Gizmodo

No matter how jaded we become, each year the fine gadget purveyors of the world manage to find new ways to delight and surprise us with gear that’s inventive, exciting, and just plain cool. We put our heads together and collected the very best and most interesting products we were lucky enough to try this year. Here’s…Read more...

“I was driving it with the windows down,” then-product planner and engineer Bob Hall told me over the phone, “and you’d have sworn there was a Ferrari two cars behind you. With the windows up... you couldn’t hear a fucking thing.”

When Altria—formerly known as Philip Morris Companies and parent company of Marlboro—invested $12.8 billion for a 35 percent stake in Juul, it put a huge $38 billion valuation on the biggest e-cigarette maker in the game.Read more...

Out of the three major sectors of the economy—agriculture, manufacturing, and service—two are already largely automated. Farm labor, which about half the American workforce used to do, now comprises around 2 percent of American jobs. And we all know the rust belt song and dance, beat out to outsourcing and…Read more...

With all the talk about Russians using social media to amplify divisive political messaging and influence voter turnout, little attention has been paid to the inevitable use of those tactics by Americans. According to the New York Times, it’s already happening: A group of researchers actually mirrored Russian methods…Read more...

Korolev crater on Mars boasts an ice rink measuring over 50 miles wide—and it’s one of the most spectacular surface features on the Red Planet, as the latest image from the Mars Express spacecraft reveals.Read more...

The MacBook Air is an icon: A wedge-shaped computer fashioned from a block of aluminum into a device so thin it can fit in a paper envelope. But other laptop makers have riffed on Apple’s idea in the last ten years. Instead of aluminum (or in the case of the new Air: recycled aluminum), some companies are using…Read more...

An Amazon user in Germany recently requested data about his personal activities and inadvertently gained access to 1,700 audio recordings of someone he didn’t know.Read more...

If you ever fly on airplanes, you probably need noise-canceling headphones. If you work in an open plan office, you probably need noise-canceling headphones. If you ever feel the world is attacking your ears, you probably need noise-canceling headphones. Therapy might help but try noise-canceling headphones first.…Read more...

Using its robotic arm, the InSight lander gingerly placed a hexagonal device onto the smooth Martian surface yesterday. It marks the first time in history that a seismometer has ever been placed on Mars—or the surface of another planet for that matter.Read more...

This year was dismal for home robots, but that’s not deterring Japanese startup Groove X from announcing the Lovot, an adorable and cuddly robot designed to manipulate your emotions.Read more...

Almost immediately after Amazon announced on November 13 that it would build a new corporate campus in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, critics of the company—and of the multibillion dollar package that helped woo Jeff Bezos to the neighborhood—loudly began making themselves themselves heard.

A Tesla Model S caught fire earlier this week in a parking lot in Los Gatos, California. It then reignited a few hours later after it had been brought to a tow yard.Read more...

Get another look at the Hellboy reboot, John Wick 3, and Aladdin in new pictures. Nick Nolte’s The Mandalorian character could be from a familiar Star Wars race. The Locke & Key TV show has found its Locke siblings. Plus, a clip from Guillermo Del Toro’s follow up to Trollhunters, and a new look at The Walking Dead’s…Read more...

While plenty of smartwatches and trackers can measure your heart rate, most don’t really have a medical purpose outside of familiarizing yourself with a baseline. Even the Apple Watch Series 4 comes with a lot of caveats about its ECG and atrial fibrillation features. But Omron’s HeartGuide smartwatch is the first…Read more...

Update: The campaign ends in just a few days, meaning this is your last chance to preorder the Capsule II for $399, or $200 less than MSRP. In our experiences with Anker’s crowdfunded projects, it takes a long time for them to offer a deal on the product through Amazon that’s as good as the Kickstarter price, if they…Read more...

Anker’s been making a big push into the audio world with its SoundCore spin-off brand this year, and four of its most popular products are deeply discounted in today’s Amazon Gold Box.

Drones! People can’t stop flying ‘em, whether they’re harmless hobbyists, police looking to expand their surveillance powers, criminals looking to evade them, corporate profiteers, failed assassins, or dumbasses who violate airspace restrictions or interfere with emergency operations out of ignorance, recklessness, or…Read more...

Having rounded out the year with yet another bombshell report from the New York Times about Facebook’s mishandling of user data, the beleaguered social media company is now hitting back at claims that it allowed its partners to view Facebook users’ private messages.

Johnson & Johnson, which lost a lawsuit brought by 22 women and their families who claimed their ovarian mesotheliomas were caused by talc products contaminated with the carcinogen asbestos to the tune of $4.69 billion in July, has failed to have the verdict thrown out on jurisdictional grounds.

Due to the plethora of unsavory grifters who’ve found themselves in the administration of Donald Trump over the past few years, Commerce secretary Wilbur Ross has mostly managed to fly under the radar despite being, in many ways, as laughably corrupt as Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke.

MoviePass, the e-ticketing company that has spent most of the last year in a slow-motion catastrophic meltdown, has somehow sucked Bruce Willis into a three-picture deal with its production company, Deadline reported this week.

Following reports last month that Juul was in talks with Big Tobacco for a possible minority stake in its company, it seems that nicotine-fueled train is chugging right along.

Not A god. THE God. Also, Daniel Radcliffe and Deadpool’s Karan Soni play the Big Guy’s angelic underlings, toiling in a corporation that stands in for Heaven. As the first full trailer for the TBS limited series suggests, it’s a bit of a dysfunctional workplace...and Earth is in serious trouble because of that.Read more...

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed Green New Deal Committee is an ambitious, openly-progressive push to make the United States grow past the constraints and disastrous consequences of dated, pollutant-heavy energy sources like coal and fossil fuel. So, very unsurprisingly, leadership in the House of Representatives…Read more...

