Gizmodo

The universe began with a bang—and things immediately got weird.

Today’s House Judiciary Committee hearing was a clownshow—accurately predicted by Minority Leader Nadler as focusing mainly on the outgoing Republican majority’s apoplectic rage towards imaginary conservative bias on Alphabet’s platforms, and largely a rehash of the browbeating doled out to Twitter and Facebook…Read more...

Copying one of Mother Nature’s designs is a clever shortcut when building robots that need to navigate our complex world. But those designs aren’t always adaptable—a fish can’t do much when it’s out of the water. Adding some human ingenuity, however, results in the best of both worlds; a robot that swims like a fish,…Read more...

In sports they call it a rebuilding year. Xbox One has had a few of those recently, but it’s an especially appropriate description of the console’s 2018. This wasn’t a year for new hardware nor a major blockbuster exclusive game. The most exciting announcement to come out of Microsoft was the news that it is acquiring…Read more...

This beautiful 65-inch OLED Sony 4K TV is down to $3,000 at Walmart. And if you’re a fan of deep blacks and impressive contrast, pay attention.Read more...

All the glue that has held the Arctic together for millennia is being dissolved by climate change, right down to the ground beneath millions of people’s feet.Read more...

Russian cosmonauts are preparing to inspect a mysterious hole on the exterior of a damaged Soyuz capsule, a complex spacewalk that could take upwards of six hours to complete. The mission is scheduled to start at 11:00 am ET, and you can watch it live right here.

Two mysterious videos recently appeared online that allegedly show protected rock formations in the Utah desert being destroyed with explosives. The videos raise more questions than they answer, but if they’re fake, they’re very well done.Read more...

The concept of today’s smart, connected wearables just didn’t exist back in the 1980s when text-only operating systems like MS-DOS were still popular. But that didn’t stop Puma from releasing what was possibly the world’s first modern fitness tracker by strapping a chunky computer to the back of a sneaker. Thirty-two…Read more...

Password-recovery questions have been a part of Windows 10 for more than a year now, but you’ll never know they exist if you sign into your operating system using a Microsoft account. Use a local account when you’re first installing Windows, however, and you’ll be prompted to create three security questions that you…Read more...

Super Micro has found no evidence of malicious microchips on its motherboards, according to a statement by the company that was released to customers today. The audit of Super Micro hardware comes on the heels of a scandalous report that Chinese spies had allegedly installed secret microchips on motherboards that were…Read more...

Somewhere between a viral fake story about Harvard researchers suggesting we ‘dim the sun’, and a major, government-funded report laying out how we might re-engineer the oceans to save coral reefs, it hit me last month: This whole geoengineering idea has become suddenly, frighteningly mainstream.

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura teases the future of Hasbro’s movie plans for Transformers and G.I. Joe. Legendary has the rights to The Toxic Avenger. Christina Hodson explains just why Birds of Prey’s hilariously long title stuck. Plus, teasers for the Roswell reboot, and J.K. Rowling is already teasing Fantastic…Read more...

Often new technology is good, whether it’s a spectacular advancement in medical science or just a new gadget that brings you hours of joy. Sometimes, it’s bad, like the infamous Keurig, a device that seemed to exist simply to break the stranglehold of Big Coffee on... coffee... by suckering people into buying a …Read more...

Bonafide deals on Apple MacBooks are hard to find. Refurbished models tend to be the most consistent source for bargains, like this offer from Amazon. Priced at $820, this is $280 less than what’s on Apple’s Refurbished storefront.Read more...

Last year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched through the electronic devices of more than 29,000 travelers coming into the country. CBP officers sometimes upload personal data from those devices to Homeland Security servers by first transferring that data onto USB drives—drives that are supposed to be…Read more...

Gavin McInnes, the onetime Vice Media bigwig and more recently the creator of the violent, far-right “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys organization, isn’t having such a great holiday season.

Change is in the air over at the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology. An oozing sump of climate change skepticism under the leadership of Texas Republican Lamar Smith, the committee is poised to be taken over by Democrats and led by Texas’s Eddie Bernice Johnson, a registered nurse and longtime champion…Read more...

Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei (and daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei) detained by Canadian authorities for extradition to the U.S. this month on allegations she lied to financial institutions as part of a scheme to evade sanctions on Iran, will not learn whether she can…Read more...

It seems like it was forever ago when Netflix swooped in out of nowhere and dropped a piece of mysterious teaser art announcing its upcoming Carmen Sandiego reboot. Since then, there hasn’t been all that much revealed about the new series, but today, the studio announced a new release date and dropped a handful of…Read more...

Batman is the entry point into DC for lots of people. However, screenwriter Christina Hodson also credits another superhero: Margot Robbie.Read more...

The legal tug of war between Apple and Qualcomm continued this week with what at first may have seemed like a rare win for the chip giant in a Chinese court.Read more...

House Republicans spent 14 months investigating the 2017 Equifax breach only to reach the same conclusions that virtually everyone else with a brain did in the immediate aftermath of the company’s disclosure. The breach was “entirely preventable,” lawmakers found, and the credit reporting agency’s shit management did…Read more...

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer met with Donald Trump today to discuss whether or not the latter would make good on his promise to shut down the government if he doesn’t get money for his border wall and... they fucked it up. Wow. Guess we have to take this back.

The Root It’s Official: The President Is an Idiot and This Tweet Is The ‘Smocking’ Gun | Deadspin It Only Took Four Bears To Make Jared Goff Look Like A Chump | Jezebel The Jezebel Thirsty 30 | Splinter BERNIE DON’T RUN | The A.V. Club Here’s how they wrote Danny Masterson out of The Ranch |Read more...

