Gizmodo

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is holding a series of hearings leading up to another NASA authorization bill, which helps set goals and authorizes funding for the agency (2017-2018's bill is here). On Wednesday, scientists from U.S. universities, the Smithsonian Institution, and NASA…Read more...

Human rights nonprofit Amnesty International on Tuesday disclosed what it says was a plot likely carried out by a hostile government to infiltrate its network by infecting a member of its staff with sophisticated spyware.

Deadspin Why Your Team Sucks 2018: Indianapolis Colts | Splinter ‘The View’ Had a Really Good, Really Random Fight Today | Jezebel I’m So Sorry to Report That Lots of People Are Gonna Owe the IRS at Tax Time | The Root Dak Prescott Is Every Black Man in Corporate America | The A.V. Club Better Call Saul hits new heights…Read more...

Five years ago, a lot of people thought Cody Wilson was a wild-eyed fanatic. The New Yorker described his rhetoric about making blueprints for 3D-printed guns available to anyone on the internet as “divorced” “from any practical reality.” Yet here we are in 2018, and Wilson’s company, Defense Distributed, is still in…Read more...

Did you have your credit card info stolen from Chili’s, Arby’s, or Chipotle recently? Well, the Department of Justice claims they have some of the perpetrators in custody. Three men are accused of being members a high-profile hacking group responsible for the theft of millions of credit card numbers from more than 100…Read more...

A class-action lawsuit filed against several U.S. government officials claims a newly updated policy expanding the collection of biometric and biographical data is unjustly resulting in the prolonged imprisonment of unaccompanied immigrant children and potentially aiding immigration enforcement agencies in the capture…Read more...

It’s almost back to school season, and even if you’ve long since left lockers and pop quizzes behind, you can still stick to a reading list—drawn from this selection of fresh sci-fi and fantasy books from authors like Cixin Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, Connie Willis, and some guy named J.R.R. Tolkien.

Earlier this year, fueled in part by the U.S. government’s concerns over security and potential espionage, AT&T, Verizon, and Best Buy all backed out of deals to carry Huawei phones in their retail stores. This forced Huawei to shift its attention away from the U.S. and focus more on other markets such as Europe and…Read more...

States have urged the federal government to provide more funding in order to beef up cybersecurity in voting systems, but Republicans in Congress just don’t think it’s the right time to do it. On Wednesday, an amendment to allocate $250 million for election security was rejected by the Senate on partisan lines.Read more...

Are you ready for another year of wild, scurrilous Star Wars speculation? Well, even if you’re not, you’re gonna get it anyway. Episode IX has just begun filming, and returning director J.J. Abrams has already started dropping sneaky glimpses.Read more...

Facebook on Tuesday announced its banning of eight pages, 17 profiles, and seven Instagram accounts that engaged in what it described as online political activity that was both “inauthentic” and ultimately an “abuse” of its platform. While the activity was not attributed to anybody specific, the implication was clear,…Read more...

According to chief technology officer Christopher Slowe, Reddit—the fifth-most trafficked website in the U.S.—suffered a data breach at the hands of a hacker or a group of hackers between June 14 and June 18. Veteran users of the “frontpage of the internet” should consider securing their accounts.

Noted craver of “the cleanest air” Donald Trump has finally nominated a science advisor. It’s the longest the post has remained vacant since its was created under law in 1976 (the post has been around since 1941).Read more...

Bacteria are steadily winning the war against even our strongest antibiotics, stoking fears of a future that resembles Victorian-era England in all the worst ways. A new study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine is sure to add to this existential terror: It suggests that at least some hospital-spread…Read more...

A new case study from Pittsburgh highlights the resilience of the human brain. It details a boy who, despite losing one-third of the right hemisphere of his brain when he was six, is now a mostly ordinary 10-year-old. Though he can’t see past the left side of his face, his brain has compensated for the loss in some…Read more...

