Gizmodo

By combining data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, an international team of astronomers has come up with the most accurate estimate yet of our galaxy’s mass.

Do you know where you’ll be on April 6, 2019? If you heavily rely on GPS, you may not be able to determine where you are when that date rolls around. That’s because GPS navigation technology was originally built with a short-sighted timekeeping system that will reset next month and has the potential to cause chaos.Read more...

On Thursday, I clicked on a link that promised to show me a snail “playing” with a baby carrot. The video was nice, but I wanted to know more. After speaking with multiple snail specialists, I have inched toward the truth about “Snails Can’t Get Enough of Baby Carrot,” dear readers, and it’s either fun in a different…Read more...

A team of scientists are using their training in physics to solve some real-world problems—like the optimal strategy for detangling long hair.Read more...

Facebook, the very open platform that would like to be the opposite of that in the near future, announced a big change this week: It will no longer be a dumping grounds for the anti-vaccination conspiracies of a few misinformed clowns.

Last September, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia gave a bizarre lecture at CERN in which he argued—to an audience of young women scientists—that women are less qualified to conduct physics than men. On Thursday, CERN officially severed its association with Strumia.Read more...

Gail Gygax and I were sitting in the living room of a lace-trimmed, flower-filled bed and breakfast in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin when she told me about the time she discovered what she believed was a plot to kill her.Read more...

A pair of bills that prohibit spreading fake news and insulting authorities just made it one step closer to becoming law in Russia.Read more...

We know chimpanzees as intelligent, emotional creatures that make and use tools, grieve for their dead, and pass down traditions between generations. But less well-known is that different communities of chimps have unique cultures—and that behavioral diversity that is shrinking, according to a new, 10-year study of…Read more...

The Instant Pot is having a moment. Friends, family, and many, many of my co-workers can’t stop talking about the electric pressure cooker that ostensibly lets you do a lot more than cook stews and beans quickly. However, the Instant Pot is a brand, not a specific kind of cooker. There are a lot of other electric…Read more...

Whistleblower and activist Chelsea Manning has been ordered to appear at a contempt hearing this Friday for refusing to answer questions about her 2010 disclosure of classified material to WikiLeaks before a federal grand jury in Virginia.

In 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency published a report titled “Can We Delay A Greenhouse Warming?” It ran through the latest predictions on climate change, and analyzed the feasibility of several policy options, from taxes to fossil fuel bans, that could slow the coming catastrophe. It is one of the earliest…Read more...

You can now completely control your Playstation 4 with an iOS device anywhere there’s internet thanks to a free, new PS4 Remote Play app. The new feature comes through a system software update for PS4, which is also free. After spending a few minutes acquiring said software updates and apps, I was able to control my…Read more...

Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that…Read more...

Microsoft figured it out. Tuesday I got my first opportunity to try out the HoloLens 2, and after slipping it over my head and taking a quick moment to calibrate the eye tracking, I was instantly able to move around the room and interact with objects crafted from light. It was annoyingly natural to participate in an…Read more...

NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Christina Koch will make history on March 29 by becoming the first all-women team to perform a spacewalk, which they’ll do outside the International Space Station.

The area immediately above our planet where most of our satellites live might seem like an inexhaustible place, but it’s not. Low Earth orbit is quickly filling up with all sorts of junk, and the potential for a disaster has never been greater. Here’s how laws and international treaties can help—and why we need to…Read more...

A couple capacities of SanDisk’s tiny external SSDs are marked down to all-time low prices today on Amazon. Not everyone needs these, but they’re spacious, rugged, and compared to most flash drives, extremely fast.

It’s that time again—another USB standard is upon us, ready to upgrade your device’s ports and cabling in the coming years. Here we’re going to explain everything you need to know about USB4, including the speed improvements in the pipeline and the new capabilities it’s going to borrow from Thunderbolt 3, which shares…Read more...

You’ve probably heard a lot about ketamine this week, thanks to the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve a nasal spray based on the drug as a new depression treatment. But given ketamine’s long-standing reputation as a recreational drug—so notorious that users talk about entering a “K-hole” after taking…Read more...

There’s wild rumors about who could co-star in the Black Widow movie. Jumanji 2 and the CW’s Lost Boys show expand their casts. Duncan Jones offers up a Rogue Trooper update. Plus, a new Captain Marvel clip, Team Flash confronts Cicada once and for all, and the Nancy Drew show gets a new title. Spoilers get!Read more...

Most people don’t give a second thought to the poop they flush away. But perhaps they should, because the energy contained within our repellent remains is impressive.

You wear it once and throw it away. At least that was the idea.

While they might not have the name recognition of Philips Hue bulbs, Anker’s Eufy smart bulbs are a great, affordable entry point into smart lighting, and you can stock up on bulbs for just $13 each today.

Following a report from the New York Times earlier this week that such a move was imminent, Chinese telecommunications company Huawei has announced that it is suing the United States government for restricting federal agencies from using its products as it continues to hit back against claims that it poses a national…Read more...

The Nintendo Switch already felt like the best part of a VR experience thanks to the wizardry of the Joy-Con controllers in some games, but now it’s going full VR. Tonight the company announced the Nintendo Labo: VR Kit, an $80 Labo kit that lets users build a VR headset out of cardboard. This is the first major foray…Read more...

