Gizmodo

Whether the audience is policy wonks, nature lovers, or environmental activists, documentaries on climate change still feel like a niche thing in 2019. Which is what makes Ice on Fire, the climate documentary co-produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio that debuted Tuesday night on HBO, so refreshing. This isn’t a…Read more...

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope point to the presence of sodium chloride on the surface of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. This is potential evidence that sodium chloride, otherwise known as table salt, exists within Europa’s subsurface ocean—yet another indication of this moon’s potential to support alien…Read more...

Humans have been smoking, eating, and wearing cannabis for millennia, and a new study out Wednesday presents some pretty strong evidence of people using it explicitly to get high back during the first century BCE in Central Asia. The paper suggests that the plant could have been cultivated to be more mind-altering and…Read more...

TP-Link Deco Whole Home Mesh WIFI System 3-Pack | $160 | Amazon | Clip the coupon code | Amazon Credit Card Users Get 15% Cash BackRead more...

Even if the days of your youth are long past, chances are you know Fortnite and that flossing dance are popular with the kids. Building on that success, Epic Games—the company behind Fortnite and creator of Unreal Engine—just acquired Houseparty, a social video app popular with teens.Read more...

If you don’t own a soundbar, you’ve probably thought about getting one. Maybe your speaker-head friend told you to check out the new Sonos Beam (sort of expensive!), or that sick-looking Sony surround sound system (even more expensive—wow!). Vizio, on the other hand, wants to sell you a new, super small and super…Read more...

HBO’s Chernobyl has ignited a newfound interest in our relationship with nuclear power and the impacts of one of the worst nuclear disasters with history. It’s also wildly popular, which means it was only a matter of time people started looking to cash in on the moment on social media.Read more...

It won’t be long before smartphones ditch every last physical button, but is that necessarily a good thing? Fewer components in a device means more profit for manufacturers, but users are left having to learn awkward touchscreen gestures to compensate. Researchers at Columbia University are bringing back the button…Read more...

Spain’s data protection agency has fined La Liga, the nation’s top professional soccer league, 250,000 euros ($283,000 USD) for using the league’s phone app to spy on its fans. With millions of downloads, the app was reportedly being used to surveil bars in an effort to catch establishments playing matches on…Read more...

We’re a month and a half past the Galaxy Fold’s original launch date, but after Samsung delayed its debut in order to improve its durability, there’s still no concrete info regarding when the company’s bendable phone will actually go on sale.Read more...

A remarkably well-preserved Bronze Age settlement dubbed the ‘British Pompeii’ was destroyed by fire around a year after it was constructed, according to new research. It’s one of many new findings that’s shedding light on the 3,000-year-old community and the people who called it home—albeit it for a short time.Read more...

The latest Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has officially become an international problem, with three confirmed cases in neighboring Uganda confirmed as of today. Tragically, one of those confirmed cases includes a 5-year-old boy who died from the illness.

Last night, while catching up on everything Nintendo announced but didn’t reveal during its streamed E3 2019 presentation, something caught my eye and made my heart skip.Read more...

Look out, because Uber has an airborne bridge it wants to sell you.

Our actions carry consequences, and that includes the clothes we buy. Off the coast of Tarragona in northeastern Spain, the waters are full of microplastics. Most come from clothing fibers, according to new research.

If you’re one of the millions of people on the planet with an Amazon account, you’ve probably never come close to using all of its services, apps, labyrinthine website menus, and settings screens. Here are 19 tricks to get more out of your Amazon account.

Mark Hamill talks about defying expectations while lending his voice to Chucky. Robert Kirkman’s sci-fi series Oblivion Song is being turned into a movie. Chip and Dale are heading to Disney+. Plus, what’s to come on The 100, good news for Russian Doll, and Idris Elba’s supervillain runs riot in new Hobbs & Shaw…Read more...

Smartphones have made plenty of tech obsolete. Yet every time I get a buzz for a text, I can’t help but feel a deep yearning for the old glory days of T9 texting.Read more...

Delta has never flown the Boeing 737 Max plane, which has been grounded worldwide in the wake of two crashes that killed 346 people in Ethiopia and Indonesia. But Delta still wants to assure people that Boeing’s problems aren’t a big deal, judging by the discussion that Delta CEO Ed Bastian had at the Code Conference…Read more...

Hot off the heels of releasing its standalone Stations app, Spotify is leaning even harder into that whole ‘reinvent the radio’ vibe. Today, the music streaming company released a new playlist called “Your Daily Drive” that uses an algorithm to mash together short-form podcasts and music.Read more...

In what is either an incredible blockchain-enabled monetization opportunity or a sign that perhaps the gears are finally starting to fall out of this thing, Republican politician, failed presidential candidate, and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is a cryptocurrency guy now.

DJI is already the worldwide leader for drones, and despite recently taking aim at GoPro with new Osmo Action, it’s venturing into yet another market with the new Robomaster S1. While this might seem like a move out of left field, DJI’s robotics efforts are actually quite well established in Asia thanks to its annual …Read more...

Mark Zuckerberg may be famed for looking and acting like a (slightly damp) synthetic being trying to infiltrate human society, but a team of artists working with advertising company Canny appears to built a software version of the Facebook CEO that could one day threaten to make hardware Zuckerberg obsolete.

I mean, if you’re gonna start doing Funko Pops from the grim dark future of Games Workshop’s sci-fi tabletop game...you might as well make it as close to the 40K experience as possible, right?

Today is a big day in Silicon Valley because of a hearing happening in Washington, D.C.

The far side of the Moon contains an enormous and very weird structure at its South Pole. And scientists think they might know the source of this anomaly.Read more...

