Gizmodo

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...

Retail colossus Walmart just patented a new technology meant to monitor employee productivity via audio surveillance of checkout counters. The technology, which Walmart calls “listening to the frontend,” aims to increase employee efficiency by using sensors to monitor sounds that can indicate how long lines are, how…Read more...

It’s one of the greatest showdowns in recent movie history, and now it’s a “Great Showdowns” print by artist Scott Campbell.Read more...

Night after night, a father has terrible dreams. Dreams of death. Invasion. Destruction. Then, those dreams start to become reality and he’ll stop at nothing to save his family. That’s the plot of Extinction, a new Netflix sci-fi film that just got its first trailer.Read more...

Facebook is apologizing after its algorithms tagged 65,000 Russian users as “interested in treason.” Facebook algorithmically tags users based on their behavior, making it easier for advertisers to target people interested in specific topics. In this case, however, the tag “treason” may have put users under the threat…Read more...

Elon Musk has been taking a good bit of criticism lately, much of it deserved. After enduring quite a bit of roasting over his ineffective efforts to help kids trapped in a cave in Thailand, he’s now pledged to help every single person in Flint, Michigan, who is still affected by the water crisis.Read more...

Much like climate change, the growing emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacterial superbugs is a ticking time bomb that threatens our very way of life. It’s also a very expensive problem to tackle, and Big Pharma has struggled to find any promising solutions. On Wednesday, yet another major pharmaceutical—the…Read more...

In a poorly-lit corner of a former Polish wedding venue in Brooklyn, New York, Giovanni “ShinG” Nieves took a screwdriver to a GameCube controller as a crowd of customers waited. Nieves, in a red bomber jacket and a fade haircut, was reverse-engineering a Super Smash Bros. 4 competitor’s controller at a tournament…Read more...

Between 2013 and 2015, the FCC reportedly spent close to $3 million overhauling its comment system. But after being flooded with millions of fake comments during a docket to overturn net neutrality last summer, the agency is now planning another total makeover.

For decades, the idea that a bacteria or virus could help cause Alzheimer’s disease was dismissed as a fringe theory. But not so much anymore. On Wednesday, a team of researchers from Harvard Medical School reported in the journal Neuron the latest bit of evidence suggesting herpesviruses can spark the cascade of…Read more...

Smack in the middle of the World Cup semi-finals, YouTube TV totally fucked over fans of England and Croatia alike.

On Tuesday, the remaining five boys were rescued from the Tham Luang Nang Non cave complex where 12 members of a soccer team and their coach were trapped for more than two weeks. The rescue mission spanned three days, and, according to new details, involved drugging the boys prior to the extraction.

When horses are happy, they snort, according to new research published today in PLoS One. The finding could help improve treatment of these domesticated animals, the authors say.