Gizmodo

And lo, Tile decreed you can replace your own batteries now, and there was much rejoicing. If you’ve been waiting on a good deal for the new Tiles with replaceable batteries, today’s Amazon Gold Box has three options to choose from.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company unveiled its latest transportation experiment in Los Angeles last night. The Loop, not to be confused with the Hyperloop, was supposed to be a high-speed urban transportation system of the future. And the first reviews are in, but they’re pretty disappointing, to say the least.

Shennong Mountain Scenic Park has become the latest place in China to offer a financial perk to anyone carrying a Huawei phone by waiving the park’s entry fee completely. Why? The park wants to show solidarity with Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei who was arrested in Canada at the direction of the United States earlier…Read more...

Back in 2015, a woman named Imy Santiago wrote an Amazon review of a novel that she had read and liked. Amazon immediately took the review down and told Santiago she had “violated its policies.” Santiago re-read her review, didn’t see anything objectionable about it, so she tried to post it again. “You’re not eligible…Read more...

This has been a terrible 2018 for Facebook so far, from numerous revelations about its shady privacy practices and high-profile political spats to admissions it helped enable genocide. With 13 days left in the year, it’s still getting worse. Much worse.

Elon Musk has been talking and tweeting about tunneling below Los Angeles to beat traffic for ages. We don’t have a full subterranean road system yet, but it looks like the Boring Company now has a 1.14-mile long prototype underneath Hawthorne that a Tesla Model X can fit through.

Tech giant Apple is sending out push notifications for its deeply annoying Carpool Karaoke show—a standalone spin on a The Late Late Show with James Corden segment which was released last year to terrible reviews—the Verge reported on Tuesday, in seeming disregard of its own policies on unsolicited promotional…Read more...

Earlier this year, Pixar paired Incredibles 2 with its first-ever animated short directed by a woman: Domee Shi’s Bao, a lovely tale about an elderly woman who befriends one of her own dumplings. And now, if you missed before, you can see it for free online.

War? War never changes. But in the case of the war for Cybertron, it’s more like it never really goes away.

With its extensive system of rings, Saturn is among the most beautiful planets in the Solar System. Sadly, it’s beauty may be fleeting, according to new research. Saturn’s rings are dissolving faster than scientists expected, according to the study, and they could be gone in 100 million to 300 million years—a…Read more...

Penny Marshall, director of Big, A League of Their Own, and Awakenings, died today due to complications with diabetes. She was 75 years old.Read more...

Time passes, technology advances, and next thing you know you have newspapers writing scaremongering stories about teens doing different drugs than last time. Are you worried about your teen’s vaping addiction? Try looking at it this way: who cares?Read more...

If you fancy yourself well-informed, then Google’s got the game for you. In addition to its usual ‘Year in Search’ video, it’s also released a ‘Game of the Year’ quiz to test just how well you remember what did (or didn’t) trend in 2018.Read more...

The Trump administration isn’t about renewable energy, but thanks to the Washington, D.C., city council, it could soon be running on clean power. The council passed one of the most ambitious climate bills in the country on Tuesday requiring the District to get all of its energy from renewables by 2032.Read more...

What if I told you that your Twitter timeline doesn’t have to be filled with algorithmically selected tweets from three days ago? Actually, it’s been like that for a while—Twitter made a reverse-chronological timeline available in September. But now it’s taking away the permanent option to choose how your timeline is…Read more...

Every year we think there couldn’t be any more television, and again we are surprised. Before we reveal our best and worst shows of the year (those’ll come in a separate list), we want to take some time to honor the unique moments that made TV great, interesting, or baffling—and sometimes a bit unpleasant. Get ready…Read more...

Welcome back to The Billionaire’s Inbox, a series in which we get to hear from the other half, in its own words. Today we’re looking at how the influential Ricketts family—patriarch Joe Ricketts, Nebraska Governor Pete Ricketts, Republican National Committee finance chairman Todd Ricketts, Chicago Cubs chairman Tom…Read more...

The Switch Pro controller isn’t just one of the best ways to control your Nintendo Switch, it might be one of the best gamepads ever made, period. If you have a Switch and still haven’t picked one up, $56 is below the price we were seeing on Black Friday. It’s not a huge discount, but we rarely see it drop below $64.Read more...

A trove well-preserved dinosaur footprints has been uncovered on a beach in southern England. Dating back to the Cretaceous Period, the prints still show traces of skin, scales, and claws.

2018 has been an excruciating exercise is achieving, and then discovering new definitions of, rock bottom. Public confidence in the tools of democracy eroded, replaced for most Americans with trust in tech monopolies—many of which spent the year showing us how wrong we were to offer them stewardship over any aspect of …Read more...

Today was the last possible day for mission controllers to adjust the trajectory of the New Horizons spacecraft as it approaches Ultima Thule, a distant Kuiper Belt object. With no detectable dangers in sight, NASA has given the green light for the spacecraft to remain along its optimal path—a trajectory that will…Read more...

Aleksandra Korolova has turned off Facebook’s access to her location in every way that she can. She has turned off location history in the Facebook app and told her iPhone that she “Never” wants the app to get her location. She doesn’t “check-in” to places and doesn’t list her current city on her profile.

It’s well known that Americans have steadily become more overweight and obese over the years. A widely reported 2017 study even found that overweight Americans were giving up on losing weight altogether—but, as it turns out, that conclusion wasn’t quite right.Read more...