It’s game over for Shawn Levy and Uncharted. The director has left the video game adaptation to make another film, a film that just so happens to also be about video games.Read more...

Remember when Zack Nelson from JerryRigEverything got everyone worked up into a tizzy after he bent an iPad Pro in half with his bare hands and mused whether Apple’s new tablet might be a little weak? Well, it seems he may have been onto something.Read more...

Anthony Levandowski—formerly of Google, where he reportedly contributed to at least one serious crash and did not alert the police while overseeing its self-driving car program, and of Uber, where he allegedly imported stolen secrets from Google and was fired after being sued over it—rides again.

Pressure is mounting on U.S. regulators to investigate whether Google Play Store is currently distributing mobile apps that place children’s personal information at risk.Read more...

New scientific results have strengthened the case that the ubiquitous northern cardinal could be two species of bird or more.

Citing a continued disregard for “international norms,” the U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday announced new sanctions against Russian assets and individuals, including 15 members of the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the GRU.

Thousands of years ago, Japanese artisans had a habit of mixing maize weevils into their clay when making pottery. The recent discovery of a single pot packed with an estimated 500 weevils is adding to our knowledge of this practice, and the extent to which these destructive pests plagued ancient Japan.

We didn’t know what to think about the Osmo Pocket when DJI announced the device earlier this month. It’s basically a tiny drone camera and three-axis gimbal on a stick. There’s a little screen so you can see what you’re filming and some smart features that help you track subjects. It’s not an action cam, the company…Read more...

Authorities say a man in Montana was almost shot by a still-unidentified gunman who claimed he mistook the victim for the elusive, mythical beast known as Bigfoot.Read more...

While Facebook has encountered plenty of public outrage and bad publicity since the Cambridge Analytica scandal first emerged in March, its legal penalties have been few and far between. That could change soon, as the attorney general of the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the social network on Wednesday.…Read more...

The first trailer for Neil Marshall’s Hellboy reboot is here and it’s probably nothing like what you’d expect from the movie, but trust that it’s exactly what you need.

Nine states between Virginia and Vermont are taking steps to clean up their biggest source of carbon pollution. On Tuesday, they along with Washington, D.C., announced they’re building a regional cap-and-trade system to cut vehicle emissions and reinvest in low-carbon transit.Read more...

Way back at the beginning of 2018, you kind of had feeling it was going to be a good year at the movies. Two weeks in, we had a contender in the form of Paddington 2. February brought the $700 million hit Black Panther and the hypnotic Annihilation. And even before that, film festivals introduced us to Hereditary,…Read more...

Sometimes it’s just easier to hand over your data instead of taking the ten seconds to Do the Right Thing. Logging into an app through Facebook, linking an app so it posts on Twitter, allowing a service to access your location at all times... In 2018, these are all privacy no-no’s and we all know better.Read more...

It’s been a weird year for Samsung. While the South Korean giant managed to hold onto the top spot for global smartphone sales, many of its Chinese rivals started closing the gap with Huawei CEO Richard Yu going so far as to say that Huawei could steal the number one spot by as early as 2019. But the bigger issue is…Read more...

From rooftop configurations to utility-scale facilities, solar panels are springing up like popcorn across the United States. Putting an exact figure on the nation’s total solar power output, however, is proving to be notoriously difficult. Thankfully, it’s a problem well suited to artificial intelligence, as new…Read more...

As the automotive industry continues to throw all of its weight behind developing self-driving technologies for the near-future, looking back on 2018—which included lawsuits, wake-up calls about limitations and the first known pedestrian fatality from a self-driving car—does anything but sell the promise of having…Read more...

If you take a peek at the back pages of 1990s computer magazines, you’ll find plenty of ads for data recovery services, toner cartridges, and bulk shipments of computer disks. Look even closer, and you’ll discover a now-almost-forgotten world of early digital erotica and sexual chat services.

Getting a movie up on the big screen in your living room is easier than its ever been—with services like Netflix, iTunes, Google Movies & TV, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video and more at your disposal, you’ve got a huge choice of films to pick from. But movie night is about more than just the movie, and here we’ve picked out…Read more...

On Tuesday, an internal memo was sent to employees at NASA to inform them of a data breach that was identified on October 23. The notice claimed that hackers were able to obtain personally identifiable information including social security numbers belonging to the space agency’s staff.Read more...

The solar panels stood tall against the icy expanse as the four-person team approached on snowmobile. GZ20 hadn’t seen visitors in a year, having endured yet another brutal Antarctic winter since the last time its human caretakers checked in. But the fact that its power source could be seen from over three kilometers…Read more...

Those of us who regularly wear contact lenses know we should practice good lens hygiene, including taking taking them out at night and washing them with a sterile cleaning solution. But knowing doesn’t always equate to doing. For those who need a more visceral reminder of why these habits are so important, here are…Read more...

The European Union’s network used for diplomatic communications, COREU, was infiltrated “for years” by hackers, the New York Times reported on Tuesday, with the unknown rogues behind the attack reportedly reposting the stolen communiqués to an “open internet site.”Read more...

The long-in-the-works Battlestar Galactica movie has found a writer. John Mulaney pitches the perfect Spider-Ham spinoff. Get a big look at Gotham’s return. James Wan teases the third Conjuring. Plus, behind the scenes on Aquaman and Bumblebee, and a new look at the CW’s Roswell reboot. Spoilers ahead!

This year, you and your loved ones may have come across ads for a great gift to give this holiday season: cheaper-than-ever home DNA-testing kits sold by companies like 23andMe, FamilyTreeDNA, and Ancestry.