Gizmodo

The UK’s advertising watchdog chastised Spotify today for releasing an “unduly distressing” ad that, it argues, improperly targeted children. The ad shows young people listening to Camila Cabello’s song “Havana,” which in turn wakes up some scary looking dolls that go on to terrorize them.

Gravity is incredibly weak. Just think: You can lift your foot despite the mass of the entire Earth pulling against it. Why is it so weak? That’s unclear. And it might take a very, very big science experiment to find out.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Twitter announced today that a dataset of tweets, accounts, and media associated with state-sponsored efforts on its platform would be made public. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the data is available only to researchers.Read more...

Canada just became the second country in the world to legalize recreational cannabis on a federal level. Implementing a national cannabis system in a huge country with distinct provincial governments is, at best, an intricate, fraught, high-stakes project—and the resulting rollout has been about as complicated as…Read more...

Halloween costumes, full-sized candy bars, and discounted iPads lead off Wednesday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

When you look at the design of Apple, Samsung, and Google’s latest phones, there’s very little to distinguish this year’s crop from 2017’s has-beens. Meanwhile, outside of the big three, every other phone maker seemed content to jump on the notched screen bandwagon and settle for similarly iterative aesthetics. And…Read more...

Even in a world of face unlocking and fingerprint scanning, we still haven’t escaped the password just yet. They’re still a necessity and they’re still annoying to remember. There are now numerous browser features, third-party tools, and even hardware dongles designed to help keep your login credentials safe and…Read more...

BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA—The winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics didn’t just make discoveries. Their revolutionary work turned powerful lasers into ubiquitous lab tools. The day of the announcement earlier this month, I’d already planned to visit the tennis-court sized Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, or BELLA,…Read more...

A surprising star joins the Cats movie. John Carpenter hopes for a They Live sequel. Pennyworth finds a few more of Alfred’s security team. Gotham might have dropped a sneaky hint at its take on Bane. Plus, new footage from Aquaman, and The Flash teases a grim fate for one member of the team. Spoilers now!

So you want to dress up for Halloween and be a fun person...but you don’t really have the time or the inclination to put in to a lot of effort. It’s fine! ThinkGeek has you covered today with a wide array of costumes, decorations, and other Halloween-adjacent tchotchkes for a flat 50% off. I suspect the best stuff…Read more...

Unless you really need the iPad Pro (and you almost definitely do not), the standard, vanilla 2018 iPad is a terrific tablet for both consuming and creating media. It even works with the Apple Pencil, the first non-Pro iPad to do so.Read more...

In what would be somewhat of a revelation had the late theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking not been one of the world’s most famous atheists—and spoken or written on the topic on numerous occasions—media outlets are playing up that Hawking’s final book Brief Answers to the Big Questions contains the…Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week issued a warning about a disease known as acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), an illness it says it knows very little about but can cause arm or leg weakness and paralysis, particularly in children. According to a Tuesday press briefing, there have been 62 confirmed…Read more...

The New York Attorney General’s office has subpoenaed “more than a dozen telecommunications trade groups, lobbying contractors and Washington advocacy organizations,” the New York Times reported on Tuesday, seeking to determine whether they were behind the flood of fake public comments submitted before the Federal…Read more...

Video giant YouTube appeared to be suffering a massive outage on Tuesday night, with users reporting widespread problems attempting to connect to the site. The cause is not yet clear, but reports indicate that viewers are experiencing a number of glitches including “500 Internal Server Error” messages (a generic HTTP…Read more...

If you’re a dog person who has suspected that your four-legged friend may know exactly what you mean when you use certain words or phrases—for example “toy,” or “car,” or maybe even “who’s the good boy?” (he is)—you may be correct.

Casting anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role of Han Solo just feels like sacrilege, but since Ford is now 76 years old, playing a younger version of himself would be all but impossible. Or at least impossible if you rely on the standard Hollywood de-aging tricks like makeup and CG. Artificial intelligence, it…Read more...

Today, in an interview with the Associated Press, President Donald Trump compared the Saudi regime, which allegedly murdered and dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside its consulate in Turkey last month, to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault by several women…Read more...

A Rochester, New York, resident might have caught one of the most frightening brain diseases around in one of the strangest ways possible—eating squirrel meat contaminated with zombie-like proteins.Read more...

The head of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday slammed wireless carriers over what he described as unsuitably slow progress in restoring communications in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael.

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

It sounded a little slippery last week, when Facebook announced Portal, a new voice-activated speaker and video chat gadget, and the company said that it would not use data collected through the device to target ads. It was, in fact, very slippery. Facebook just admitted that Portal is completely capable of collecting…Read more...

In response to the record-setting $5 billion fine recently levied against Google by the European Union, the search giant is making some changes. On Tuesday, it announced that manufacturers will soon have to pay a licensing fee to ship devices into the European Economic Area (EEA) with Google apps pre-installed.Read more...

While the flu is no picnic for anyone, it can be especially risky and sometimes deadly for young children. But a new survey suggests many people still avoid the flu shot because of misconceptions about how it works, including that the vaccine actually can give you the flu.

Between the CW’s new Charmed and Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, you might be fooled into thinking television witches are having a particular moment. But the truth is, witches have been small-screen staples for over 50 years. Here are 13 TV witches who’ve kept us spellbound.

This week’s New Yorker features a scathing article on Google’s self-driving car program, detailing the stories of nightmarish mismanagement and at least one crash involving self-driving cars that went mostly unreported. We want to shine more light on what happens behind closed doors in our race to get self-driving…Read more...

