Gizmodo

Some members of the United States House are concerned the Pentagon may have unleashed disease-infected ticks that caused the spread of Lyme disease.Read more...

Well, folks, they managed to pull it off. Twitter has somehow made itself worse than it already was.Read more...

Facebook’s plan to launch its Libra cryptocurrency is facing considerable pushback from federal officials who’ve raised concerns about the prospect of it being used to skirt anti-money laundering rules and fund other illicit activities.

A power outage swept New York City this weekend, leaving streets and metro stations without lights, individuals trapped in elevators, and homes without electricity. Certainly less endangering but still pretty shitty, the blackout also meant that many events in the city were canceled, and StubHub shelled out $500,000…Read more...

Welcome to another edition of Amazon Prime Day, an event described in earnest by the everything store as “a 2-day parade of epic deals.” If you can stomach scouring the website and mostly wading through a lot of hot garbage, you may land on something actually useful. But mostly, you’ll find deals on a lot of shit you…Read more...

Amazon made waves when it announced late last week that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain one-third of its U.S. workforce—100,000 employees—as part of its ‘Upskilling 2025’ initiative. The sizable commitment, which the Wall Street Journal notes is “among the biggest corporate retraining initiatives” yet…Read more...

Mars’ surface, as far as we can tell, is not habitable to humans—it’s far too cold. But eventually, humanity would like to put an outpost on the planet. That will require warming things up a bit, but how?

Around one hundred New Yorkers took a page out of Amazon’s book this afternoon and made a one-day delivery to the $80 million penthouse apartment of CEO Jeff Bezos: 275,000 signed petitions demanding broad change from a company which is becoming more closely associated with brutal working conditions, surveillance, and…Read more...

An analysis of soil samples, ocean sediment, and fruits from the Marshall Islands—the site of nearly 70 nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s—has revealed alarmingly high levels of radiation, with some regions at levels exceeding areas affected by the Fukushima and Chernobyl disasters.

Apple killed a laptop that had a lot more fans than I expected last week. Around the Gizmodo office, my colleagues groaned when news broke that following a refresh of its laptop line, there would no longer be a standard MacBook Pro without a Touch Bar. Apple, in their eyes, was going all in on the little…Read more...

Right now, it’s peak road trip season. And while that means there’s a lot of things to consider when planning your next vacation like the price of gas, lodging, and food, Waze has a new feature that could help make budgeting for your next adventure slightly less of a headache.Read more...

Sony Wireless Noise Canceling Over-Ear Headphones | $90 | AmazonRead more...

Barely missing a fatal slap at a bothersome fly might be a headache for both of you, according to new research from scientists at the University of Sydney. They say they’ve found evidence that insects are capable of feeling chronic pain after an injury, much like we do. What’s more, studying why and how insects…Read more...

President Trump’s attack this Sunday on four first-term congresswomen was widely viewed as one of the most racist he’s ever produced. Not everyone agrees, however. Twitter, whose platform serves as a catapult for Trump’s bigoted attacks on migrants, has ruled internally that Trump’s words on Sunday were not racist at…Read more...

As many reasons as there are for loving my smartphone, there are just as many reasons I hate it, but they all boil down to how dependent I am on this device that devours my attention. I’m bombarded by annoying notifications, and then when the phone dies because I’ve been futzing with it all day, I’m helpless to do…Read more...

Instacart has a checkered past when it comes to fair and dignified labor practices, and now dozens of its contract workers are claiming that the company app torments them into accepting shitty jobs or suffering the consequences.

With 2019 already halfway over, it’s becoming painfully clear that Nintendo isn’t going to release a Game Boy Classic Edition to celebrate the console’s 30th birthday. The GBAConsolizer helps take some of the sting out of that gross oversight, letting Game Boy, GBC, and GBA fans enjoy their favorite titles in HD on a…Read more...

There are casual gamers who like to occasionally pick up a game to relax for a few minutes, and there are more dedicated players who will devote hours to completing games and unlocking achievements. And then there’s those gamers who refer to themselves as “pros” or “hardcore” who must have the highest score, beat a…Read more...

Timothy Zahn’s return to his most famous creation, Grand Admiral Thrawn, has been one of the consistent highlights of the new canon of Star Wars under Disney. So far we’ve got to see Thrawn’s early days in the Empire and a fateful encounter between him and Anakin Skywalker, and io9 can now give you an exclusive look…Read more...

Typically, Qualcomm only releases one flagship chip per year. Take for example the company’s current top-spec processor: the Snapdragon 855. After getting announced late last year, it found its way into actual consumer devices earlier this spring, first on the Galaxy S10, and then on pretty much every other high-end…Read more...

OnePlus phones just keep getting better and better, but what’s not often talked about very much is the software that comes pre-installed on board. It’s Android, but it’s OnePlus’ own brand of Android called OxygenOS and it’s getting very close to beating Google at its own game.Read more...

Meanwhile, Frank Grillo teases and then immediately denies his own Marvel movie future. Melissa Benoist discusses a new costume upgrade for Kara on Supergirl. The Simpsons will pastiche Stranger Things in this year’s Treehouse of Horror. The Mortal Kombat movie reboot will be as gory as you hope it should be. Plus,…Read more...