If the Star Wars Rebels season 4 Blu-ray was only 15 minutes long, it would still be worth the purchase. That’s because the release (which has about seven hours of content, don’t worry) includes an incredible 15-minute featurette called “Forces of Rebellion,” which is just series executive producer Dave Filoni talking…Read more...

Facebook is finally releasing its time-management feature, which will definitely not make you feel bad about yourself.Read more...

The New York Times Magazine has been teasing out its upcoming issue in recent days, as it’s dedicated to a single story that focuses on how we had an opportunity to address climate change in the 1980s, but failed to do anything. Coinciding with the current administration’s proposal to roll back fuel economy targets,…Read more...

Snag deals on a quintessential KitchenAid mixer, a six-camera security system, $75 off a Dyson ball vacuum, and the rest of the best deals the internet has to offer.

If that drawer full of neglected, outdated gadgets in your desk happens to include a Kindle, Jaap Meijers has come up with a clever way to put it back into service. His girlfriend, an avid reader and English literature teacher, wanted a clock for their living room, so Meijers hacked an older model Kindle to display…Read more...

Linda Hamilton with shades and a goddamn shotgun is an aesthetic.

The 21st century’s longest lunar eclipse has passed, eclipse doomsday fever has subsided, and all that’s left are the memories and pictures, which you can find everywhere online. But one image really stood out to us—not because of the way the Moon looked, but because of how it made the Earth look.

Could DC be making an animated Super-Pets film? Alex Kurtzman teases Star Trek: Discovery’s take on a younger Spock. Get a look at some of the returning rangers for Power Rangers’ 25th anniversary episode. Plus, what’s to come on The 100's season finale, and the return of Fantasy Island. Spoilers now!Read more...

China has an army of internet censors who comb through the web and block information that the government doesn’t want its people to see. But the job of the censors is about to get easer if Google has its way. The tech giant is planning to release a new censored version of its search engine and apps in the land of 1.3…Read more...

A recent review by UK cybersecurity firm Sophos in partnership with cryptocurrency firm Neutrino has concluded that the crew—or possibly one extremely proficient black hat hacker—behind the SamSam ransomware attacks have rolled in at least $5.9 million in ransom payments, according to BleepingComputer.

Coinciding with a national “we won’t be complicit” day of action aimed against US Immigrations Customs and Enforcement (ICE) approximately 100 protesters gathered in Midtown to pressure tech companies, which in recently months have drawn criticism for providing infrastructural support to the agency.

DC organizers are angry after Facebook took down what it said were 32 pages and accounts engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on Tuesday, as one of the events was a local-backed counter-rally to the upcoming August 12th white supremacist “Unite the Right 2.0” rally in the nation’s capitol, DCist reported.

When you see light, you’re looking at photons spat out by an excited atom. But what if instead of light, an excited atom released a wave of matter?Read more...

When the Thirteenth Doctor’s rainbow-accented costume was first revealed, I was admittedly a little reticent. I didn’t dislike it, per se, but there was a quirkiness to it which made it stand out much more than the typical aesthetics of Doctor Who’s modern Time Lord couture. But the more and more we see of season 11,…Read more...

Ann Nocenti wrote some of the most inventive, daring, and pointed superhero comics of the 1980s. We’re all really lucky that she makes a triumphant return to the medium this week, with The Seeds #1.

An ice cream delivery driver smashed the window of his car with a rock early Friday morning last week after seeing his wife and mother unconscious inside the vehicle. He found his spouse was in critical condition and his mother was dead.Read more...

Less than a week after a damaging report exposed substantial flaws in facial recognition technology marketed to law enforcement by Amazon, five Democratic lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the commercial and government use, and potential abuse, of the technology.

Facebook wants to prove to lawmakers and the public that it’s working diligently to combat political disinformation and foreign election meddling, and on Tuesday, the company revealed it recently shut down a network that appears to be mirroring the kind of activity Russia is accused of orchestrating in the run-up to…Read more...

