Gizmodo

Right now in Star Wars, if something evil is going on, odds are it's all part of Emperor Palpatine's master plan. The Bad Batch has been playing with this idea as it set up its Rise of the Empire-era world across its first two seasons, but season three's premiere made it even more explicit with the big boss showing up...Read more...

Reddit reportedly signed a $60 million deal with Google to allow its online communities to be scraped for AI training data, according to Reuters Thursday. Google will sift through millions of posts on Reddit, and train a large language model on Reddit's threads. The content deal was originally reported by Bloomberg...Read more...

New research seems to offer some long-sought insights into the perplexing and devastating condition known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome. The National Institutes of Health-led study found several potentially key differences in the brains and immune systems of people with ME/CFS...Read more...

Get a new look at the Spiderwick Chronicles TV series. Marvel's Thunderbolts has tapped The Bear's showrunner. The long-in-limbo Crow remake is bumping up its release date. Plus, what to expect when superpowered comedy Extraordinary returns. Spoilers, now!

Many Star Wars fans probably thought they were dreaming when the European Space Agency published images of what looked like a TIE starfighter in space. Alas, it wasn't the Empire, but rather glimpses of a decades-old Earth observation satellite making its return home.Read more...

ChatGPT started throwing out unexpected responses" on Tuesday night according to OpenAI's status page. Users posted screenshots of their ChatGPT conversations full of wild, nonsensical answers from the AI chatbot.

Google is pausing the ability of its AI chatbot Gemini to generate images of people after a slew of historically inaccurate and racially diverse creations, such as images of Black Nazi soldiers and a Black medieval British king, went viral and led some to say the company was racist against white people.Read more...

Will Stancil, a man who's made a name for himself online as a feisty defender of President Joe Biden and Democratic policies, announced Wednesday that he's running for a seat in the Minnesota House of Representatives. But Stancil says social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, aren't going to be a very...Read more...

Great news for those of you holding out on trading up for a Galaxy S24 Ultra. Samsung has announced that its Galaxy AI features are coming to more smartphones. That means Circle to Search, Live Translation, Instant Slow-Mo, and Generative Edit are coming to an older Samsung device near you.

Earlier in the week, My Dad the Bounty Hunter creator Patrick Harpin and Yuhki Demers, a visual artist on Sony Animation's Spider-Verse films, revealed their concept art for an animated Batman Beyond movie they're trying to get made. They're both fully aware nothing might come of this, and talks are still happening....Read more...

Amazon driver Alexander Evans survived a harrowing crash back in 2021 that saw his delivery truck sliced clean in half by an oncoming train in Ixonia, Wisconsin. Miraculously, Evans escaped with only minor injuries, but the truck didn't fair as well. Three years later, recordings from inside the vehicle have made...Read more...

Apple has rolled out an update to iMessage encryption, the likes of which includes post-quantum protections that the company calls the most significant cryptographic security upgrade" in the messenger's history.

Steven Spielberg wouldn't be where he is without his crucial collaborators George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy. And you could say any of the trio have stepped in to save the day on a number of each other's films through advice and in some cases even taking over directing duties. Without them we wouldn't have theStar...Read more...

Takeshi Ebisawa, a purported leader in Japan's Yakuza crime syndicate, was charged on Wednesday with trying to sell undercover DEA agents nuclear materials that he believed would eventually make their way to Iran. Why was it the DEA who nabbed Ebisawa? The Yakuza leader first tried to sell them drugs and...Read more...

Here at io9, we love nostalgic toys-whether they involve fondly remembered fast-food meals or childhood lessons about not always getting what's on your wish list. But we also love new toys, games, and weird collectibles, even if (like these cult and horror-themed selections) they spark nightmares as well as joy.

Google's AI chatbot Gemini has a unique problem. It has a hard time producing pictures of white people, often turning Vikings, founding fathers, and Canadian hockey players into people of color. This sparked outrage from the anti-woke community, claiming racism against white people. Today, Google acknowledged Gemini's...Read more...

