Gizmodo

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.

Scientists have published five years of observations of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io, revealing just how strange the world is. They even describe one volcano that might be influenced by the moon’s orbit.

San Diego Comic-Con 2019 has ended, leaving us with another year before returning to the San Diego Convention Center for that amazing cosplay we love so much. We’ve been sharing videos and pictures of some of the best lewks (or looks) throughout the weekend, and have created a handy compilation of all our cosplay…Read more...

It’s not often you find some genuine innovation coming from a company whose products are targeted at kids. Toymakers tend to stick to minor feature upgrades or simple cosmetic improvements to make existing products feel new again. When it was announced Toy Fair 2019, I assumed Spin Master’s Ducati Upriser was just…Read more...

Last year’s ASUS ROG Phone felt like one of the first gaming phones that actually made sense. But for its second attempt, Asus has doubled down on everything: Between its big 6.6-inch screen, a new processor from Qualcomm, and an absolutely massive battery, Asus may have just created the most powerful Android phone on…Read more...

A new study seems to demonstrate that gull chicks can communicate information to their siblings—while they’re still in the egg.

The cloud storage scene has changed a lot since Dropbox launched in 2007, propelled by the falling cost of storage, the rising speed of internet connections, and the proliferation of powerful mobile devices. There is no shortage of options for your storage needs, many of which are free. So why would you pay for it?Read more...

The U.S. government has imposed strict sanctions against doing business with the North Korean government. But Huawei, a giant telecom company at the center of a new Cold War between the U.S. and China, may have violated those sanctions by helping to build a 3G wireless network for North Korea, according to a new…Read more...

Superman: Red Son is getting the animated treatment. Get a first look at Zack Snyder’s new zombie movie. Caity Lotz will step behind the camera on the next season of Legends of Tomorrow. Plus, a creepy new Scary Stories poster, the return of Wynonna Earp, and a look at the return of The Terror. Wash away those post-…Read more...

Apple MacBook Air (2018) 128GB | $950 | Amazon

Apple Magic Trackpad 2 | $105 | AmazonRead more...

Certain Boomer basements are little shrines to obsolescence, untidy stockrooms of the one-time cutting-edge: VCRs, corded telephones, immense beige PC monitors, etc. Way fewer Millennials will have basements to store trash in (‘home ownership’ itself quickly verging on obsolete), but presumably, once climate change…Read more...

The third week of July 2019 is past us—and if you live in much of the Midwest or the East Coast, it’s been one helluva hot one with a heat wave breaking one-day temperature records in NYC and conditions in Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati compared to Death Valley and Nairobi respectively. And while it’s difficult to…Read more...

Hackers breached servers at a contractor for Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), SyTech, and stole about 7.5 terabytes of data after gaining access to the company’s entire network earlier this month, ZDnet reported on Saturday.

Every San Diego Comic-Con, Hasbro lifts the lid on what fans can expect from its line of toys and collectibles from the galaxy far, far away as well as the comics and movie universes of Marvel. This year is no exception, with everything from some very cute Star Wars figures to...Squirrel Girl on a moped?? Hell yeah!Read more...

During yesterday’s Supergirl season five panel at San Diego Comic-Con, the cast and crew took to the stage to both debut the first trailer for the next leg of Kara’s adventure, and to shed a little light about some newcomers who are on their way to shake things up in National City.

When Dungeons & Dragons rebooted its ruleset for its 5th official edition back in 2014, alongside the rules, Wizards of the Coast offered an epic battle against Tiamat herself as the first adventure for new heroes to deal with. Now, five years on, they’re revisiting it for a special, and rather fabulous looking treat.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police in British Columbia have apologized after livestreaming a press conference on the murder of an American woman and an Australian man on Facebook Live with an augmented reality “cat filter” turned on, per the Daily Beast.