This 55" TV from Samsung offers all the bells and whistles you’d expect from a mid-tier TV under $700, including 4K UHD resolution, HDR, and internet connectivity. And today, both Walmart and Amazon have it marked down to $478, the lowest price we’ve seen from either retailer.Read more...

After a rocky start with the Pixel 1 (which remains one of the ugliest phones made this decade), a big—but still not fully realized—improvement on the Pixel 2, the Pixel 3 came out and finally made good on Google’s homegrown phone initiative. And unlike phones from Samsung or Huawei, the Pixel 3 achieved this not by…Read more...

Charter has agreed to pay a record $174.2 million to settle fraud charges brought by the New York Attorney General’s Office.Read more...

Mark Rober really loves to build things. So when this home electronics tinkerer discovered that some neighborhood thieves were ripping off Amazon packages from his porch, he did what any self-respecting former NASA engineer would do: He built a glitter bomb made to look like a boxed-up Apple HomePod, and he built it…Read more...

Starting today, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is calling for users to log out of Facebook and other Facebook-owned social media and chat apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. The weeklong boycott is in response to two reports released on Monday detailing how Russian hackers specifically…Read more...

In 1974, Bruce Lee had just passed away and the popularity of kung fu films was exploding. Nervous lawmakers in New York foresaw an urban hellscape terrorized by teenaged street toughs swinging nunchucks and decided to ban the ancient weapons. Now, a federal court has ruled that ban unconstitutional.Read more...

KATOWICE, POLAND—Women are underrepresented at UN climate conferences, and this year was no exception. With COP24 concluding on Saturday, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that yet another major round of global decision-making was conducted largely by men.

James Wan won’t produce the Resident Evil reboot after all. Thomas Mann teases what to expect from the live-action Lady and the Tramp adaptation. Gotham teases more death and destruction in its final season. Plus, a few more new snippets from Bumblebee, and what’s coming on Young Justice. Spoilers now!

USB-C is taking over the world, so if you’re getting a new Switch, laptop, or other USB-C-powered device for the holidays this year, Anker’s got you covered with all the charging accessories you need.

Archaeologists dug up a lot of cool stuff in 2018, but they dug up a lot of weird, disgusting, and disturbing stuff as well. Here are the strangest archaeology stories the year had to offer.

Good news for fans of getting stuff fast—all of us, then—because a new version of wifi is just around the corner. Wi-Fi 6 is going to be better than current wifi in every regard, and the body behind it just published a paper extolling its virtues, emphasizing that, yes, we will still need good old wifi internet…Read more...

A 1-month-old named Joy Nowai became the first person to ever get inoculated by vaccines delivered via drone yesterday. The baby lives on the island-nation of Vanuatu, where 1 in 5 children aren’t fully immunized and delivering vaccines can be difficult due to the terrain. Vanuatu’s Ministry of Health partnered with…Read more...

Nine months after Amnesty International called on Twitter to be more transparent about abuse on its platform, the organization has published another study indicating that—brace yourself—Twitter still has a damning online abuse problem, and it overwhelmingly affects women of color.

Alas, Sphero’s BB-8, R2-D2, and other Disney-licensed robots will bleep and bloop no more. The Verge reports that Sphero has decided to clear out its remaining inventory of licensed toys—and no, it won’t be restocking any more.Read more...

Today Twitter alerted select users affected by a November bug with one of its support forms. So far the company has declined to provide an estimate for how many accounts potentially had data exposed.Read more...

The Green New Deal is popping. New polling released on Friday by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication shows that 81 percent of respondents across the political spectrum support the progressive plan to combat climate change by rapidly weaning the U.S. off fossil fuels.Read more...

We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.

Of all the controversies surrounding the FCC this year, Chairman Ajit Pai’s appearance in a Daily Caller video dancing alongside a woman who had pushed Pizzagate conspiracy theories was perhaps the easiest to avoid.

It’s a good time to be a fan of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling.Read more...

A team of astronomers has discovered the most extreme trans-Neptunian object in the outer reaches of the Solar System. Dubbed “Farout,” the object is more than 120 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. Excitingly, given preliminary estimates about its size, it could actually be a dwarf planet—but it’s still too…Read more...

Lording atop its portfolio like some kind of $1,000 crown jewel, the iPhone is undoubtedly the Apple’s most important product. And for years, people have droned on about how the phone that Jobs built is the most innovative and user-friendly device out there. But is it really?Read more...

The number of Americans who were killed by firearms in 2017 reached a record high, according to a recent CNN analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were almost 40,000 gun-related deaths last year. The majority of these deaths were suicides.Read more...

Noted oil and gas lover Ryan Zinke is on his way out the door at the Department of Interior. And like fellow grifter Scott Pruitt who also left us too soon, Zinke’s temporary (for now) replacement is much less scandal-plagued and much more laser-focused on gutting the agency.

Tourists frequently flock to Lizard Island, off the northeastern coast of Australia, to marvel the Great Barrier Reef. Among the dugongs, sea turtles, and jewel-toned corals, though, there’s another organism that doesn’t get nearly as much credit as it deserves: seagrass.Read more...

On Monday, two new independent studies commissioned by the Senate Intelligence Committee were made public, providing the most in-depth look at online Russian interference in the 2016 election to date. The studies found that social media networks haven’t been totally forthcoming with lawmakers, and the propaganda…Read more...

Here’s some refreshing good news, courtesy of a new study released last week in Science Advances. Teens in Seattle got more sleep, were less tardy, and even did better in class after schools across the area delayed their start times by about an hour.Read more...

In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook promised users a tool that would give them back some power over how extensively they can be tracked online. That was seven months ago.