You may have heard that Madame Web is not a good movie. That there are, in fact, things about Madame Web that could be described as The Worst." I am not here to refute those claims; there are in fact many things about Madame Web that are not what you would feasibly call good." But in its surprise camp turn, it...Read more...

In recent days, the internet has become enthralled with a 20-second of video a man attempting to cut a pretzel perfectly in half. The short clip purported to come from a German TV show dedicated entirely to the art of cutting things in half. But as disappointed users soon found out, no such German TV show exists.Read more...

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have donated $4.9 million to the political action committee Fairshake, according to new filings with the U.S. Federal Election Committee. It's just the latest windfall for Fairshake, which is spending millions to run attack ads against Katie Porter, a Democrat who's running for Diane...Read more...

There are a lot of free streaming services these days-but precious few are ad-free. All hail Kanopy, which you can access with a public library card through participating institutions, and which boats an excitingly vast array of movies and TV shows, including tons of recent horror releases.

Lionsgate has been trying to get a Borderlands movie off the ground since 2015, with Eli Roth becoming attached to the project in 2020. After a longer-than-expected wait and a series of reshoots with Tim Miller at the helm, the movie is a real thing, and it's coming in August. The first trailer, however, is here now:Read more...

Billions of years of evolution has given rise to us, the millions of species that persist on planet Earth today. Some of us are small, some of us are big, and some of us have huge ears, flat tails, compound eyes, or infrared vision. Each of these adaptations has its merits, but only a handful of them can be considered...Read more...

Dune: Part Two is more than a mere sequel. It's a continuation, culmination, and ultimately a fantastic elevation of everything you already loved about director Denis Villeneuve's 2021 film Dune: Part One. That film ended with Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) embracing a new way of life after almost everyone he loved...Read more...

Superhero movies are in a weird place right now, especially at Marvel's house of ideas. Even as recent films struggle to land with audiences like the surefire hits of old, the studio is ready to look ahead with the heightened interest in what's on the horizon. But part of that horizon includes navigating the murky...Read more...

Veterinary researchers are shining a light on an oddly mesmerizing skin condition found in hairless sphynx cats. The condition, called figurate erythema, causes the cats to develop intricate, swirling rashes all over their body. There is no clear explanation yet for why figurate erythema happens, though it seems to be...Read more...

There's good news if you're running out of space on your Google account. Researchers from Scientists from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology just figured out how to fit up to a petabit of data onto an optical disk by storing information in 3D. In other words, that's 125,000 gigabytes on a single...Read more...

While journeying through the far reaches of the solar system, the New Horizons probe picked up a dusty trail of icy fragments that may indicate that the Kuiper Belt-home to former planet Pluto and countless other objects-is way bigger than we thought.

Bong Joon Ho's Mickey 17 has been hit with another delay. The cast of Venom 3 is expanding. Prince Zuko brings the heat in a new clip from Netflix's The Last Airbender. Plus, what's to come on Halo as the show adapts a major piece of gaming lore, and Stephen King is still wondering what Warner Bros. is doing with Salem...Read more...

A D.C. resident is suing the Powerball lottery system and the D.C. Office of Lottery and Gaming after a technical error left him without a prize of $340 million, accusing the lottery operators of conspiracy, negligence, and fraud.Read more...

Home surveillance company Wyze announced a glitch caused some 13,000 customers to see each other's camera footage on Friday, according to a report in The Verge. The company originally disclosed the breach last week, but said it had only identified 14 affected customers. As it turns out, the tally adds up to a few more...Read more...

A good pair of headphones is nothing less than a necessity in this age. Whether you're attending meetings on the go or jamming to music on the subway, you need headphones that sound good, look good, last long, and ideally silence the loud outside world around you.

