Gizmodo

This week, a German federal court ruled that Facebook must give the mother of a dead 15-year-old access to her entire account. They’re not just talking about access to a memorial page, either. The mother gets access to everything, including private messages. In Germany, the judges decided, heirs should be able to…Read more...

Even under the best of circumstances, ordering salad at McDonald’s is a dicey endeavor. But now an outbreak of the foodborne parasite cyclospora has sickened over 100 people in Iowa and Illinois since May, and several cases are tied to salads purchased at the fast food giant.Read more...

On September 19, 2017, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck central Mexico, killing nearly 370 people. But something good has come from this tragic event: The quake damaged an ancient pyramid, revealing a previously unknown Aztec temple underneath.Read more...

Sunscreen is a wonder of technology. It’s the closest thing we have to an anti-aging miracle, and it makes the outdoors safe for pale folks like me who would otherwise fry to a bright pink crisp. But we know you have questions about how to use it, and even whether you really need to use it. Here’s our primer on all…Read more...

Ravaged by the effects of climate change, the world’s corals are on the brink of catastrophic decline, and time is running out. At the Gates Coral Lab in Hawaii, however, scientists are searching for the magic recipe to breed a more resilient “super coral” with a better chance of surviving.Read more...

As you know by now, Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team at the U.S. Justice Department issued an indictment against more Russian operatives believed to be involved in tampering with the 2016 election. The 29-page document names 12 such Russian military intelligence (GRU) operatives, details exploits involving…Read more...

HBO’s still the name to beat when it comes to prestige genre television and apparently, it has no intentions of losing that title. The network’s teaming up with Joss Whedon for a new series set in a fanciful world of social norms and secret powers.Read more...

YouTube got a lot of crap earlier this week when its budding cable TV substitute, YouTube TV, went down during England and Croatia’s World Cup semi-final match.Read more...

An Air China flight crew had to enact emergency protocols during a flight from Hong Kong to the city of Dalian on Tuesday, all because a co-pilot tried to sneak in a vape break.Read more...

You’re looking at the center of our galactic home, the Milky Way, as imaged by 64 radio telescopes in the South African wilderness.Read more...

The U.S. Justice Department on Friday announced new charges against 12 Russian military officers accused of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by hacking into computers and stealing confidential documents, which they later allegedly disseminated to the public.

Drugs that can lengthen life have long been a hallmark of speculative science fiction—many hope for an invention that could extend average lifespans well into the triple digits in the distant future. But the timeline of these drugs could be shorter than we think. A new clinical trial published Wednesday in Science…Read more...

Boeing and SpaceX, owing to manufacturing delays and certification hurdles, are unlikely to provide NASA with the vehicles required to transport astronauts to the International Space Station next year, according to an alarming government report. As a result, and starting in late 2019, the U.S. might not have a crew…Read more...

When is an asteroid not an asteroid? When it’s a binary pair. Turns out that an asteroid discovered late last year is actually two gravitationally bound objects in orbit around each other. But this particular duo, dubbed 2017 YE5, belongs to an exceptionally rare class of near-Earth objects.

The last two Blockbuster stores in Alaska are shutting their doors for good next week according to the Anchorage Daily News, which means there is just one remaining relic of the video rental giant still up and operating in the entire United States.

Despite a massive recall of Honey Smacks last month, the US Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday that some grocery stores and other retailers are still selling the cereal from a batch that has been linked to a salmonella outbreak across the United States.

There’s a twisted new sextortion scam going around.Read more...

By meticulously stitching together photos taken from two cameras aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, a team of scientists has compiled the most accurate maps of Pluto and Charon to date.

Facebook has quietly changed its privacy standards for closed groups to eliminate the option of manually viewing members’ private information and after it threatened legal action, a Chrome extension that made it possible to download the details of all group members at once has been shuttered. But the question of why…Read more...

Sprint, mirroring its competition, has engaged in some grammatical gymnastics with its new unlimited strategy, announcing not one, but two different unlimited plans, each with their own limitations. One might almost say they’re not unlimited plans at all, and instead amount to yet another attempt by carriers to…Read more...

After the Parkland, Florida, school shooting last year, in which 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were killed, a slew of companies sought to distance themselves from the National Rifle Association.

An Ohio school district is gearing up for a surprising security upgrade for the new year: smart pepper spray. Beginning in the fall, schools in the Columbiana Exempted Village School District in Ohio will begin using devices called ‘Threat Extinguishers.’ Modeled after fire extinguishers, these are pepper spray…Read more...

People in cities around the world—from Taos, New Mexico, to Windsor, Ontario, to Blackburn, England, to Auckland, New Zealand—have reported hearing strange humming noises that have no obvious source. The hums are often compared to the sound of idling trucks, and for the people who can hear them, they can be maddening,…Read more...

Today, scientists made a huge announcement: Telescopes around the world recorded a source of mysterious, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the highest-energy particles that hit the Earth. It all started with a text message.Read more...

When Fox approached William Gibson to write a script for Alien 3 back in the late ‘80s, the studio imagined that the lauded author would bring his distinct cyberpunk vision of the future to the franchise. Instead, Gibson turned in a complicated, politically-charged script influenced by the Cold War. Due to a number of…Read more...

Today, Apple finally pulled the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro from its store. This marks the end of the dongle-free MacBook Pro, and now only the super-outdated MacBook Air, which you shouldn’t buy anyways, still has ports besides USB-C. Headphone jacks aside, Apple just moved one step closer to being a USB-C only laptop…Read more...