India was supposed to launch a rocket today that would send a craft to the Moon’s surface, making it the fourth country ever to do so if successful. But with 56 minutes left in the countdown, everything came to a halt, because of a “technical snag.” It’s hard to get to the Moon.Read more...

Is the 2004 Ashton Kutcher vehicle The Butterfly Effect a good movie? Definitely not, no—but try telling that to me at age thirteen. And then wrap your head, once more, around the fact that if you had told me that, you might have set in motion the utter annihilation of the human race—the whole notion of the butterfly…Read more...

While there isn’t a big, advertised board game sale this Prime Day, a bunch of popular games are individually discounted for Prime members. The best ones we’ve seen are below, but I’ll give a special shoutout to Ticket to Ride - Europe, which features some mechanics not present in the North American version that make…Read more...

The Bank of England has announced that legendary British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing will appear on the new £50 note in the UK. Turing was chosen from thousands of names that were submitted by the public for possible inclusion on the British currency.

Baby names are important. If you need suggestions, you can always try Google. Or, as one Indonesian family did, you can skip the looking on Google and just name your kid after it.

Billionaire Peter Thiel has called for a federal investigation into Google’s refusal to work with the U.S. military and says that the tech giant’s relationship with the Chinese military is “treasonous,” according to a new report from Axios late Sunday.

2019 Comic-Con International: San Diego is coming this week, which means our team will be on the ground, providing you with on-the-scene coverage of pop culture and fandom as well as hoping our fellow attendees please, please exercise some acceptable minimum degree of basic thoughtfulness. But in the meantime, our…Read more...

European leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron were treated to a demonstration of the Flyboard Air, a sort of gas turbine-powered jetpack/hoverboard/flying platform originally invented by jetski champ Franky Zapata, during Bastille Day festivities in Paris on Sunday.

Tropical Depression Barry has been downgraded to its current status after smashing into Louisiana as the first hurricane of the season on Saturday, and it mostly spared the city of New Orleans from a potentially devastating direct hit. But torrential downpour has put 11 million people at risk of “epic flooding” as it…Read more...

Being in a Marvel movie is, according to Disney, serious, serious business.Read more...

It’s all in the props.Read more...

Deathcember is coming. It’s going to be schlocky, and wild, and I’m so excited for it.Read more...

Chinese tech firm Huawei is planning on laying off hundreds of U.S. workers after landing on a Commerce Department blacklist that has savaged its ability to do business stateside, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

I must say, I do love a good supervillain. And Blofeld, the villainous rival of spy James Bond, is a great one. As played by Christoph Waltz, he’s a compelling force, and he’s returning in the newest Bond film.Read more...

What little subtlety remained in Donald Trump’s tendency to project his own racism, misogyny, and hate was obliterated this fine Sunday morning, and what’s left is the naked face of a monster occupying the White House.Read more...

Philips Hue 2-Bulb Starter Kit | $100 | Amazon

Reads Adapted For Screen Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

Saturday is the 42nd anniversary of the July 13-14, 1977 New York City blackout, which took out power to most of the city, resulted in widespread civil disturbances and looting, and helped usher in an era of noxious “tough on crime” politics. Another blackout struck NYC today, though this one appears to be restricted…Read more...

The U.S. Army—which has already been testing robotic squad vehicles like the Multi-Utility Tactical Transport (MUTT) and semi-autonomous targeting systems like the Advanced Targeting and Lethality Automated System (ATLAS)—says it will conduct live-fire testing of a new Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) built on M113…Read more...

Making storyboards interesting for a special feature is tricky, especially when the original actors aren’t around to provide any voice-over work to make the images pop on screen. In what appears to be a cancelled special feature, the best voices ever to get on board the Batman franchise were there to help.Read more...

Amid growing concern about the vulnerability of the U.S. election system to hackers, Pennsylvania told election officials they had to upgrade their machines last year. But according to a Saturday report in the Associated Press, though some 60 percent of those systems have been upgraded—at a cost of $14.15 million—many…Read more...

The Joker? Oh, you mean the Joker? No, no, the Joker. Lately, there are a lot of Jokers. The newest one is being written by John Carpenter.Read more...

On Friday, The New Republic published an an offensive, homophobic attack on Democratic candidate Pete Buttigieg. The article was swiftly condemned for being inappropriate, and it was taken down from the site Saturday. In light of these events, The New Republic is withdrawing its participation from our recently…Read more...

Who you going to call? This wholesome little family.Read more...

A New York State Supreme Court Justice on Friday rejected a suit brought by 55 families attempting to block the state’s recently passed law “eliminating exemptions to school vaccination requirements on the basis of religious beliefs,” Ars Technica reported.

Today, developers have a huge variety of ways to create and manage enemy AI. However, back in the 90s it was much more difficult to create sophisticated enemy AI. It was even harder to do so on the N64 due to its limited power and resources. But Rare, the developers behind GoldenEye, pulled it off and did such a great…Read more...

This job does things to you, folks. Once, I would be surprised and bemused by the things Hollywood tries to turn into major franchises in 2019. I might observe how the truth now matches what we used to make up as parody. But, look, Battleship is a real movie and Rihanna was in it and that was seven years ago. So let’s…Read more...

Tile Pro 4-Pack With Replaceable Batteries | $76 | AmazonRead more...