Gizmodo

If all goes according to plan, NASA’s Mars InSight mission will launch this weekend from California. Onboard the Atlas V-401 rocket is the InSight lander, a nearly 800-pound machine loaded up with cameras, a robotic arm, a heat probe, and a seismometer that, for the first time, will allow us to examine the inner…Read more...

Just in time for the weekend, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed an $8,500 fine to Idaho State University for losing track of a single gram of weapons-grade plutonium missing since 2004.Read more...

Concerts used to be one of the most analog activities a person could do. But those days are going the way of the paper ticket, and now the gatekeepers of live events are determined to inject some digital anxiety into your drug-fueled Phish party. Ticketmaster is jumping into the facial recognition businessRead more...

The Care by Volvo subscription service sounded like a hell of a deal. Pay $600 a month and you’d get not only a brand-new Volvo XC40, but everything from insurance to basic maintenance thrown in with it. No down payments, no extra fees. And it should be a deal—but multiple would-be subscribers say their promised cars…Read more...

A self-driving minivan belonging to Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, was involved in a crash in Chandler, Arizona on Friday. The aftermath looks brutal.Read more...

Google I/O is around the corner, and while the company has already teased us with some revamped services, we’re expecting to see a lot more. Personally, I’m hoping to see improvements to Google Lens, the image recognition tool the company has put into a few of its apps. Because right now, my friend, it ain’t great.

In a scientific first, researchers have used an MRI scanner to study the brains of Nile crocodiles. Sounds weird—and even a bit dangerous—but the experiment is revealing new insights into the evolution of brains and how mammals and birds acquired the capacity to comprehend complex sounds.

Everyone wants to go to Iceland to get that perfect selfie for their dating profile and briefly feel what it’s like to exist in an actual paradise. But last month, a man who is suspected in a heist of $2 million-worth of bitcoin mining gear only wanted to get out. After pulling off a daring prison break, however, he’s…Read more...

A 38-year-old woman was forced to endure the sort of body horror that would make John Carpenter shudder: An all-consuming, if benign, ovarian tumor that swelled up to 132 pounds. But thankfully, doctors were able to successfully remove the monstrosity with relative ease.

Vine is dead, again. On Friday, Dan Hoffman, a co-founder of the defunct six-second video app, announced via Twitter that v2, his Vine sequel, is now indefinitely on hold. Hoffman said his vision of a small passion project was engulfed by too much attention, and that he would need a larger team and potential investors…Read more...

Yet another study claiming to show a connection between cancer and cellphones—this time from the UK—is making the rounds. But plenty of scientists are saying the new paper is misleading.Read more...

There hasn’t been a Legion of Super-Heroes comic in a very long time. At one point, the massively popular 31st Century super-team seemed like it’d be around forever. But, in 1989, the Five Years Later run radically re-invented the team in a way that fans hated.

Do not be me. I was desperate for a new Apple laptop to replace my dying 2012 one and as soon as the 2016 Macbook Pro with Touch Bar was available to buy I ordered it. This was a major redesign for Apple, and experience with other products told me that buying the first generation of a new laptop would be a very bumpy…Read more...

Social media stardom is a brutal Darwinistic competition, a craven and utterly shameless battle for space on our screens and in our brains carried out by a phalanx of influencers, thinkfluencers, beauty vloggers, charlatans, health quacks, spiritual phonies, and unhinged vegans. Recently, Lil Tay entered into this…Read more...

NORAD, the agency that tracks missile threats to the US and Canada, just sent out a tweet welcoming the US Cyber Command to the big leagues. The US Cyber Command was elevated to a combatant command today, the country’s 10th, after previously working under the US Strategic Command since 2009.

Liza Lizarraga has spent hours combing through paper and digital archives to track her family’s history the old-fashioned way, and she has spit in a test tube to find out what morsels of her family’s history might be revealed by her DNA. In September, though, Lizarraga will walk the same path as her ancestors when she…Read more...

After a calamitous data breach exposing the personal information of more than 145 million U.S. citizens, Equifax shareholders this week voted to re-elect all of the company’s board members following its first annual shareholder meeting since the incident.

Google’s big once-a-year developer conference kicks off Tuesday May 8th. While much of Google I/O is meant to support coders and the people who create apps and software for Google’s various platforms, what gets announced at the event will impact anyone who uses Android, Chrome OS, Wear OS, or any of Google’s many…Read more...

