Gizmodo

Scientists are reporting the discovery of a previously unknown species of ancient human that lived in the Philippines over 50,000 years ago. Evidence suggests the new species, named Homo luzonensis, was exceptionally tiny—and possibly even smaller than the famous Hobbit species uncovered on the island of Flores in…Read more...

We live in the glorious future that technophiles have long dreamed of. Almost everything can now connect to the internet: cameras, coffee pots, televisions, vacuums, toilets, children’s toys, sex toys. If you build it, a wireless connection will come for it. These smart devices are always on, always connected, and…Read more...

Two-thirds of hotel websites leak guests’ booking information, according to a new security report.Read more...

When his son asked for a Harry Potter themed birthday, Adam Thole decided to borrow an idea from Universal Studios’ The Wizarding World of Harry Potter which lets visitors cast spells using interactive wands. The results are quite possibly the most magical smart home upgrade you’ve ever seen, and one that’s not…Read more...

Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives made good on a campaign promise on Wednesday by passing legislation that would effectively reinstate, in its entirety, the 2015 Open Internet Order—rules that, for a brief time, ensured that net neutrality was the law of the land.Read more...

Climate change is one the greatest intergenerational injustices. Decades of profligate carbon emissions by older generations have conscripted their children and grandchildren to a hotter, more dangerous world. And the inaction of adults has ensured the world will need radical system change to avert the worst impacts…Read more...

The U.S. Department of Defense under Patrick M. Shanahan has quietly pulled funding for an independent organization called the Jason Group under the Pentagon’s latest budget proposal. And it’s just one more way that the Trump regime is chipping away at independent scientific voices in the U.S. government.

On Tuesday afternoon, police in Oregon received a 911 call claiming someone had locked themselves in the bathroom, according to a Facebook post from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. According to the law enforcement department, several police officers responded to the call, surrounded the house, commanded the…Read more...

Some of the fastest storage tech around is soon going to be available to people buying just any old laptop. Intel’s Optane technology, based on 3D Xpoint is really fast, but unless you’re building your own computer or manage a server farm it’s been out of reach. Which is a shame because Optane offers blazing storage…Read more...

At long last, Sony announced it will let you change your online ID on PSN beginning on Wednesday. That said, before you rush to your PlayStation 4 to change that embarrassing handle you’ve had since middle school, there are just a few teensy weensy caveats to keep in mind.Read more...

Amazon’s cashless convenience stores may be undergoing a significant conceptual overhaul. Specifically, an Amazon spokesperson told Gizmodo, “We are working to accept cash at Amazon Go.”Read more...

Today, scientists revealed the first-ever image of a black hole at a press conference in Washington, D.C. This is a huge deal, as Harvard & Smithsonian astrophysicist Center for Astrophysics physicist Grant Tremblay told Gizmodo’s Ryan Mandelbaum, “The image marks the start of a new epoch.”

Laptops haven’t been really upgradable in a while. Sure you could switch out the storage or memory on some, but as laptops have gotten thinner and thinner, even those components have become permanently a part of devices. So it was a big deal when Alienware showed of the new Area-51m at CES. Yes, it’s a 17.3-inch beast…Read more...

For every device that a company reveals and releases, there are probably 10 that never escape the R&D lab. Sonny Dickson, who has a solid track record of leaking things Apple doesn’t want the world to see, managed to get his hands on a working prototype of the Wizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone (or WALT, for short)…Read more...

Federal prosecutors on Tuesday indicted British firm Indivior Plc, the manufacturer of the opioid craving and withdrawal drug Suboxone Film, with misleading doctors and government health programs into thinking the drug was safer and less addictive than it really is, Bloomberg reported. According to the U.S. Justice…Read more...

We didn’t really need an indicator beyond the initial trailer that Jon Favreau’s Lion King re-imagining was going to be a sumptuous, familiar take on the Disney icon. But the new trailer is here to remind you that, oh yes, absolutely: this is just The Lion King, rendered in the most mind-boggling CG the House of Mouse…Read more...

I know you’ve got some printer PTSD. You’ve probably bought several throughout your life that did nothing but make you angry and miserable, up to the point that when it finally came time to buy an overpriced replacement ink cartridge, you just threw the whole thing out to the curb.

I know two things about vacuuming:

To follow the doings of Donald Trump even briefly is to be constantly bombarded with a stream of indignities, breaches of protocol, reality-warping lies, and extended middle fingers, ranging from the petty (his staff photoshopping him to look thinner) to the outrageous (brazen efforts to make our cruel health care…Read more...

Senators Mark Warner (D-Virginia) and Deb Fischer (R-Nebraska) have introduced legislation to ban so-called “dark patterns” tactics designed to trick users into handing over access to their data, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Bees have been disappearing from the planet at an alarming rate, a phenomenon that seriously threatens our ecosystem. Scientists speculate bees are dying out for a number of reasons, including pesticides, habitat losses, starvation, and parasites. What they have not considered, however, is that bees have just decided…Read more...

Well, folks, it appears the inevitable choose-your-own-adventure-style YouTube programming may soon be coming to a channel near you.

Tomorrow the Senate Commerce Committee will hold a hearing to better examine the state of broadband maps in the U.S. These maps currently suggest just 25 million Americans are without access to broadband internet, which is defined as speeds of 25Mbps. But according to numbers released by Microsoft today, 162.8 million…Read more...

The man who crafted the languages of Essos for HBO’s Game of Thrones is heading to Arrakis. Dothraki and Valyrian language builder David J. Peterson is doing language work for Denis Villeneuve’s highly-anticipated Dune. Now, how do you say “the spice must flow” in High Valyrian?

