Gizmodo

Of all the things that could end our world, an asteroid strike may be the doomsday we have the most control over.Read more...

Netflix has finally unveiled its new, comparatively cheaper mobile-only plan in India—and honestly? This kind of seems like something that a lot of its U.S. users could get on board with.Read more...

Ever since human beings have been jamming themselves into little metal canisters and shooting themselves off into space, there has been one thing everyone wants to know: how do you go to the bathroom? Sure, you can read about how it’s done, and for most people that’s enough. But not for me. I wanted to experience the…Read more...

A federal Green New Deal has remained a dream-like idea since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey introduced a proposal to do just that in February (and since the Senate shot it down in March). Other Green New Deals have taken hold on the local and state level—I’m…Read more...

No one needs a $250 ereader, but the Kindle Oasis is often good enough that you can convince yourself otherwise. Its display and backlight are better than average, and its asymmetrical design is purpose-constructed for the avid reader. Though it’s got its detractors, I’ve always liked it. I read a lot, and I love…Read more...

The fourth Riddick has an intriguing title. Get a look at an infamous reunion in new It: Chapter 2 pictures. Kevin Feige discusses the scope of Marvel’s new animated Disney+ series, What If? Plus, wild Crisis on Infinite Earths casting rumors, and what’s to come on The Purge’s second season. Spoilers away!

If rumors ahead of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10's likely August 7 launch are to be believed it looks like both versions of the Note 10 will be sporting Qualcomm’s most powerful mobile processor, the Snapdragon 855 Plus. That’s surprising because it was only announced earlier this month. Purported specs for the Note 10…Read more...

Food delivery app DoorDash has, for months, doubled down on its policy of systematically skimming customer tips meant for its fleet of contract delivery workers. That resolve cracked on Tuesday night when CEO Tony Xu took to Twitter to announce some unspecified changes to its compensation model.Read more...

Former special counsel Robert Mueller will testify on Capitol Hill today about the investigation into various crimes that President Donald Trump committed against the United States. And if you want to watch Mueller’s testimony live, we’ve got you covered.

The Federal Trade Commission recently attracted scorn from congressional Democrats for fining world-spanning social network Facebook just $5 billion rather than tens of billions after the company failed to abide by the terms of a 2011 settlement with the agency on user privacy. But the FTC still has more dirt to dish…Read more...

Snap Inc. has been slowly righting its ship recently, stymying its nose-diving stocks prices and exodus of users. The Snapchat creator’s Q2 2019 earnings imply that things are looking up.Read more...

The man behind Twitter’s “Retweet” button—which is pretty much the foundation of the whole site—now thinks he screwed up big time, telling BuzzFeed News in an interview that he recalled thinking, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”

Since their discovery 13 years ago, scientists have puzzled over the origin of tiny glass beads found inside ancient clam shells. New evidence suggests they’re microtektites—a byproduct of meteorite impacts—marking the first time these celestial remnants have been found hiding in old clam shells.

Several U.S. lawmakers have called for further action in the wake of a $700 settlement reached by state prosecutors with the credit bureau Equifax over its disastrous 2017 data breach.Read more...

The Justice Department is finally set to being its long-rumored review of monopoly concerns in the areas of online search, ecommerce, and social media, specifically targeting big tech companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. An exceptionally broad probe, the agency announced this afternoon it would seek…Read more...

Because of its free and open-source nature, VLC is one of, if not the most popular cross-platform media player in the world. Unfortunately, a newfound and potentially very serious security flaw discovered in VLC means you might want to uninstall it until the folks at the VideoLAN Project can patch the flaw.Read more...

You might think of meteors as flashes in the sky that result in lumpy-looking meteorites on the ground. But not all meteorites are lumps. A substantial population, like the leftovers from the 2013 Chelyabinsk airburst, are notably conical. One team of scientists thinks they know why.

For soulless ghouls who view the bottom line as superior to basic human rights, for-profit prisons are an apt investment, one that the investment arm of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation just increased its stake in.

The Lion King offers a number of lessons around innocence, deception, and love. However, one of my favorite takeaways from the movie—both the original and the remake—is the so-called Circle of Life. We all know the term, made famous by the classic song by the same title.Read more...

Democratic presidential candidate and self-help author Marianne Williamson is on the defensive. In her latest tweet she says that she’s “not a cult leader” and “not anti-science.” She even says that the idea she’s anti-science is laughable because she quotes Albert Einstein so much.Read more...

In late 2016, U.S. and Canadian diplomats at their embassy in Havana, Cuba began coming down with unexplained symptoms, including nausea, headaches, and hearing loss. Some also claimed to have heard mysterious sounds just prior to their symptoms, fueling a theory by some U.S. officials and the media that a “sonic…Read more...

Anna Sorokin—the woman who posed as a German heiress and swindled New York’s social elite and numerous institutions out of hundreds of thousands of dollars under the name Anna Delvey—may not be able to cash in on the forthcoming Netflix series based on her story.

UE Boom 3 | $120 | AmazonRead more...

After nearly a decade in court, Google has agreed to pay $13 million in a class-action lawsuit alleging its Street View program collected people’s private data over wifi from 2007 to 2010. In addition to the moolah, the settlement—filed Friday in San Francisco—also calls for Google to destroy all the collected data…Read more...

