Gizmodo

New York’s night sky was bathed in a green-blue light Thursday night, with police saying that an investigation into the cause is currently underway but that they believe it may have resulted from a transformer explosion at a power plant in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens.Read more...

There are mere days left in 2018, but Facebook’s eternal year of reckoning continues.

You’ve seen movies with hair metal bands, and you’ve seen movies with giant killer monsters. But what happens when a hair metal band fights giant killer monsters? You get Dead Ant.Read more...

With the end of the year upon us, all of the most recent trends are officially dead and it’s time to make some new ones. But rather than thinking about which appliance should be connected to the internet next, we want to know which old tech features, gadgets, and doo-dads deserve to be rescued from the dustbin of…Read more...

Anyone who’s been part of a rowdy New Year’s celebration knows that a little alcohol can make us euphoric, energetic, and affectionate. But the more we drink, the more we descend into a (sometimes life-threatening) stupor. The scientists behind a recent study claim to have worked out how that initial buzzed feeling…Read more...

Amazon’s new 4K Fire TV Stick was on sale for $35 on and around Black Friday, but Daily Steals is doing you one better today via its Facebook marketplace. Get Amazon’s latest and greatest streaming stick for $30, including support for Dolby Atmos audio and both major flavors of HDR video.Read more...

CES is less than two weeks away and with it will come a whole slew of announcements about the TVs your living room will covet in 2019, but Samsung has made one announcement early that reads like a souped up version of Chromecast. Its 2019 TV sets will allow you to remote access your computer.

If France isn’t willing to take action on climate change on its own, well, the courts are always an option to force the government’s hand.Read more...

Damn, 2018 sure was a cruel year for pop culture fans, with tons of beloved characters being killed off in television, movies, and video games. Not to mention long-running TV shows being axed off this mortal coil forever (some of which, frankly, really needed to be put out of their misery).Read more...

The entire southwest flank of Indonesia’s Anak Krakatau volcano is missing, as new radar imagery suggests. The erupting volcano triggered a massive landslide on December 22, generating a tsunami that has killed more than 420 people.Read more...

James Weiss is a linguistic quality assurance software tester, but his true passion is studying single-celled eukaryotes. When he’s not staring at a screen, he films microscopic organisms and shares them on YouTube and Instagram so that he can, in his words, “introduce non-scientific communities to the wonders of…Read more...

I’ve never thought about how coal actually gets used. It came out of the ground, it goes into a power plant, soot comes out, and West Virginia dies happy and very, very early. The end. Sure, it had to go onto a train at some point, and that train was probably unloaded by Dickensian street urchins with shovels or…Read more...

New evidence confirms that an influx of cosmic rays struck the entire planet around 994 CE—and it might solve the mystery of the event’s origin.

Putting internet-connected cameras in your home requires some blind trust—namely, that these devices are designed without any major, easily discoverable security vulnerabilities. But that’s not always the case, as researchers at Rapid7 say they found with Guardzilla’s home security cameras. Recently spotted flaws mean…Read more...

The European Space Agency is synching up atomic clocks with distant, rapidly spinning neutron stars, called pulsars, according to a release. Read more...

Elon Musk may be done with 2018, but 2018 ain’t done with Musk.Read more...

Eastern lowland gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have endured dramatic population declines in recent decades, leading to a startling lack of genetic diversity and a slew of harmful mutations, according to new research.

Instagram has given some users a new way to stalk everyone in their feeds: sideways.

The past year saw tremendous advancements in humanity’s capacity to explore space, and 2019 promises to be no different. From mysterious Kuiper Belt objects and Martian probes to historic rocket launches and daring efforts to touch the Sun, here’s what the next 12 months have in store.

The Game Boy Camera was one of the first truly cheap digital cameras, but the trade-off was that it could only snap grainy, 128x112-pixel black and white photographs. Despite its abysmal image quality, there are still a few photographers who love the Game Boy Camera’s lo-fi aesthetic, including Matt Gray who …Read more...

Deadspin Matt Patricia Is Always Late | Jezebel Dave Chappelle Took Pete Davidson Into the Woods | The Root Someone Secured a $1.5 Billion Bag, But Still Hasn’t Claimed Their Mega Millions Jackpot Prize | TV Club The Netflix Marvel series, ranked by season | Splinter Trump Says His Shutdown Is Specifically Harming…Read more...

One month after the NES Classic launched, it was impossible to find. One month after the SNES Classic launched, it was the hottest console on the market. And one month after the PlayStation Classic launched, it’s been marked down from $100 to $60 at every store on the internet.

Once upon a time, legend told of a magical charging pad that could power up a smartphone, watch, and wireless earbuds all at the same time. Reports from locals who claimed to have seen it even mentioned that it bore a mark that looked like half-eaten fruit. However, despite all the prophecies and rumors, no one has…Read more...

YouTube appears to have found itself in hot water after it lifted an uncredited video from one of its creators and used part of the video for its own Christmas content on Twitter.

Japan announced this week it will be splitting from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in order to renew its commercial whaling practices. The announcement comes after years of Japan exploiting a loophole in IWC’s international moratorium on whale killings, and after the IWC declined to approve its bid for…Read more...

The Indian government sent a strong screw you to Amazon and the Walmart-owned Flipkart on Wednesday, banning e-commerce companies from selling products from companies that they have an equity interest in or “entering into exclusive agreements with sellers,” CNBC reported.