Well, that escalated quickly. Less than a day after calling for a half foot of snow and gusty winds to hit a portion of the Midwest this week, the National Weather Service has vastly upped its forecast.Read more...

A 99-year-old woman in Oregon lived a long life with one of the world’s rarest and often fatal conditions: a body in which most of her major organs were on the wrong side. Even more amazingly, the woman remained blissfully unaware of her unusual predicament. It was only after medical students and their professor got…Read more...

During the Cold War, the United States flew U2 spy planes over Europe, the Middle East, and central eastern Asia in search of potential military targets. These missions inadvertently gathered historical information, which archaeologists are now using for scientific purposes.

Amazon’s online book store is plagued with thousands of auto-generated ebooks crudely hacked together from other texts by shady authors” looking to make a quick buck. Most are unreadable, but it’s not always going to be that way. Springer Nature, a publisher serving the research community, just published its first…Read more...

Dropbox has finally delivered on a long-awaited partnership with G Suite for native editing tools, and it definitely seems like it was worth the wait.

Recently, you may have seen news stories claiming that tourists could “face the death penalty” for taking selfies on a certain beach in Thailand—which we can all agree is a little bit extreme. Thankfully, those claims are totally fake.

Apple needs China. But it comes at a cost.Read more...

The flying car has been just a few years away for, well, years. The predictions aren’t getting more optimistic under President Donald Trump, but now science is offering a surprising new reason for us to make flying cars a reality: We might need them to fight climate change.Read more...

If using the law to corral antivaxxers doesn’t work at first, try, try again. At least, that seems to be the lesson learned by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. On Tuesday, he declared a state of emergency and mandated residents of the Williamsburg neighborhood, where an outbreak of measles has been raging since…Read more...

The upcoming horror movies Ma and Brightburn aren’t intended for little kids. But a movie theater full of children got an unwanted peek at the films recently anyway when the trailers were screened for unsuspecting families. The poor kids were there to see the new Peppa Pig movie, Festival of Fun.

A former computer science student who used the moniker K!NG and made more than $900,000 scamming visitors to legal porn sites using ransomware has been sentenced to six years in jail, the BBC reports.Read more...

During the Early Cretaceous, a small two-legged dinosaur walked across a stretch of fine-grained mud following a rainstorm. The resulting footprints became locked in stone, but unlike other fossilized dinosaur tracks, these 120-million-year-old fossils show skin impressions across the entire footprint, in what is…Read more...

YouTube shut down numerous chat rooms being flooded for over an hour by racist comments when thousands of people tuned into YouTube on Tuesday to watch a House Judiciary Committee congressional hearing on the rise of white nationalism.Read more...

If you’ve dabbled in mobile gaming, particularly more resource intensive titles like one of the many battle royale games out there, you know jank. It’s the slight hiccup, frame skip, or graphics lag that can sometimes mean the difference between an early exit and a chicken dinner (or perhaps a victory royale).Read more...

As technology becomes more central to our lives, kids are increasingly being steered towards careers in programming with things like toys that promote coding. Is there still room for the arts in a world run by apps, AI, and computers? It turns out there might be a closer connection between the two than you’d think, as…Read more...

It’s been a while since I’ve used a phone with such wildly different personalities living in the same device, but here were are. On the outside, the LG G8 features a fantastically sleek and minimalist design as good or better than other phones on the market. But on the inside, the G8 dreams of being a technological…Read more...

Those strips and gels you use to get your teeth as pearly white as possible may come with some previously unknown risks, according to new, preliminary research out this week. It found that the key ingredient in these products—hydrogen peroxide—could be capable of damaging dentin, the second, deeper layer of our teeth…Read more...

People have been complaining about iTunes for ages. The bloated and confusingly arcane piece of software has been updated and repurposed and jerry-rigged to handle new tasks for the past 18 years, and one developer says it won’t live to see its 19th birthday. It looks like Apple is finally about to kill iTunes and…Read more...

I don’t consider myself anything close to a sports fan, but even I understand that the Lord of the Flies-level chaos that transpired following Texas Tech’s victory over Michigan State on Saturday is remarkable if for no other reason than the bonfire of flaming Lime scooters.

Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) has approved Project Wing’s plans for drone delivery of food and medicine in suburbs around the capital city of Canberra, a “world-first,” according to a new report by the Guardian. Project Wing, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, has been testing…Read more...

Spammers on Twitter are annoying. That’s why Twitter is thwarting one their most obnoxious tactics by further slashing the number of people you can follow per day from 1,000 to... 400.Read more...

California Representative Devin Nunes, one of the president’s biggest yes-men in Congress and recent filer of a lawsuit against Twitter and several of its users, including the account @DevinCow and Republican strategist Liz Mair, over mean things said about him has launched yet another lawsuit. This one again targets …Read more...

Jean Grey lets the Phoenix Force in for Dark Phoenix’s latest TV spot. Dwayne Johnson promises production on Black Adam is finally moving forward next year. Some preying birds unite in new pictures from Arrow. Plus, what’s to come on Legends of Tomorrow. Spoilers now!

It’s a law of nature that whatever AV cable you need at any given time to set up a home theater, you inexplicably won’t have it. Unless, of course, you stock up on essentials from this AmazonBasics sale.

Regulators in China are considering a ban on cryptocurrency mining as an “undesirable” economic activity, according to a government document released Monday.

Authorities in Singapore have seized more than 14 tons of scales of pangolin scales bound for Vietnam in what Paul Thomson of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Pangolin Specialist Group described as the largest single such shipment on record, the New York Times reported on Monday. Thomson…Read more...