Gizmodo

Mary Queen of Scots, the controversial 16th century royalty, met a rather (spoiler alert) grisly end. And it all had to do with a cracked code. But how did Mary actually send her secret messages—the ones that she ultimately lost her head over?

I noticed something in the distance while clicking along rural U.S. Route 59 in Minnesota, 80 miles southeast of Fargo, North Dakota. Two grainy heads appeared out of the water like a pair of Loch Ness monsters. I couldn’t make them out for certain, but given the location (Minnesota) and time of year (summer), I…Read more...

If you failed to pull the trigger on a big, beautiful new TV during Deals Week, Walmart is blowing out a bunch of TVs. Full disclosure: Most are basic sets and lack fancy features you’d expect from a TV in 2018, like HDR and apps.Read more...

A 68-year-old Seattle woman who died after contracting a rare brain-eating amoeba used regular tap water to rinse her sinuses, according to new research.

Before we set foot into 2019, 3.9 billion people or about 51 percent of the global population will be using the internet, according to estimates by ITU, the United Nations agency for information and communications technology.Read more...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission won’t just take pretty pictures of the asteroid Bennu—it will also help scientists learn whether the rock will one day threaten Earth.Read more...

There’s a new joke at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium in Ohio: Who’s your daddy? It’s a genuine question for the female baby Asian elephant born early Thursday morning as a result of artificial insemination.Read more...

Chromebooks should not cost $1,000. As much as I adore the Pixelbook from Google, I know I cannot reasonably ask anyone I care about to spend a minimum of $1,000 to own it. Which means it is also a struggle to consider Acer’s Chromebook Spin 13, which borrows heavily from the Pixelbook while also introducing welcome…Read more...

Security researchers have discovered a batch of ad-fraud-enabling apps that have collectively been downloaded more than 2 million times on the Google Play store. The clever malware is able to impersonate various models of smartphones while it goes wild clicking online ads and draining your battery.

It’s been 11 days since InSight made its picture-perfect landing on Mars. Vivid new photos taken from the landing site are finally giving mission controllers a sense of the landscape around the stationary probe—and the early signs are very positive.

Hot off the excellent news of its renewal for a fourth season, The Good Place returned from a brief hiatus to show us what happened when Janet brought the humans and Michael into her “void” to protect them from demons on Earth. The result? Yet another new scenario for the ever-changing show.Read more...

In a teaser for an upcoming 60 Minutes segment, Elon Musk told veteran CBS journalist Leslie Stahl: Weed? Who? Never heard of him.Read more...

On Thursday, the Pantone Color Institute announced its new color of the year. 2018, the year of ultra violet, will give way to 2019's year of living coral. And because the internet, people got angry.

The robots are coming for our jobs, artificial intelligence is ascendant, and invisible programs are taking over our lives. “Automation” is the word that comes up in each of those contexts and plenty more. It’s certainly one of the looming concepts of Our Times—a business imperative, an economic driver, a utopian…Read more...

The Doctor is still in. Jodie Whittaker has confirmed she will return for another season of Doctor Who. Brilliant!

This week, we’ve been assaulted with a barrage of 5G “news” and announcements, but without a real good reason for why things are happening now. Companies like Samsung, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and others have been out talking big about making 5G capable phones, while wireless carriers—most notably AT&T and Verizon—have been…Read more...

Sometimes the number of built-in LAN ports in your sexy, modern router isn’t enough. Luckily there’s a cheap solution: Networking switches, like this $16 Netgear 8-Port model.Read more...

Huawei’s chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada on behalf of the U.S. last weekend and the incident grabbed the global spotlight after the arrest was revealed publicly on Wednesday night. Meng was apprehended for allegedly violating U.S. sanctions against Iran, but we won’t officially hear the…Read more...

We’ve known for some time that Andrew Smith, who was hired to lead the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection earlier this year, had a significant number of corporate ties that called into question whether he was fit for the role. But those corporate links apparently run much, much deeper than…Read more...

Though it resembles a coral, root system, or some other kind of growth, the above photo actually depicts a six-inch-wide blood clot in the near-perfect form of the right bronchial tree of a human lung, the Atlantic reported on Thursday. Even more uncomfortable is the revelation that it was not removed by medical…Read more...

After rumors circulated that such a move was imminent, Microsoft has confirmed that it is indeed shifting from its EdgeHTML back end to Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. In confirming the rumor, the company also said it expected this shift could allow it to introduce Microsoft Edge to macOS.Read more...

Mobile giant Verizon has faced withering criticism in the months since it throttled Santa Clara County Fire Department firefighters trying to contain California’s Mendocino Complex Fire, then tried to force them to purchase increased data even as they were begging for immediate assistance. It said it would immediately…Read more...

The Environmental Protection Agency is using energy affordability among low-income communities and people of color as an argument to bring back coal. Yes, the same coal responsible for an estimated 3,000 American deaths a year.Read more...

It’s been quite a year for Mark Zuckerberg and his friends at Facebook. You might even say that 2018 has been the single worst year in the company’s history. But you wouldn’t know it by reading “Facebook’s 2018 Year in Review.” The annual blog post leaves one with the impression that Facebook’s involvement in global…Read more...

The atmosphere of a gas giant exoplanet located 163 light-years from Earth is being blasted into space by its host star, forming a ghostly tail. Excessive ultraviolet radiation is responsible for the celestial phenomenon, according to a new study, a discovery that could provide new insights into planetary formation.

Winter may have already arrived around the globe, but next year we’ll also be getting a winter the likes of which we’ve never seen. We’re a few months away from the final season of Game of Thrones, where good will take its last stand against the forces of the undead, and we’ve gotten a gorgeously symbolic teaser for…Read more...