Sony has been trying to crack a tough nut for the past couple of years. The company wants to translate the tremendous success it’s had making over-ear noise-canceling headphones and shrink the technology down to something you can put in your pocket. The new $230 WF-1000XM3 represent its latest attempt at miniaturizing…Read more...

The Chandrayaan-2 mission is officially off to a promising start, as India vies to become the fourth nation to land on the Moon.Read more...

Should electric scooters be allowed on highways? Obviously not, you might say. With a top speed somewhere in the ballpark of 15 mph, it’s a recipe for carnage to the scooter rider’s brains.Read more...

You know how you instinctively reach for your pocket every time you feel your phone vibrating with a notification? Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have harnessed that same reflex to create what is essentially a remote control dog that receives silent commands and signals through a vibrating vest.Read more...

Merely existing in the modern world means giving up a wealth of your information to countless institutions and services. While many of the places make promises to keep your identifiable data as secure and private as possible, they can still—and oftentimes do—share anonymized versions of your data to third parties,…Read more...

I don’t go to the beach for the sand or the sun. I go for the waves. There’s nothing like splashing in the water after lugging your cooler, chair, and beach umbrella to your designated spot. Unfortunately, I may need to think twice about going for a swim at the beach. And so should you.Read more...

If you search YouTube for Facebook’s Libra, you’ll find plenty of videos that tell you how to buy the digital currency. The problem is that many of the videos are published by scam artists who are apparently trying to steal your personal information. How do we know they’re scams? Libra hasn’t even been launched yet.Read more...

Two police officers in Gretna, Louisiana have been fired over a Facebook post that suggested Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be killed. One of the officers published the content and another police officer liked it.

Microsoft will pay out $26 million in a settlement to resolve charges that its staff bribed government officials in Hungary, the Washington Post reported on Monday, with President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith telling staff in an email the matter “involved employee misconduct that was completely unacceptable.”

North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un, whose lineage is well known as the world’s foremost lookers at things, has toured a “newly built” submarine, the country’s state-run media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) wrote in a release.Read more...

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, it turns out that letting the company with tons of privacy scandals run a messaging service for children might have been a bad idea. Now there are multiple reports that a pitfall in the design of Facebook’s Messenger Kids app lets children talk to unauthorized users in group chat—aka…Read more...

Amid mounting unrest and a night of violence in Hong Kong, Apple is among the retailers that have chosen to shut stores or close them early citywide, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

In an absolutely depressing bit of déjà vu, DoorDash’s controversial tipping policy—the one that generated a good amount of outrage nearly six months ago—has received renewed attention this week, reminding us that DoorDash and companies like it continue to exploit workers even after ample (but ultimately inadequate)…Read more...

Other humans aren’t the only living things affected by your smoking habit, scientists in the UK warn. Their new research suggests that at least some plants can’t grow as well in the presence of discarded cigarette butts.Read more...

Even the most expensive smartphones can’t match the image quality of the priciest digital cameras, but with a beefy processor at their disposal, smartphones let you do so much more with the photos you snap. The iPhone’s Portrait Mode is a good example, letting you tweak the lighting of a photo after you snap it, but…Read more...

Fresh off the heels of a record-setting heat wave last month, Europe is about to heat up in a major way again.Read more...

We still know very little about Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series. It will take place sometime prior to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, director J.A. Bayona (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom) and consultant Bryan Cogman (Game of Thrones) are involved, and the writers’ room is operating under intense security…Read more...

At about this time next year, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of video games will look like. New consoles will likely be shown off, bold new streaming initiatives will begin to launch, and we’ll see all the wonderful kinds of games they will bring us. All these new things will come, and we’ll…Read more...

Acer Predator Helios 300 Gaming Laptop with 144Hz display, GTX 1060 Graphics, 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD | $900 | AmazonRead more...

Even if you haven’t encountered this problem yourself, you’ve almost certainly heard of a Switch owner who has: Joy-Con drift. This issue causes the Switch’s detachable controllers to detect input—or drift—even when nothing is actually touching the analog stick.Read more...

Slack is one of those apps that needs to just work. But too often, especially when I’m on a mobile wifi connection, it barely works at all.

People who only occasionally fall down an internet rabbit hole on their smartphones late at night might be able to rest easier—at least according to the results of a new study in mice. Researchers found that short bursts of light exposure at night won’t necessarily disrupt your internal clock, including sleep habits.Read more...

We ride bikes not just because they’re fun, but because they’re efficient. They enable us to use our body power to propel us forward far faster than our pathetic, floppy feet ever could. Efficiency, though, is only as good as the fit.Read more...

When Netflix revealed it was making a television adaptation of The Witcher, Henry Cavill immediately wanted in. However, producers still auditioned over 200 actors for Geralt before choosing him for the job. Why did it take four months and hundreds of actors before going with the leading man who wanted to be there in…Read more...

Medical tests can be scary and expensive, so providing someone the option to non-invasively and more affordably find out if they are at risk for cancer from the comfort of their home is an enticing offer. But doctors are pointing out that these at-home kits aren’t always accurate, and patients are coming in for major…Read more...

Nearly two years after the catastrophic Equifax data breach of 2017 was announced, it looks like the company is readying to cough up damages to any of the 147 million people whose personal information was exposed in the breach.