Much in the way that streaming has too many damn options now, gaming services are flooding the market as companies increasingly position themselves to compete for attention over singular domination of an entertainment medium. Netflix, for example, disclosed in an earnings report earlier this year that it viewed itself…Read more...

The consumer protections widely known as “net neutrality” are hugely popular among Republicans throughout the U.S., if only because cable and internet providers are American’s choice example of rapacious corporate gluttony. In Washington, however, things are radically different. Insofar as net neutrality is…Read more...

A 20-year-old college student used the Snapchat gender-swap filter to catfish a cop on Tinder, in a creative act of vigilante justice.Read more...

There’s a lot we still don’t know about Google’s forthcoming streaming game service Stadia, and we won’t know some of it until it’s available in the wild. But in a controlled demo of Stadia at E3, I was treated to a solid experience, as well as some fresh information about how the company plans to deliver Stadia to…Read more...

Be forewarned: the civil, polite, and respectful discourse that accompanies many online games could potentially devolve into something childish, even bordering on vulgar, with Nyko’s new Sound Pad. It’s a keyboard-like accessory that attaches to a controller allowing players to trigger sound effects in a game’s voice…Read more...

A discarded Apollo 10 lunar module known as “Snoopy” has been drifting in space for the past 50 years, its location a complete mystery. Now, after a meticulous eight-year search, a team of astronomers suspect they’ve finally found it.

Nintendo didn’t give us any new hardware during its E3 2019 presentation today, so you’ll instead have to lust and drool over Bill Paxton’s latest creation. He reinvented the clamshell Game Boy Advance, but with the guts of a fully-functional Wii packed inside, allowing the portable to run a huge list of games,…Read more...

A new study seems to deal a serious blow to one of the pro-cannabis movement’s talking points: the idea that the more medical cannabis is legalized, the fewer people will die from opioid overdoses. The findings suggest that there’s no real connection between the rate of opioid overdose deaths and a state’s medical…Read more...

If you hate climate change but love Radiohead, man do I have a two-for-one deal for you. The band has released 18 hours of OK Computer-era recordings it says were being held for ransom after band member Thom Yorke’s minidisc archive was stolen. The band is donating the proceeds from the sale over the next 18 days will…Read more...

As we continue to watch social media giants fumble their half-baked policies around hate speech and harassment, one of the most visible blunders recently has been YouTube’s mishandling of videos with homophobic and racist comments about one of its creators by another. During an interview at Code this week, YouTube CEO…Read more...

The internet is full of sites, and a crap ton of them are run by WordPress. But around 1:05 pm today, something went sideways for sites hosted on the Wordpress VIP Go platform...and an internet star was born. See this friendly ‘lil succulent? It’s currently plastered on any site that reverted to the original WordPress…Read more...

There’s a new season of the technology-themed Twilight Zone-like Netflix show, Black Mirror, and the premiere episode, called Striking Vipers, has a passing cameo from a very interesting car that reveals where the episode was actually shot, despite attempts to obfuscate this fact. I’m not going to spoil the episode…Read more...

“Welcome to Amazon Go,” a cheery man told me, explaining that there were two ways I could shop at the retail giant’s automated convenience store—both of which involved downloading an app. “Oh, I was going to pay cash,” I said. And then it got weird.Read more...

The U.S. Justice Department recently signaled it was exploring possible antitrust investigations into Google and Apple. Leading those investigations—assuming they actually happen—would be none other than Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, a former lobbyist that presidential hopeful and Massachusetts Senator …Read more...

Let’s think about this. Disappointing as it might be, we’re not getting a new PlayStation or Xbox in 2019. There are a lot of reasons why. (And if you for sure know of a specific reason, you should DM me, email me, or tip us safely and securely via SecureDrop.) But I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, and I…Read more...

As far back as 2015, major companies like Sony and Intel have sought to crowdsource efforts to secure their systems and applications through the San Francisco startup HackerOne. Through the “bug bounty” program offered by the company, hackers once viewed as a nuisance—or worse, as criminals—can identify security…Read more...

Security researcher Troy Hunt revealed on Tuesday that he is planning to sell his data breach service Have I Been Pwned (HIPB).Read more...

Thanks to modern paleontology techniques, finding dinosaur fossils isn’t as difficult or random as it once was. There are now more skeletons to go around, but unfortunately, based on an upcoming auction at the Parisian auction house Aguttes, you’ll still need a couple million dollars of disposable cash to add a…Read more...

Many presidential candidates have released climate change plans, but what about plans to address environmental health hazards like lead? Democratic candidate Julián Castro released a formal lead elimination plan Monday—making him the first White House hopeful to do so—and while the candidate is currently polling at …Read more...

A well-preserved head belonging to an ancient species of Pleistocene wolf has been pulled from the permafrost of northeastern Siberia. The enormous, well-preserved head could yield important genetic information about the evolutionary history of wolves and the origin of domesticated dogs.

It’s been one year since T-Mobile announced its intention to buy Sprint for $26 billion and, despite some scrutiny, the mega-merger has trudged forward at pace, save a few hiccups. That might have something to do with the lobbying blitz the companies embarked on a year ago.Read more...

Not long after Apple acquired music recognition app Shazam last fall, the music-ID service introduced a new feature called Pop-up that allowed it to identify songs being played on the device itself, in addition to outside sources.Read more...

Amongst the reveals we saw at WWDC 2019 was a new technology for apps and the web: “Sign in with Apple.” It’s supposedly a more private way to sign into apps and services, according to the company. But if Apple’s version is more private, what are you actually giving away when you sign in with a competing sign-in…Read more...

When speaking to David Lapola it is hard not to feel both his excitement and frustration. On the one hand, the biologist from the University of Campinas in Brazil is about to oversee the launch of a pioneering trial deep in the Amazon to see how its trees could respond to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. On…Read more...