Gizmodo

Between an Apple event, the midterms, and a global technology worker walkout—in addition to everything else happening in our mad world—there was a lot of news to keep up on this week. Gizmodo covered it all and published some stellar long reads to boot.

If there is a God and he is indeed omniscient, it is also true that he foresaw the human race’s ability to create a great many things that would change the world, improve the overall quality of life here on Earth, and maybe even one day move beyond it. I can’t help but wonder what the hell he would make of this $2,400…Read more...

Ryu’s been getting around lately. Sure, yeah, he’s in Street Fighter. But he’s also in Smash Bros. And he’s a Power Ranger? And now he’s a Lego man, fighting Captain America?Read more...

Amazon is inching ever closer to making its long-awaited decision on where to build its second North American headquarters, with the company entering “advanced discussions” to set up shop in Arlington County, Virginia’s Crystal City, with additional facilities in nearby Potomac Yard in Alexandria, the Washington Post…Read more...

Doctor Manhattan vs. Superman. Why? I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t care. There’s some knowledge I just don’t need in my life. But I do know that this fan adaptation of Doomsday Clock is great.Read more...

Politicians and tech executives are split on San Francisco’s Proposition C, which would impose an annual 0.175 to 0.69 percent tax on businesses with over $50 million in gross receipts and would double the city’s current spending on services for the homeless. And while many have spoken out about their position ahead…Read more...

After the snap, everything changed. The Earth, all life on it, and on every planet, entirely changed shape. What was that like? What would it be like to survive? And who would you blame?Read more...

Georgia Secretary of State and increasingly desperate Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who is tied in the polls with Democratic nominee Stacey Abrams, has shamelessly used his position as the state’s top election monitor to purge hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls and close hundreds of…Read more...

The sixth episode of Haunting of Hill House is a remarkable cinematic feat, designed to look like one long shot that weaves and winds its way through the episode. Now, Mike Flanagan, the show’s writer and director, has broken down how it came together.Read more...

Mario Segale, the namesake behind the famous mustachioed protagonist of Nintendo’s iconic video game franchise, has died at age 84.

Workers at a Goodwill sorting facility in Fort Worth, Texas were stunned to discover a live, albino red-tailed boa constrictor mixed in with donations on Thursday, NBC New York reported this week.

Two men were killed in a partial building collapse at an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Baltimore late Friday in an incident resulting from severe weather, an Amazon executive confirmed Saturday.Read more...

TV show quotes are good. But made-up quotes are even better.

Perhaps because they are running scared, the Trump family—and Republicans in general—are going all-in on a campaign of overt racism and white supremacist dog whistles to rally MAGA voters across the country as Tuesday’s midterm elections approach.Read more...

5G speed might be coming to Apple products as soon as 2020, according to a recent report.

Getting cast in Star Wars is a once in a lifetime experience. Which provides the opportunity for a once in a lifetime over-the-top reaction.Read more...

SpaceX’s Starman and cherry red Tesla Roadster have traveled beyond Mars. SpaceX shared a diagram of the car once driven by the aerospace manufacturer’s CEO Elon Musk indicating it has now reached beyond the Red Planet.Read more...

When nailing down a classic character, getting the right influences can be key. For the cast of Titans on DC Universe, they went to exactly the right place.Read more...

A former Bitcoin tycoon who served a year in prison for his role facilitating transactions on the Silk Road digital drug bazaar is being sued by none other than the Winklevoss twins, the HarvardConnection creators famous for suing Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook from them.

Picking up an action figure of your favorite character at the store is all well and good, but what if you could spend several hours assembling one from scratch? Putting together these Star Wars character kits from Bandai and Bluefin is a lot more fun than it sounds.Read more...

A group of students last month was involved with the discovery of a stone artifact nearly 6,000 years old while on a school trip to Mount Vernon, and officials are characterizing the find as particularly noteworthy. The item, a stone ax head approximately seven inches long and three inches wide, is believed to be work…Read more...

How do complicated, ambiguous stories work? What role does literal interpretation play in a story laced in metaphor? They’re good questions to ask, and especially good questions to ask about io9-favorite Alex Garland’s Annihilation.Read more...

HUNTINGTON, WV—If you had walked into the airport hangar at 4 p.m. sharp on Friday, just as the opening notes of “Country Roads” began to pour from the overhead speakers, you could have witnessed a pure, divine American moment. You could have seen the power of the anthem of this beaten down state. You could have seen…Read more...

Amazon makes its own furniture under the Rivet and Stone & Beam brand names, and it actually looks really good! Whether you could use an extra lamp, an ottoman, or an entire leather sofa, a bunch of popular pieces are on sale right now for up to 25% off.Read more...

Dyson vacuums dominated the nominations in our Kinja Co-Op for best vacuum, but they can be prohibitively expensive. Today though, refurbs of the popular Dyson Ball are down to $150 on Amazon, the best price we’ve seen.

The heat is on in an apparent fight between two e-scooter companies after Lime said earlier this week that some of the batteries made by one of its manufacturers, Segway Ninebot, could catch fire. Now, Segway is squaring up against the allegation, suggesting instead that Lime doesn’t understand how batteries work.