It’s been more than a year since Hurricane Maria ran roughshod over Puerto Rico, but the island is still struggling to escape from under its long shadow.Read more...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has already detected evidence of water on its target, the asteroid Bennu, just a week after arriving.Read more...

I know Super Smash Bros. is The Thing To Play right now, but if you have a Switch, or are giving one as a gift this year, these three games are just as essential, and they hardly ever get this cheap:Read more...

In a statement late Friday, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced an investigation was underway to determine whether a particular mobile carrier had lied about the extent of its 4G coverage. But we’ll have to wait to find out the name of the culprit.

Elseworlds, this year’s big DC/CW crossover, is upon us—kicking off in last night’s episode of The Flash, the mysterious Monitor made his move... and gave us an hour of giggle-inducing metahumor in the process, along with some pretty key character moments for TV’s finest heroes. It was so huge, io9 needed a teamup of…Read more...

For eight years, YouTube has released end-of-year Rewind videos that showcase some of the platform’s top trends, music, and memes. The recaps feature some of the most popular YouTube personalities acting out cheesy scenarios in an extended musical video, and are generally accepted to be awful. This year’s rewind was…Read more...

I have determined the precise upper boundary of how many monitors it is okay to have hooked up to the same computer. I do not know, exactly, how many monitors is the ideal number. But I do know it is no more than eight.

In October, Alphabet announced it would begin shuttering its failed social network, Google+, after internal investigations revealed bugs that could have leaked user info. The proposed 10-month sunsetting period has been cut down to a mere 90 days now that an additional API bug was discovered, affecting some 52.5…Read more...

You can add political apathy to the list of things millennials have killed, particularly when it comes to climate change. On Monday, young people flooded Capitol Hill for the second time in less than a month to send a message to Democrats that they want a Green New Deal and a select committee to make it happen in the…Read more...

The most expensive film ever made in India is out around the globe, and its producers are very serious about shutting down piracy of the film. So serious that they were able to obtain a court order forcing local internet providers to block 12,564 domain names—many of which aren’t even registered. It appears this…Read more...

While you probably already know enabling location services for third-party apps might compromise your privacy, an investigative New York Times report details just how creepy and personal smartphone location data can be.Read more...

Even knowing they’re robots, watching Westworld’s hosts go under the knife for repairs was even more gruesome than the bloody battles that sent them to the ER. But in addition to using lots of CG, visual effects studio Pixomondo employed some old-school special effects tricks to make those surgeries look as…Read more...

During the launch event for the Galaxy A8s in China, Samsung announced an upcoming partnership with Supreme, the New York streetwear brand known for slapping its name on premium-priced merchandise. Except, it wasn’t actually that Supreme. The partnership is instead with Supreme Italia, a knock-off brand that exists…Read more...

At this time last year, I predicted that the aging Nintendo 3DS would probably be sent to its grave after Christmas 2018. Recent events have caused me to reconsider. I am now here to argue that you should prepare for the Nintendo 3DS to stay alive for a couple more years at least—if you can truly call its fate…Read more...

While it only features mid-range specs, Samsung’s new Galaxy A8s is a noteworthy handset because not only could it give us a preview of what we’ll get on the Galaxy S10, it might also be setting the stage for one of 2019's biggest smartphones trends.

A human-made object has entered the space between the stars for the second time in history, scientists report.Read more...

It now seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that social media is bad—bad for our well-being and privacy, too much of a time-sink, and so on. But does it have to be? Can it be made good? Or, slightly less bad? Shaking up who you follow and share with can do wonders for your social media life, and here’s how to…Read more...

The burgeoning fight to bring tech workers’ employment issues out of the darkness and into the public light grew further on Monday as a group of Google employees demanded the industry eliminate forced arbitration agreements entirely.Read more...

I sat for a while trying to figure out what image should be at the top of this post. Punching in different keywords—hurricane, wildfire, heat wave—turned up photos from around the world. Eventually, I settled on Southern California’s Woolsey Fire bearing down on the mansions of Malibu, because it best encapsulates…Read more...

Godzilla: King of the Monsters teases an epic kaiju showdown. Jessica Chastain promises to take on the X-Men in Dark Phoenix. The new Aladdin remake could be adding new songs to the animated classic’s iconic soundtrack. Plus, a new look at the Kim Possible movie, and what’s to come on Titans. Spoilers, away!

International climate talks in Poland continued their ignominious march toward being completely ineffective. We’ve seen coal decking the halls and petro states refusing to recognize sound science. And then came Monday when the U.S. played the role of global troll by hosting a pro-fossil fuel event with an audience…Read more...

Surveying the whole scope of human history vis-à-vis food, a couple of themes emerge. One is that humans like their food to taste good. Another is that they like it to not kill them. These two qualities often cohere in the same foodstuff—apples, for instance, taste great, and are not to my knowledge toxic—but…Read more...

Did you catch Elon Musk on 60 Minutes last night? It was weird, to say the least. The billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla said that he didn’t respect the SEC, that his Twitter habits are normal, and that reports of dangerous conditions at Tesla are all part of a conspiracy to unionize the company.

It hasn’t been a great week for tech giants, a few of whom were taken to task for all manner of questionable ethics or decision-making. Facebook, reliable nuisance that it is, knew that tracking who you call is messed up but did it anyway. Tumblr announced a ban on porn, which will invariably lead to further …Read more...