The FCC blew past a deadline to respond to questions brought by two U.S. senators over dubious “cyberattack” claims made by agency officials.

Less than a week ago, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was in a Thailand cave with a mini-submarine his team made that didn’t quite work out for the daring rescue of 12 boys and a soccer coach trapped inside. Now, he says he wants to help resolve Flint, Michigan’s water contamination crisis. Expectedly, this latest…Read more...

Competitors at this year’s World Human Powered Speed Challenge are going to have to contend with this—a bullet-shaped bike designed by an artificially intelligent software program.

A high-contrast, black-and-white image of your bones is an effective tool for spotting fractures or breaks. But after 120+ years, x-ray imaging is getting a remarkable update with 3D, full-color images that reveal far more than just the bones inside you. These images will improve what a doctor can diagnose without…Read more...

This is admittedly less exciting than it used to be, but if you haven’t gotten your hands on an SNES Classic yet (and you definitely should!), it’s back in stock for $80 at Amazon right now, with free shipping.

The FCC knows that Americans hate telecoms, and it’s doing everything it can to give us reason to hate them more. On Tuesday, a proposal to kneecap the informal complaint process at the agency sparked cries of anti-consumerism. Now, the rule changes have been approved—and formal complaints will still cost you $225.Read more...

The 70th Emmys are upon us, which means its time for some of the biggest hits in genre entertainment on television to get their nods—and they’ve done so in spades this year, with tons of nominations for Westworld, The Handmaid’s Tale, and more.

It took a mini circular saw to hack off the keratin talons that had been growing on Shridhar Chillal’s left hand for the last 66 years.

It’s taken ages, but Microsoft is finally updating Notepad, its barebones text editor. This is the next in a recent series of updates to software that’s been floating around the Windows operating system since the ‘80s.

Stealing tens of thousands of dollars worth of Apple products didn’t call for an Oceans Eleven-style elaborate heist. No, it simply required less than thirty seconds and moving with a sense of purpose.

Every so often, protons and even entire atomic nuclei strike the Earth with extremely high energies—much higher than what scientists can produce in their most powerful physics experiments. Since the discovery of “cosmic rays” a hundred years ago, no one knew for sure where the most energetic of these particles came…Read more...

Since the discovery of his mummified body nearly 30 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman has provided scientists with heaps of information about Copper Age Europeans. An updated analysis of his stomach contents is providing a glimpse into the iceman’s final meal, which was remarkably high in fats.

Nikon 1, the camera company’s line of mirrorless cameras, is on its way out.Read more...

After that wild twist at the end of Split, we’ve been waiting for ages to see what M. Night Shyamalan could do when it came to smashing together James McAvoy, Samuel L. Jackson, and Bruce Willis for the Unbreakable sequel no one saw coming. And so far, the results are sinister and weirdly gorgeous.Read more...

We’re still waiting on our flying cars. But back in 1923, the magazine Science and Invention assured readers they were just around the corner. And to top it off, the buildings of tomorrow would be built to “solve” the traffic problem.Read more...

Apple has just updated its line of MacBook Pro laptops, putting in new, current-generation CPUs and a new key switch mechanism that might have fixed the laptop’s most consistently annoying problem.Read more...

If you need a lot of space to store GoPro footage, Nintendo Switch games, or anything else that you can put on a microSD card, this massive 200GB model is down to $55 on Amazon right now, one of the best prices ever outside of a short-lived $50 deal last holiday season.

Henry Cavill is still pondering what could’ve been with Man of Steel 2. Another Rob Liefeld comic hero could be coming to the big screen. Dwayne Johnson says his Black Adam won’t appear in Shazam! Plus, what’s to come on The Originals, and a tiny sneak peek at the next season of The Expanse. Spoilers, go!

The Environmental Protection Agency may still be headed up by person hellbent on destroying it despite Scott Pruitt’s ouster, but there’s some good news for the environment out in California. The most populous state in the nation hit its first target for cutting back on emissions four years ahead of schedule.

The first “civilian-registered” remotely piloted drone to ever make a flight across the Atlantic landed at 6:43pm local time (1:45pm ET) in RAF Fairford, Gloucestershire on Wednesday after taking off from Grand Forks, North Dakota on Tuesday, the BBC reported, after traveling nearly 3,800 miles.

Bitcoin has lost most of its (likely inflated) value in the last few months, but it still has plenty of value for law enforcement agencies looking for financial crimes to punish. The latest cryptocurrency criminal to get the book thrown at them is “Bitcoin Maven,” a 50-year-old woman who ran a bitcoin-for-cash…Read more...

The execution of twice-convicted killer Scott Raymond Dozier in Nevada on Wednesday was postponed after pharmaceutical company Alvogen requested a federal judge prevent officials from botching an execution with their drug midazolam.

Andrew Wheeler, former aide to climate change denier Sen. James Inhofe, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee staff director, and more recently fossil-fuel lobbyist, is now temporarily in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency following the resignation of scandal-plagued former administrator Scott…Read more...

Still reeling (at least in reputation, but certainly not in financial success) from the 2016 US presidential election, Facebook is launching its own slate of news shows produced and funded by the social network in partnership with “trustworthy” news organizations. The lineup, which launches next week, features a whole…Read more...