Gizmodo

An investigation by the Federal Communications Commission identified the causes of what it called “unacceptably slow restoration of wireless service” in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael, the Category 5 that ripped across Florida in October, killing dozens and causing some $25 billion in damage.

Let’s use a crime spree to teach a lesson.

Just when you thought Louis Vuitton had reached the pinnacle of sartorial elegance, one of haute couture’s thirstiest brands went out and made what the “Maison” is calling the Canvas of the Future, or more simply, a purse with some fucking flexible screens sewn into its sides.

Helium is an essential chemical element used in MRI scanners, rocket fuel tanks, and floating party balloons. It’s also a finite natural resource, and a global shortage has made it harder to sell balloons at Party City, which is now closing 45 stores.Read more...

Trendy toothpastes made with charcoal are likely a worse option for your teeth than traditional toothpaste, according to some British dentists. In a new paper, they argue that the claims behind these products, like better whitening, are completely unproven, and that they might even speed along tooth decay and other…Read more...

Rideshare unicorn Uber doesn’t do anything small. When it was in the game of raising money, it raised close to $25 billion. When it loses that money—and it does every single quarter—it loses it at astronomical burn rates. It finally debuted on the New York Stock Exchange today, in the middle of international trade…Read more...

Netflix is notorious for not giving a single shit about ratings. It does not report viewership numbers to investors, entertainment reporters, Hollywood, or fans—a fact that can be especially frustrating when popular shows seemingly get canceled out of the blue. But in a step toward transparency, today Netflix…Read more...

Like a scene out of a dystopian police state film, a failed software update caused hundreds of ankle monitoring devices in the Netherlands to go dark from police surveillance on Thursday.

An upcoming exhibit at Space Center Houston will feature the core section of the Falcon 9 rocket used in two NASA missions.

One of the most stereotypical relaxing things to do—meditation—may actually cause distress for some people, according to the findings of a survey released this week. It found that more than a quarter of regular meditators have had bad experiences related to their meditation.Read more...

A bright green frog-shaped pencil case targeting children on Amazon contained 80 times the federal legal limit for lead, according to an investigation by the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. This was among dozens of children’s school supplies being sold on Amazon.com with illegal levels of toxic metals.

Happy IPO day to Uber, the Silicon Valley giant whose long-term plan to deal with unhappy drivers is to replace them with robots that won’t worry about details like wages and health insurance.Read more...

Smartphone makers might soon not have much to brag about when it comes to the number of pixels they can fit on a pocket-sized screen. Researchers at the University of Cambridge have come up with a way to create pixels that are a million times smaller than those used on even Apple’s Retina displays. But extreme pixel…Read more...

Did you see those slick animations of space colonies that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos showed off yesterday? They were, not surprisingly, inspired by Gerard O’Neill’s ideas from the 1970s. And if that kind of thing interests you (and of course it does, you’re reading Paleofuture right now) then you have to drop…Read more...

Sometime between 136,000 and 240,000 years ago, a flock of awkward, leggy birds took off from Madagascar and arrived at a pristine island in the Aldabra atoll 250 miles away. “This is nice,” they may have thought—there were no predators, and the birds colonized the island. Without the threat of predation, they…Read more...

A woman in Philadelphia was treated to a delightful text message, commenting on her looks and her breasts, from a delivery driver, a person who—lest we forget—visits at a particularly vulnerable time: at your home, late at night, when you’re just trying to eat your god damn pizza fries.Read more...

Northern Europeans who speak Uralic languages, such as Estonian and Finnish, can thank ancient migrating Siberian populations for their dialects, according to a fascinating new study that combined genetics, archaeology, and linguistics.

Google I/O 2019 was a whirlwind of info about upcoming Android updates, demos of new features in Google Lens and Duplex, upgraded abilities for the Google Assistant, and more. But aside from all the fancy new things that got mentioned in the keynote, several other small changes, and updates that came out of Google’s…Read more...

If your heart sinks every time you open up your laptop—at the thought of sluggish performance, broken shortcuts, and a mess of files and folders—this is the guide for you. We’ll talk you through some of the ways you can tidy up your Windows or macOS laptop, and reduce those feelings of frustration.Read more...

Satellites are our eyes in the sky or, er, in space. Now, a coalition of groups is turning to satellites and AI technology to help monitor emissions from all the world’s power plants.Read more...

Take a second to look around you and consider the various gadgets within eyeshot. How many of them, if they broke, could you reasonably fix right now? Could you afford (or even know how) to repair your phone or computer? Your car? How about your coffee maker? Consider what you’d do with them if pricey repairs were…Read more...

There was a lot of news at Google’s I/O developer conference this year, but when it came to the smart home, one thing stuck out. Nest, which Google bought back in 2014 for $3.2 billion, has been fully absorbed and rebranded as Google Nest.Read more...

In case there was any doubt—penis enlargement surgeries are usually ineffective and can leave men psychologically and physically damaged, according to a new study.Read more...

I love space. I am very excited for humans to explore space more, and I’m even okay with us going back to the Moon for starters. Space is a vast frontier of scientific discoveries waiting to be made; a chance for us to probe the mysteries of the universe and learn more about ourselves.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the wealthiest man on the planet, gave an hour-long presentation yesterday about his plans for humanity’s future living on the moon and in space colonies. It was a bit like watching a monologue from a sci-fi movie in a lot of ways. And now you can finally view the entire presentation online…Read more...