Stop me if you've heard this before: the Bad Batch find themselves up against, and running away from, some kind of giant creature. Why," grunts Wrecker, the team's beefy strongman as he huffs along, why is there always a huge monster?" It's a fun gag, because really, with The Bad Batch, there almost always is a huge...Read more...

The Creator and Rogue One: A Star Wars Storyfilmmaker Gareth Edwards has entered the dino arena. The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed Edwards as the next helmer in the Jurassic World franchise. Steven Spielberg is set to produce through Amblin Entertainment, along with Frank Marshall and Patrick Crowley on board...Read more...

Two men in Maryland who sent thousands of counterfeit iPhones to Apple for repairs to get authentic replacement iPhones in return were found guilty by a federal jury on Tuesday, according to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia. The men now face up to 20 years in prison.

Despite what Best Buy will tell you, physical media, including Blu-rays, is back in style-spurred along by the panic that comes when streamers remove content and a movie or TV show becomes suddenly very inaccessible. While most Disney content is readily available, there are a few difficult-to-snag titles, something...Read more...

For those who care about digital privacy, few apps are more beloved than Signal. For years, the end-to-end encrypted messenger has offered some of the best privacy protections on the web. Strong encryption, zero subscription fees, and virtually no data collection? What's not to like?Read more...

The first human implanted with a Neuralink brain chip can control a computer mouse with their thoughts, Elon Musk claimed in an X Spaces event Monday. The anonymous patient has recovered fully, according to Musk, after having a Neuralink chip implanted into their brain just a few weeks ago.Read more...

Hasbro dropped a new look at a plethora of incoming arrivals for its Marvel Legends line, and it is certainly a random plethora, covering everything from Spider-Man, the X-Men, Captain America, and more-including a sideways step into the most feral build-a-figure yet.

Delta Airlines is offering a special flightpath that will put its passengers right in the heart of the upcoming total solar eclipse in April, scheduled to coincide with the peak of the rare event.Read more...

Groq, an AI chip company, wants everyone to forget about Elon Musk's snarky chatbot with nearly the same name, Grok. Lightning-fast demos from Groq went viral this weekend, making current versions of ChatGPT, Gemini and even Grok look sluggish. Groq claims to provide the world's fastest large language models," and...Read more...

If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there's a good chance they'd paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It's full of known unknowns.Read more...

One of the most pressing questions in American politics has finally been answered: Who would Elizabeth Warren most want to smoke copious amounts of weed with?Read more...

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Medications used to treat diabetes and obesity may also show promise in reducing opioid cravings, recently released research suggests. The small study found that people with opioid use disorder who took the GLP-1 drug liraglutide reported noticeably fewer cravings afterward. The findings are the latest to indicate...Read more...

Sony's $200 PlayStation Portal is one step closer to being an actually fun device. Out of the box, the Portal can only stream games from a PS5, and users are barred from remotely accessing the company's sizable cloud gaming library service. But now, thanks to two Google engineers, you may soon be able to hack the...Read more...

There's already plenty of Batman coming in James Gunn's new DC universe, between Brave and the Bold and the sequel to The Batman. But hey, it's Batman, and when has DC been known to not simply keep doing even more Batman? Which is why this incredible concept art for a Beyond movie, by the way of Spider-Verse, has us...Read more...

Have you seen on social media that Kid Rock and Jason Aldean are canceling their New York tour dates? The story, which is going viral on X, insists the musicians are doing it to support Donald Trump after a New York judge ordered the former president to pay $355 million last week. But it's completely fake.

If it feels like you've been hearing about the Borderlands movie for an awfully long time, well-our first glimpse of Cate Blanchett as red-headed bounty hunter Lilith came in June 2021. Now we have a much better look at her character beyond that enigmatic silhouette, and she looks great. The movie itself, well... TBD.

Our Sun is about 330,000 times the mass of Earth, yet it is dwarfed by the black holes that lurk at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently found the fastest-growing of this group: a 17-billion solar mass black hole in the distant universe, which is growing at the rate of one solar mass per day.Read more...