History is rife with fakes. In 1983, the German magazine Stern announced that it had acquired previously undocumented diaries written by Hitler, a find British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper initially heralded as “an archive of great historical significance.” In reality, however, an illustrator named Konrad Kujau had…Read more...

There was a time when The Walking Dead was the biggest thing on TV. That time has now passed. Sunday’s episode, “The Bridge,” had the lowest ratings in series history, beating the previous worst record set in season one.Read more...

Huge numbers of Twitter users on Tuesday found their push notifications turned to useless strings of letters and numbers, and so far no one—including CEO Jack Dorsey—seems to know why.Read more...

One of the most well-studied tropical forests on Earth has seen its insect populations crash since the 1970s with effects rippling up the food chain, an alarming new study has found.

Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, are claiming to have discovered the oldest known animal fossil—an ancient sea sponge that emerged between 660 million and 635 million years ago.Read more...

Yang Kaili, a young internet star in China, was detained for five days for singing the country’s national anthem in a non-serious manner during a livestream. On October 7, clad in a fuzzy antler headband, Yang waved her hands around as she sang the national anthem for about 10 seconds.

Ey, I’m Mista Real New Yawka from Da Big Apple, da biggest city in da whole woild. I tawk like “dis” and rememba da good old days when Ess-A-Bagel had da best bagel in da City and you’d neva eva think about gettin dat inna tube from da wiseguys at Stawbucks.

The good news is that it appears Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s cat is alive in the Ecuadorian embassy. The bad news is Assange needs to be told by the Ecuadorian government to care for the cat or he’ll have to find it a new home.Read more...

Out of every original comment sent to the Federal Communications Commission about its Net Neutrality repeal proceedings, nearly all were against killing the regulations, according to a new Stanford University study. The study found that 99.7 percent of non-duplicated comments were against a repeal.Read more...

While companies like Nintendo and Sony are content to cram a smattering of back-catalog titles into a tiny box to cash in on gaming nostalgia, Analogue has instead focused on making it easy for devoted retro gamers to enjoy all of their favorite classic games by making them shine on modern TVs. To date, the company…Read more...

Arrow rarely feels like it can offer something refreshing these days. After all, some of the show’s biggest problems lately have come from it regurgitating similar arcs and never letting its characters really grow. But last night’s season seven premiere might have finally done it. Although. in true Arrow style, it’s…Read more...

Lyft just announced the broad availability of its new All-Access Plan. This subscription-based service gets you 30 “FREE” Lyft rides (as long as those rides cost $15 or less) every 30 days for $300. After that, subscribers get a 5 percent discount on all rides. If the math that would make this a good deal seems a…Read more...

Using ground-penetrating radar, archaeologists in Norway have discovered an ancient Viking ship buried just 20 inches beneath the surface of a farmer’s field. The 66-foot-long ship, deliberately buried during a funeral ritual, appears surprisingly intact—and it could contain the skeletal remains of a high-ranking…Read more...

Earlier this year, Huawei passed Apple to become the second largest smartphone maker in the world, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the company’s best phones like the P20 Pro aren’t officially sold in the U.S. And because of the current business climate, where largely going to miss out on Huawei’s…Read more...

Warner Bros. is going all in on another cinematic universe. Simon Kinberg talks up the Gambit movie. Elisabeth Olsen promises more doom and gloom for Wanda and the Vision in Avengers 4. Plus, new details on what’s coming on Doctor Who, Sonequa Martin-Green on Discovery’s Spock, and what’s to come on Arrow. Spoilers,…Read more...

When Amazon released its revamped Kindle Oasis last year, we called it the best ereader of all time. But $250 is lot to spend on something that’s essentially a single-purpose device. So, to shore up the other end of its ereader line, Amazon has made a new Kindle Paperwhite sporting many of the high-end features found…Read more...

Elevation Lab’s Anchor has long been one of our favorite headphone storage solutions, and our readers have bought thousands of them. And now, the company is raising the bar with the brand new Anchor Pro, and our readers can get it for $13 at launch with promo code ANCHORPRO.Read more...

Google has become the latest tech company to pull out of a high-profile conference in Saudi Arabia commonly referred to as Davos in the Desert. Google didn’t give a reason for the decision but other companies have pulled out while citing the October 2 disappearance of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, last…Read more...

Facebook is banning spreading false information about voting requirements and will also “fact-check fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations” as part of its preparations for the 2018 midterm elections, Reuters reported on Monday.

During the August 4 Patriot Prayer rally in Portland, Oregon, members of the alt-right militia stationed themselves on top of a building overlooking the protest with a cache of weapons, seemingly prepared to escalate violence. The Portland Police Department, however, did not see fit to inform city officials of this…Read more...

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has delayed the touchdown of the main section of the Hayabusa2 probe on the asteroid Ryugu from this month until January 2019, Nature reported, after mission scientists determined that the Ryugu’s surface is rougher than expected and the landing needs more planning time.

Two fans of the Alien franchise took their maternity pictures to a whole other level. We just had to find out more.Read more...

For a character who is supposed to be incredibly fast, his movie is moving pretty damn slow. DC has been working on a solo Flash movie for years, with Justice League star Ezra Miller long set to play the title role. However, a new report suggests the film is further away than you may think.Read more...

Anthony Levandowski, the controversial former Google engineer at the center of the major lawsuit between Uber and Waymo over trade secrets last year, is the subject of a new extensive, scathing, head-spinning story featured in this month’s New Yorker. One of the many incredible details is an alleged crash where…Read more...