Earth scientists. This month, many of those same researchers are furloughed as a vital airborne campaign needed to calibrate the satellite…Read more...

We have a lot of questions about Facebook’s CEO, some of which we’ve posed on this very website. But a new interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has introduced one mystery we absolutely must unravel: Did Mark Zuckerberg shoot a goat to death with lasers?Read more...

One of Lovecraft’s most beloved short stories is being turned into a movie—and Nicolas Cage is on board to star.

For at least the third time in as many days, a large cache of sensitive data has been reportedly exposed due to a misconfigured Elasticsearch server. In this case, a whopping 24 million financial and banking records are said to be involved.

Whenever I go out to dinner with a bunch of friends, and we split the check, multiple people wind up throwing in those heavy, slate-grey credit cards bearing Amazon’s smiley arrow.

A U.S. state’s politics could be influencing how people use cannabis, suggests a new study out Wednesday from Columbia University. It found that liberal states had higher rates of pot use than conservative states, but conservative states had higher rates of harmful, addictive use. These differences could be seen among…Read more...

Netflix is raising prices, but its competitor is opting for a different tack—sort of. Hulu’s just announced that its cheapest subscription plan price will drop to $6 a month—two whole dollars less than the current $8 price.Read more...

NewsGuard is a startup organization that aims to evaluate the reliability of news organizations and give web users a quick rating for how much they should trust what they’re reading. As of this week, the company’s plug-in now comes packaged in Microsoft’s mobile Edge browser. It’s a development that everyone should…Read more...

Top developers behind ad-blocking and anti-tracking browser extensions say they’re alarmed by potential changes coming to Chrome recently disclosed in a public Google document. As a result, at least one company is now threatening possible legal action.Read more...

New research suggests that much of the material that made life possible on Earth arrived after a cataclysmic collision between our planet and a Mars-sized object billions of years ago—likely the same collision that produced the Moon, the scientists say.

Chinese researchers have cloned five gene-edited monkeys with a host of genetic disease symptoms, according to two scientific papers published today.Read more...

In late December the friends and family members of the Parkland school shooting victims started getting alarming messages through Instagram from users names such as nikolas.killed.your.sister, nikolas.the.murderer, and the.douglas.shooter:

If you want to know how Shazam is going to be different from the DC Entertainment films that preceded it, you need only reference two scenes: One in which the hero fights the bad guy in a toy store filled with DC superhero merch, and another where a big fight takes place at a festive winter carnival, complete with a…Read more...

Instagram broke its silence on its algorithmic kerfuffle this week, taking to Twitter to address rumors that it was limiting the reach of users’ posts. Long story short—no, its feed doesn’t curtail your posts to just 7 percent of your followers, the company said.Read more...

As night falls on the lowland rainforests in Madagascar, dead, decaying leaves find new life, slowly unfurling in the vanishing light. But as four scaly feet and wide, unblinking eyes emerge from behind the crinkly veil, the leaves reveal their true identities: these are leaf-tailed geckos, unparalleled masters of…Read more...

The Apple Smart Keyboard is the perfect accessory to go with that 2017 iPad Pro you bought yesterday. At $110, this is a great deal made even better by the fact that it costs $42 less than what’s currently on Amazon right now—just make sure to use the promo code KJSMARTKEY.Read more...

Google, Facebook, and Amazon got more shit than ever from Washington last year, all while spending record amounts lobbying lawmakers. New filings reveal that altogether the three companies spent more than $48 million in a year pocked with congressional hearings, revelations regarding Russian interference, and little…Read more...

At CES a reporter had a question for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. What could he say to alleviate the concerns of fans who felt that the new RTX 20-series GPUs were overpriced and trying to force ray tracing technology on customers who don’t have much use for it? Huang smiled, with a mixture of serenity and satisfaction.…Read more...

Resurrected back in 2017, Sony’s robotic dog Aibo made a big splash at CES 2018, but there wasn’t much fanfare for the pup at Sony’s CES booth this year. A few weeks later, however, Sony has announced a new version of the robotic companion featuring a beagle-inspired tri-color paint job, and some new tricks that…Read more...

A few weeks ago, a leaked video of an intriguing, dual-folding bendy phone hit the net, and since then I’ve wanted to know everything about it. Then today, in a post on Weibo, Xiaomi president Lin Bin released a teaser clip for an upcoming device that seemingly confirms Xiaomi as the maker of the gadget that…Read more...

On a trip to Indonesia, gemologist Brian Berger purchased an opal that appeared to have an insect entombed inside. Insects trapped in amber are a common-enough sight, but in a slow-forming gemstone like opal?Read more...

Ryan Reynolds wants a third Deadpool to go in a completely different direction from the prior films. Black Lightning casts another new metahuman. More Magicians is on the way. Plus, Game of Thrones runtime rumors, and what’s to come on The Gifted and The Flash. Spoilers, away!Read more...

Apple isn’t known for its web apps, though you can now access a lot of its core apps (in basic form) through iCloud on the web. It doesn’t include Apple Music, but Apple does make APIs available for the service that other programmers can hook into—and that means there are now several third-party online players for…Read more...

The calendar has to be one of the most-used apps on any smartphone—keeping track of appointments, birthdays, vacations, and more—but if you’ve stuck with the one Apple or Google gives you on your phone then you’re missing out. These are five of the best alternative calendar apps that give you something more.

If your computer or phone uses USB-C, it’s worth keeping an adapter around to turn it into an old-school USB 3.0 port for your legacy devices. This space gray aluminum adapter from Nonda is attractive, only $8 (down from the usual $10), about as small as these things can possibly be.

Stomp down the resistance with this First Order Heavy Assault Walker Lego Set. Down to $110 today on Amazon, this 1376-piece building kit is about $40 off regular pricing.Read more...

What does the future of getting a job in the tech industry look like? According to the CEO of IBM, Ginni Rometty, it’s important that tech companies focus on hiring people with valuable skills, not just people with college degrees.

NASA has pulled astronaut Eric Boe, who was scheduled as a crew member for the first manned test flight of Boeing’s Boeing CST-100 Starliner crew capsule in the second half of 2019, as he “is unable to fly due to medical reasons,” the space agency said in a statement on Tuesday.

In an incident similar to ones which shut down the UK’s Gatwick Airport before Christmas last month and another at Heathrow in early January, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport grounded all departing and incoming flights on Tuesday after two pilots reported spotted a drone.

Pretty much half the news media is backpedaling from their coverage of footage of white Covington Catholic High School students in MAGA hats taunting and harassing a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in DC amid the Indigenous Peoples’ March earlier this month. Footage of the…Read more...

I’m one of those weird people that actually enjoys the liminal spaces of travel—hotels, train stations, and yes, airports—but even I have my limits. I might be having a chill time reading a book in a food court that only smells a little like a one-thousand-year-old Panda Express, but if I hear that my flight’s been…Read more...