Subscription movie theater service MoviePass gained massive popularity last year by offering something so simple and sensible it was unavoidable: a movie a day for 10 bucks a month. But that plan didn’t work for MoviePass’s bank account, and it started bleeding cash and customers. Now, it hopes to make a comeback…Read more...

Thanks to the Windows on Snapdragon initiative, Qualcomm has been dabbling in the laptop processor business for about a year now. And while systems like the Asus Nova Go and Samsung Galaxy Book 2 have their share of flaws, those laptops demonstrated the potential benefits of ARM-based chips through things like…Read more...

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest atom smasher, will be turned off for the next two years for upgrades. Hopefully, its particle-hunting abilities will be even better once it restarts in 2021.Read more...

Automation is killing jobs

American’s largest annual Earth science conference doesn’t kick off until next week, but things are already getting heated. Members of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) are up in arms over the organization’s decision to give a prestigious award to Senator Cory Gardner, who in 2015 voted against a measure declaring…Read more...

The manufacturer of a common infants’ over-the-counter pain medication is pulling some of its products off the shelves of several big box and discount stores, over concerns that the affected products might be too potent for infants to take.

Allo is the latest casualty in Google’s long and tired road to building a chat app that can rival Apple’s iMessage. After passing on further Allo investment back in April, Google officially announced this week that it’s pulling the plug on the chat app in March 2019.Read more...

Long before the two deadliest pandemics in history—the Plague of Justinian and the Black Plague—an ancient strain of the bacterium responsible for these scourges, Yersinia pestis, may have already wreaked havoc among Neolithic European communities over 5,000 years ago, according to a controversial new study.

Go big or go home, that’s what I always say. And with this deal from Walmart, you can go home to a bigass TV for just $480.Read more...

I’ve attempted to watch rockets launch from Vandenburg Air Force Base a few times when I was in California, and the thing I remember most about it was just how far away the official viewing areas were. The rocket is a tiny spike in the distance, and it’s like that for many valid safety reasons. At the Baikonur…Read more...

A dark matter experiment in South Korea may soon confirm or deny an outstanding piece of dark matter evidence.

Last week, the Marriott hotel group disclosed that it had been the victim of what’s shaping up to be the second biggest data breach of all time. Few details have been made public on who might be responsible for the theft of data from 500 million guest records, but Reuters reports that investigators believe espionage…Read more...

When I was a kid, I was certain that by the time I was a grown woman, I’d have a friendly little robot friend. Adulthood was in the FUTURE, and the FUTURE had robots like R2-D2, Threepio, Data, and so on. Alas, I am a tax-paying adult with a full-time job, and no, I do not have an adorable mechanical friend that…Read more...

When the Apple Watch Series 4 shipped a few months ago, its electrocardiogram feature was still in the works. Not anymore. Apple just released its watchOS 5.1.2 update, which adds the highly anticipated ECG app.Read more...

If you’ve ever been disappointed by the performance of a Nerf toy, you’re not alone. For safety (and legal) reasons the blasters come with limited power out of the box, but there’s a thriving community of modders online who’ve found ways to give them more kick. That includes Peter Sripol who hacked a Nerf blaster so…Read more...

The idea seemed silly at first. Bose made an Alexa-powered wireless speaker with a little screen, a big $400 price tag and a promise “to fill any room with an astonishing stereo performance.” I’ve been using the Bose Home Speaker 500 for a little more than a month, and there are a few things I don’t like about it. But…Read more...

Nicolas Cage could be joining a new Lovecraftian adaptation. The Resident Evil reboot has found a director. Tony Todd reacts to the Candyman revival. Plus, Barry and Oliver play switcheroo in a new Elseworlds trailer, Kevin Smith raves about Star Wars: Episode IX, and M. Night Shyamalan hints at the Unbreakable…Read more...

Last week, at least 8,000 barrels of crude oil gushed into the northern Amazon rainforest in Peru, creating one of the worst spills the region has seen in years. State oil company Petroperú is blaming a local indigenous community for sabotaging a pipeline and triggering the spill, but the leader of Peru’s Wampis…Read more...

Today the Chinese government called for the release of Meng Wanzhou, an executive at Chinese electronics maker Huawei after she was arrested in Canada last weekend while transferring flights. Meng reportedly faces extradition to the U.S. for allegedly violating American sanctions against Iran.Read more...

In what is truly a bizarre phenomenon reportedly stumping researchers, a handful of dumbass Hawaiian monk seals have recently been observed with eels stuck up their noses—possibly from shoving their faces into crevices, but researchers tasked with observing these fools can’t say for sure.Read more...

Dozens of Amazon workers at one of the company’s fulfillment centers in New Jersey were hospitalized after an aerosol can containing bear repellent was hit. The incident occurred at the company’s Robbinsville fulfillment center and left at least one person in critical condition.Read more...

Facebook’s board of directors appears to be sticking to the script in the defense of its opposition research into George Soros, a vocal critic of the platform. In a letter reported Wednesday by the Wall Street Journal from Facebook’s board of directors to Patrick Gaspard, the president of George Soros’ Open Society…Read more...

The alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos is in trouble. Thanks to an Australian lawsuit, his finances were made public for the first time this week, and folks... they’re not good. The one-time Breitbart writer owes at least $2 million in debt to various lawyers and funders, including $400,000 to right-wing…Read more...

Some of the people submitting tickets to get their replacement Fallout 76 canvas bag have encountered a surprise: they’ve been given access to parts of Bethesda’s support system, including the ability to open and close tickets, as well as check out customer’s personal information.