Two cost-cutting rounds of layoffs affected hundreds of Snap employees last year beginning in March. While the company, which owns Snapchat, maintains that the majority of these employees were men, a greater number of employees across some teams who worked directly with the company’s top brass and were laid off were…Read more...

On Wednesday, the saga of the most infamous GoFundMe campaign in history came closer to a conclusion. A woman and a homeless man whom prosecutors claim engaged in a fraudulent scheme that raised $400,000 on the crowdfunding site have pleaded guilty to federal charges.Read more...

Look at the photo above. “Why that’s Donald Trump and highly recognizable tech CEO Tim Cook!” you might think. But you’d be wrong, because below is video of the President calling the magnate by his true name during today’s Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting.

The head of the U.S. intelligence community is no longer required to publish an annual report detailing the number of civilians and enemy combatants killed in U.S. drone strikes abroad.

An air-to-air imaging technology developed by NASA has resulted in the first images ever taken of interacting shockwaves produced by in-flight supersonic jets. The new images, in addition to being beautiful, will help NASA design jets capable of producing gentle rumbles instead of loud sonic booms when breaking the…Read more...

Yes, George R.R. Martin is still working on The Winds of Winter. Yes, that means A Dream of Spring will come eventually. But before that happens, we’re getting the eighth and final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones. What will this spoil for fans of the A Song of Ice and Fire series? Hopefully: not everything.

And on the sixth day of March the clouds above Menlo Park parted, and lo, Mark Zuckerberg spoke of privacy.Read more...

In the 18th-century English ballad The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a storm drives a sailor’s ship toward the South Pole, where he encounters all manner of fantastical sights, including floating icebergs “as green as emerald.” It may sound like author Samuel Coleridge was taking some poetic license, but…Read more...

Archaeologists working at a 15th-century site in Peru have unearthed the remains of 137 children and 200 llamas in what’s now considered the largest mass child sacrifice known from the New World—and possibly of all time.

A 13-year-old girl living in Kariya, Japan has been investigated and chastised by police for sharing a prank link online. The link reportedly initiates a pop-up window designed to be impossible to close online.Read more...

This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved Johnson & Johnson’s Spravato, the nasal spray version of a ketamine-like sedative, for certain cases of depression. And the drug is already being heralded as a “game-changer” for depression and suicide treatment. But chief among the major questions the average…Read more...

Multiple outlets report that Apple has changed its policy regarding repairs to iPhones with third-party battery replacements. These reports say that Apple will now fix iPhones even if the device has a non-Apple battery inside. And since batteries are perhaps the most essential repair for a mobile device, this is a big…Read more...

If the Pixel 3 was Google’s crowning achievement for showing how good a software-first approach to phone design can be, then the Galaxy S10 is a tribute to the hardware gods. Between a new take on the tired notched selfie cam, a redesigned rear camera setup with three different lenses, and incredible battery life, the…Read more...

Top congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced legislation to restore the open internet rules repealed by the Trump administration in December 2017.

When you die in real life, your social media accounts remain—often as a digital mourning space for friends and family. Facebook is a particularly prominent example of that, and now the company is rolling out a new Tributes feature that lets users leave messages in a dedicated section of a memorialized account (that…Read more...

There are a few ways to hide or camouflage the bundle of cables that hang from most wall-mounted TVs—power, HDMI, etc.—but none are as truly invisible as the wireless technology that was recently revealed in a patent Samsung filed with the World Intellectual Property Office in March of last year. It eliminates cables…Read more...

The Dell XPS 13 has been so dangerously close to perfect for so long that the latest iteration left me a little surprised. I was turning it this way and that to find something I could fault it for, not because I wanted to unfairly ding the product, it’s just that nothing is perfect. But Dell has so refined this…Read more...

There are 118 elements on the periodic table. An iPhone contains about 75 of them.

Sean Gunn offers a tiny update on Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Brian Cox joins the cast of Good Omens. Netflix rounds out the cast for its fantastical take on Arthurian legend. Plus, what’s to come on The Walking Dead, and Star Trek: Discovery teases the arrival of some classic aliens. To me, my spoilers!

For most of his life, British author and BBC radio producer Tim Dee has been a birdwatcher. But it’s not finches and sparrows that have captured his heart—it’s gulls, those large, squawking sea birds with a fondness for tossed-out French fries. While many of us think of gulls as little more than flying rats, Dee is…Read more...

Apple might dominate when it comes to smartwatch sales, but Fitbit’s looking to make a dent in its lead by launching four new devices today: the Fitbit Versa Lite Edition, the Inspire and Inspire HR, and the Ace 2. As its name suggests, the Versa Lite is a streamlined version of its popular Versa smartwatch.…Read more...

March Madness, America’s favorite productivity killer, is only a few weeks away, and if you don’t have cable, Sling TV’s offering a great deal that’ll allow you to watch every game live.

Jerry Merryman, one of three people at Texas Instruments credited with inventing the world’s first handheld electronic calculator in the 1960s, died at a Dallas hospital on February 27. Merryman was 86 years old.Read more...

T-Mobile is trying to merge with competitor Sprint in a hotly contested, $26 billion mega-deal that could be blocked by the Federal Communications Commission or the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division. T-Mobile has also spent $195,000 at a DC hotel operated by President Donald Trump, who has refused to divest…Read more...