With the government shutdown, Donald Trump has been looking for ways to distract the public from his failure to BUILD THE WALL, and a trip to Iraq seemed like a publicity slam dunk for his image at a critical time. Surely he couldn’t fuck this up, right?Read more...

As the dust settles on both the year that was and our piles of comic books, it’s time to take stock of the series we’ve loved the most this year. From sci-fi epics to mindbending superheroism, these are our 10 favorite series we read in 2018.

Reid Hoffman has a lot to apologize for, but today he’s specifically saying that he’s sorry for funding a political experiment gone horribly awry.Read more...

Everything to love about Android, there is still one deeply annoying problem. One that can be so annoying it could make you swear off the OS altogether. It takes forever for the Google’s OS updates to trickle down to products manufactured by companies like Samsung, OnePlus, and Huawei. So while Samsung S9 and OnePlus…Read more...

The Roomba’s most sinister-sounding feature—recording maps of your home that iRobot CEO Colin Angle swears he will totally never sell to advertisers—can now be used for more overtly hellish purposes thanks to Doomba, a tool that converts Roomba maps for use in the 1993 shooter Doom.

Thousands of people got a particularly crummy gift this Christmas: A warning that they could have been exposed to dangerous bloodborne diseases like HIV and viral hepatitis while receiving care at the hospital.Read more...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is looking to get its hands on a product that will help its agents investigate tax dodgers who’ve set up shop on social media, according to a request posted to the federal government’s procurement website, FedBizOpps.

Public health experts have been warning us about clinics offering unapproved and untested stem cell treatments for some time now. But a recent report from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) underscores the health risks these procedures can have. An outbreak linked to stem cell injections contaminated…Read more...

Many things about the new film Bird Box may make you uncomfortable. There’s the obvious stuff, like a terrifying menace taking over the world that kills you if you simply look at it, as well as how that menace impacts different people in surprising and scary ways. Then, most interestingly, there’s how the film…Read more...

When sea turtles lay their eggs and bury them in the sand, the temperature they develop in will dictate whether the hatchlings are born male or female. Pretty cool, right? Well, not really: A new study shows that climate change may cause most sea turtles to be born female. The future of sea turtles depends on the…Read more...

President Donald Trump signed a bill last week providing over a billion dollars in funding to quantum research.

Snapchat hasn’t had the best year. It faced blowback from its botched redesign, lost 3 million daily users in just three months, and its stock price has never been lower. But now you can add new augmented reality lenses to your dog, so that’s something I guess.Read more...

Following in the footsteps of the European Union and Australia, the government of India now wants to rewrite its laws to censor content and weaken encryption. If allowed to move forward, India’s new proposals would require many web platforms to remove illegal content within 24 hours and use broken automation…Read more...

Of all of io9's year-end lists, this may have been the hardest to settle on. There were just so many memorable moments in film this year. Good ones, bad ones, moments that will last forever, moments you can never unsee.Read more...

In what’s becoming an annual rite of passage, Australia is in the midst of another record-setting heat wave.

You’ve got your hands on a shiny new 4K television set, or a 4K computer monitor, or even a smartphone with a 4K screen... so where’s all the 4K content at? It can sometimes feel like its impossible to find good looking stuff for your brand new display. From the TV makers, to the set top box manufacturers, to the…Read more...

After years of neglect, Apple finally revived the Mac Mini a few months ago with a brand new model, featuring four Thunderbolt 3 USB-C ports, a speedier quad core processor, and all-SSD storage. You’ll still need to provide your own monitor and peripherals, but if you own those already, you can plug this straight in…Read more...

In 2018, we saw the automotive industry charge headfirst into a future filled with electric and (maybe) autonomous vehicles, all while putting out the most innovative, powerful and efficient engines the world’s ever seen. Over the past 12 months, we at Jalopnik have experienced, and written about some of the best…Read more...

Scientists often detect weird sounds in Antarctica, from the groans of melting glaciers to seismic waves rippling through ice shelves. But a space weather station run by the British Antarctic Survey may hold the most diverse selection of acoustic oddities collected on the frozen continent to date.Read more...

Amazon had a pretty stellar holiday season this year. Some of the people trying to set up their Alexa smart speakers Christmas morning? Not so much. According to The Guardian, Alexa servers in Europe failed just as hordes of new users tried to register their devices.Read more...

The A.V. Club Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly hit career lows in the abysmally unfunny Holmes & Watson | Deadspin No One’s Scared Of Ben Simmons | The Grapevine Secret Santa Helped Lil Wayne Out with His Taxes... and It Just so Happened to Be Jay-Z | Jezebel Meghan Markle’s Christmas Gift to the Queen Was an Adequate…Read more...

A peek at Spider-Man: Far From Home’s mysterious Mysterio, John Wick meets The Director, and Hellboy rides. Plus new looks at Deadly Class, Outlander, and more. Spoilers dropping right this way...Read more...

A lot of people still aren’t convinced gaming phones are something that should even exist. But if there was one phone that might be able to sway peoples’ opinions, it’d be Asus’ Republic of Gamer (or ROG) Phone. In fact, based on some recent corporate shuffling, Asus is so emboldened by the ROG phone that the company…Read more...

There might be occasions when you need to take a break from the usual phone and tablet tasks—emailing, social networking, gaming, messaging—and actually do something productive. If you need to edit files on the go, whether it’s audio from an interview or a PDF sent from the office, these are the apps you need to have…Read more...