At a glitzy event near Times Square on Tuesday, Sony unveiled its new lineup of Bravia flagship TVs. (The company literally pulled a veil off of them, according to an eyewitness account from this blogger.) The new TVs are collectively called the Master Series, and the screens are designed to offer image quality that’s…Read more...

You can feasibly put anything inside the world’s largest physics experiment, CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, so long as it can be vaporized. You could even stick a sandwich in there. But for the first time, scientists have accelerated an atomic nucleus with electrons still attached.Read more...

Great tits appear to have nearly as much self-control as chimpanzees, if a new experiment’s results are accurate. They might even have more self-control than the humans who still make jokes about the name “great tit.”Read more...

Yesterday, an issue that’s been simmering below the surface of Steam for a few weeks came to a head: Unscrupulous developers were releasing games that contained dummy items masquerading as Team Fortress 2 and DoTA 2 rarities that sell for hundreds of dollars. Now Valve has addressed the issue.

Some of the top genomic-testing companies have agreed to abide by a new set of guidelines when sharing consumers’ DNA information with law enforcement and other third parties.Read more...

The last time scientists visited Ile aux Cochons in 1982, an island that is part of an archipelago in the southern Indian Ocean, the king penguin population was booming. Over 500,000 breeding pairs (around 2 million penguins total) huddled together there, making the island the largest king penguin colony in the world.…Read more...

Nerf ranks up there with Lego, Hot Wheels, and Barbie, as one of the most recognizable brands in the toy industry, but can you have just as much fun pinging your co-worker with foam ammo fired from one of its competitor’s products? I went hands on with two Nerf alternatives: the Adventure Force Commandfire and…Read more...

July has been one for extreme heat around the world, but every locale pales in comparison to what’s going on at Death Valley in California. Already one of the hottest places on the Earth, the heat has gone into overdrive this July. Death Valley is in line to set a record for the hottest month ever recorded on Earth.

It weighs 440 pounds, it endures temperatures up to 140 degrees, and it’s been on a four-year stint that amounts to the same distance as going to the moon and back. Not my luggage, despite what you might assume, but the absolute unit at the back of the first generation of Formula E race cars. Slapping the roof of this…Read more...

HAL 9000 is the original suspicious digital assistant. Before we invite Alexa, Google, and Siri into our lives to surveil our every action there was 2001: Space Odyssey’s HAL, an AI so murderous it’s a wonder anyone saw its actions and thought, “you know, not all of this is bad.” But despite the fact that HAL gave us…Read more...

Surveillance drones are headed indoors.Read more...

While Google hasn’t made a phone with a notch (at least not yet), the folks over in Mountain View have been working on adding support for sensor cutouts into the next version of Android. And in a recent Android Developers Blog post, Google described in greater detail what it’s doing to enhance the functionality of…Read more...

When you think of jetpacks, your first thought is probably an image of some fun, care-free piece of pop culture like The Jetsons or James Bond. Or maybe even the Super Bowl. But jetpacks were serious business for the U.S. military in the 1960s. And, believe it or not, there were plenty of futuristic ideas that…Read more...

Actor Topher Grace, otherwise known as that guy who’s not playing Venom anymore, has an interesting hobby of editing down giant trilogies into single feature-length movies. His latest masterpiece is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, so it looks like Warner Bros. has a new hashtag to contend with: #ReleaseTheGraceCut.

If you’ve been keeping tabs on MoviePass, get out your notebook because the service is changing once again.Read more...

If you’re one of the billions of people worldwide to use mass public transit regularly, you’re sharing a lot more than a commute with your fellow passengers, suggests a new study published Tuesday in Cell Reports. You’re also sharing and swapping the teeming microbes that call our bodies home.Read more...

By searching for the telltale, periodic dimming of light from distant stars, astronomers can spot orbiting exoplanets tens to hundreds of light-years away. But how do they know what these bodies look like? Perhaps they first try to imagine how the planets in our own Solar System might appear to a faraway alien world.