The only earbuds more recognizable than the tortured white teardrops that are AirPods might be Powerbeats. These things look like rubberized hoop earrings glued to plastic boxes, flipped upside down and strung together with a dorky wire. Well, at least they used to look like that. Beats just released a new truly…Read more...

Fast and Furious’ villainous car-wizard Cipher could be getting her own spinoff. Jason Momoa teases an eco-minded Aquaman 2. Harvey Birdman’s assistant Birdgirl is getting a TV series. Plus, Cloak & Dagger gets downright pixellated, a violent new clip from Brightburn, and it takes two to tango on the next iZombie. To…Read more...

When the boss says “I have a problem,” my ears perk up. Lifehacker is fine; we haven’t been blown up by PAM. However, Melissa can’t get her Gmail to load no matter what she tries—an issue that’s been plaguing her for months. It’s a peculiarity that makes me go “hmmmm,” since I never have issues loading Gmail.

Federal prosecutors have charged two individuals in connection to the 2014 data breach of a major health insurance provider that exposed the personal data of tens of millions of Americans.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, emoji have become a key part of the way that many of us communicate, and that makes representation vitally important to the way they’re designed. With this in mind, Google is releasing 53 new emoji that work to be more gender inclusive.Read more...

Have you ever been to billionaire’s row in San Francisco? It’s an exceptionally rich part of San Francisco filled with enormous tech wealth, the kind of place where you can make a living out of digging through the trash of the rich.Read more...

Chelsea Manning was released today from the Virginia jail where she spent 62 days for refusing to testify about her past ties to WikiLeaks before a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia.

Like every single live-action Disney movie out this year, measles is making the comeback no one asked for. Already, there have been more than 700 cases of the viral and vaccine-preventable disease reported in the U.S. this year—a record high since it was eradicated in the country nearly 20 years ago.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced its first lunar lander, Blue Moon, at a press conference today.

A hacking group, said to run in both English- and Russian-speaking circles online, have offered to sell internal documents and code allegedly stolen from the servers of three major anti-virus companies.

Scientists recreated one of the most important experiments in the history of physics—but this time, they used antimatter instead of regular matter.

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

New research has found a perplexing, though relatively small link between the devastating neurological illness Parkinson’s disease and having your appendix removed. But it’s still unclear just what exactly this could mean, and it’s definitely not a reason to avoid an appendectomy if you need one.Read more...

It takes mere moments to find thousands of Instagram posts from anti-vaxxers, but users spouting straight up bullshit about vaccinations on the photo-sharing platform are going to have a trickier time circulating their misinformation.

Need some pliers? Hard-wire cutters? A knife? Why buy all three when you can get a skeletool? We love to save money by buying one thing that actually functions as multiple things. The Leatherman Skeletool is seven tools in one. The stainless steel tool includes needlenose pliers, regular pliers, hard-wire cutters,…Read more...

Archie Harrison Montbatten-Windsor, the new royal baby with a funny name and title, has sucked the oxygen out of the new cycle this week. If the headlines are any indicator, the Western world is far more concerned about the fate of a baby they’ve never met than about a million species facing extinction and fossil…Read more...

Delta, an airline company that absorbs over $5 billion in annual profit and has a share price that’s soared to over eight times its value since 2011, does not want its flight attendants to unionize and demand fair compensation as a unit. Instead of making more money, the airline asks, how about... video games?Read more...

A newly discovered visual system in deep-sea fish could allow them to discern predators from prey in the low-light conditions found at the bottom of the ocean, new research suggests.

Over the last few months, we’ve spoken with laptop makers, gamers, and historians to get a better understanding of the gamer aesthetic. You know what I’m talking about: Blinking lights and sharp angles. Computers that look like they fell off an alien spaceship. Crucially, we wanted to know how we got this gamer…Read more...

A recent parachute test of the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule “was not satisfactory,” a NASA official said during a House subcommittee hearing yesterday. Few details were disclosed, but it’s now looking even less likely that NASA will have the capability to fly astronauts to space anytime soon.

Last year, around 100 Amazon seller accounts were reportedly breached by cyber criminals, who funneled money they stole from from Amazon loans and customer sales into their own accounts.

Last year, Amazon released a cute little children’s version of its digital assistant, and just like the flagship product it is modeled after, it may also be a pretty powerful surveillance machine.

Imagine yourself playing Tetris, and you’ll undoubtedly have the Game Boy version’s memorable theme song (called Korobeiniki) stuck in your head for hours. But playing the game on an old school analog display manages to produce an even more satisfying sound as 210 small plastic discs quickly flip back and forth to…Read more...

The Antarctic is teeming with microscopic life: Mites, water bears, and roundworms squirm around, invisible to the naked eye. In fact, the Antarctic is full of biodiversity hotspots—and they’re thanks to penguin and elephant seal poop.

As drivers around the world went on strike just days before Uber’s IPO, they shared harrowing stories of being overworked and underpaid, subjected to a frustratingly opaque payment system, and even sleeping in their cars in order to save enough money to get by. Research backs up the anecdotes they relayed to the…Read more...