The United States Supreme Court on Friday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to block a trial over its environmental agenda. The constitutional climate lawsuit being brought by 21 young activists between the ages of 11 and 22 is a go for trial, provided there isn’t any further interference.Read more...

Uber is planning to put its self-driving car technology back on the streets in Pennsylvania after it suspended the program earlier this year. The ride-sharing company ceased operations of the program in several cities following a fatal crash in which one of its cars was involved in Tempe, Arizona in March.

With the hotly contested midterm elections coming up this Tuesday, Twitter is cracking down on attempts at using the service to dissuade people from showing up at the polls.Read more...

Honestly, guys, this shouldn’t be so hard.

An island half the size of Manhattan in the south Atlantic Ocean is so isolated, it’s called Inaccessible Island. On that island, and only on that island, live nearly 6,000 puny featherballs called Inaccessible Island rails. But they can’t fly, and the island is only a few million years old. How did the birds get…Read more...

Whales are big-ass animals. They’re so big, in fact, that satellite technology is now good enough to spot them from space.Read more...

I’m a simple woman. When I’m riding the bus, walking down the street, or working in the open offices here at Gizmodo Media Group, I just want to pop in my earbuds, turn on some good music (buy Honey on iTunes) and ignore everything around me.

The iPad has always been a fantasy, and even as the device is more powerful and beautiful than it’s ever been before, I can’t bring myself to understand why most people would ever want one.

Filmstruck, the best video streaming service ever created, is dead. Well, it’s almost dead. The last day of the service is November 29, 2018, which means that if you already have a subscription, you can keep using it until then. But with just a month to go, you might be asking yourself what to watch. Below you’ll find…Read more...

The Food and Drug Administration does not have strong enough procedures in place to respond to cybersecurity problems with medical devices that are already in use, according to a report released this week by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), the agency’s watchdog.

Kids are not great at eating. They make messes and miss their mouths, and knock full cups and plates off the table. It’s sometimes funny, but it’s less funny when the food is hot and burns a kid bad enough to send them to the emergency room. And that happens a lot—nearly half of serious burns to children every year…Read more...

Days ahead of the U.S.’s important midterm elections, Donald Trump has continued on his crusade to stoke fear in the hearts of the country’s conservatives with blatant lies and racism. Today, that took the form of a Game of Thrones meme that HBO is none too pleased about.Read more...

NASA just released the first ever 8K video shot in space. With help from the European Space Agency (ESA), astronauts collected a bunch of clips inside the space station—and a few looking out—using the Helium 8K camera by RED. You can download the original file on NASA’s website. (It’s over 3 gigabytes LOL.) However,…Read more...

Spotify’s long-awaited Apple Watch app is already in the hands of beta testers, according to a Reddit post and some screenshots uploaded to Imgur today. Spotify’s online forums have been bombarded with requests for Apple Watch support for years, but until today it’s never seemed like the integration ever had much…Read more...

Less than a thousand years ago, a bird roamed Madagascar that stood as tall as an elephant. You may have heard of the elephant bird—it’s the largest bird species to ever live. New research has presented evidence that this famous extinct bird was nocturnal and had poor vision.Read more...

The Bank of England has announced it would like to feature a scientist on the new £50 banknote. So, whom should they pick?Read more...

There are few corners of the planet humanity has yet to occupy or change. Truly wild areas are rarities, and a new map has carefully identified where exactly the last ones are.Read more...

A new report might make you think twice before installing that next Chrome extension. The private Facebook messages of at least 81,000 people have reportedly been stolen, probably due to an exploit in a browser extension, and compromised accounts are now apparently up for sale for just $0.10 apiece.

“You’re going to have to keep waiting for The Winds of Winter,” George R.R. Martin wrote back in April. No shock there. But in that same blog post, the Game of Thrones creator announced a different book: a detailed history of House Targaryen. It comes out later this month, and we’ve got an early peek.Read more...

It seems humanity isn’t just content to screw up the surface of the planet. We’re gonna do the deep ocean, too.Read more...

Despite the current Silicon Valley hype, infusing yourself with the blood of a 16-year-old is probably not going to make you live longer and fix all that ails you. It’s also likely dangerous, because while blood transfusions are necessary for the sick and injured, they also come with side effects.Read more...

The screenwriter of Wonder Woman 1984 might be heading to a mysterious Marvel project. We’re getting Frozen 2 a little sooner than expected. Finn Wolfhard shares some behind-the-scenes looks at It: Chapter 2. Plus, what’s to come on the DC/CW shows, and great news for the Castlevania show. To me, my spoilers!

Computer security doesn’t really have to be hard. Some of the smallest, simplest measures can be the most effective in keeping your devices secure—they won’t take long, they’re easy to do, and you don’t really have any excuse for not doing them.Read more...

Gmail contacts can be a little confusing—especially once you realize that the popular email service automatically dumps everyone you cyber-converse with into a big “Other Contacts” directory. That makes it easy to autocomplete emails to people Gmail thinks you might interact with again at some future point, but it…Read more...