Wealthy elites sank more than $600 million into Theranos, the rapidly flatlining blood-testing startup, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.Read more...

Breakfast may or may not be the most important meal of the day, but it’s also arguably hardest to make. Can you really trust yourself to safely use a hot stove while you’re still half asleep? Obviously not, and why go to all that effort when you can build a Lego machine to make you bacon and eggs while you catch a few…Read more...

The Department of Defense has accused China of hitting US military aircraft with blinding lasers. The laser beams, which allegedly came from China’s military base in the African nation of Djibouti, have been striking aircraft landing at the nearby US military base.Read more...

Less than a week has passed since the first standalone VR headset was released, and already we have another. Except this one is made by Lenovo in partnership with Google and uses the Daydream VR platform. Like the Oculus Go, Lenovo’s Mirage Solo don’t need no phone or a wire connected to a nearby PC to transport you…Read more...

Earlier this week, Facebook fired an employee who was accused of abusing their access users’ profiles to stalk women. Had that employee’s alleged victims worked at Facebook, they would have been alerted by a special internal tool, according to a new report. The rest of us, however, get no such protection.Read more...

Merry Free Comic Book Day Eve, comics fans! Yes, the most wonderful time of the year for receiving wonderful free comics is nearly here—in fact, it’s tomorrow, May 5. FCBD 2018 is jam-packed with tons of wonderful (and did we mention, free?) books for you to pick up, so here’s a selection of what’ll be on offer.

Squirrels and other hibernating animals have an almost magical ability to withstand frigid temperatures. New research has uncovered the biological factors involved in keeping cellular structures intact during hibernation—a finding that could eventually be used to preserve human organs prior to transplantation.

The governor of Hawaii has declared a local state of emergency in the vicinity of the Mount Kilauea volcano following an eruption late yesterday on the state’s Big Island. Dramatic video footage of the eruption showed plumes of magma shooting into the air, while lava poured from a fissure that opened up near a…Read more...

While they’re hardly the only electric arc lighters out there, Power Practical’s Sparkr Mini has long been one of our favorites, due to its compact design, dual beams, and lack of high-pitched whine common in cheaper models. Now, they’re bringing the same expertise to two new form factors, and you can preorder to save.Read more...

As far back as the NES, the video game industry has been trying to sell us unnecessary accessories. (Remember R.O.B.?) Companies have occasionally come up with fun alternatives to playing with a controller—think Guitar Hero—but when you eventually finish or get bored of a game, you’re left with a mountain of unwanted…Read more...

J.J. Abrams is teaming up with the director behind Overlord again for a superhero thriller. Spamalot could be heading to the big screen. Ryan Reynolds is still holding out hope for a Deadpool/Wolverine team up with Hugh Jackman. Plus, what’s to come on Supernatural and more. May the spoilers be with you, always!

Today, President Trump is scheduled to speak at the NRA’s convention in Dallas at 1:45pm ET, 12:45pm local time (10:45am PT). And while all of the major cable networks will probably air the speech, you can still watch, even if you’re not near a TV.

Top brass from Facebook, Twitter, and Google stopped by Stanford Law School Thursday to participate in a conversation about the challenges social media companies face in regulating free speech and protecting democracies. The panel showed the companies are much better at identifying problems than actually solving them.Read more...

An FBI hostage rescue team ran into some unexpected obstacles while conducting a raid last winter when a criminal gang unleashed a swarm of drones to disrupt the operation and obscure the view of agents conducting the mission from an elevated observation post.

Slack, the messaging service of choice for tens of thousands of organizations, has given employers a considerable amount of access to the data and communications of employees. A new tool called Shhlack finally gives employees the power to shield their private conversations with end-to-end encryption.

A commonly touted theory about how women’s attraction to men works might be all wrong, suggests a new paper published this week in Psychological Science. Prior, small experiments have found that birth control pills and ovulation could change a woman’s sexual preferences. Now, a large new study has found that women’s…Read more...

You need to change your Twitter password.

Computer hacking isn’t the only way companies stand to lose sensitive data. Physical security is equally important. There’s really no need to break into a network remotely if you can through the front door and grab what you need.

Google’s quest to kill autoplay videos with sound has been a confusing ride over the last year. But last month, Chrome finally went all the way and started muting autoplaying videos on sites by default. Now, Google is changing the way its mute system works... again.Read more...

After three seasons and 30 episodes, Ash vs. Evil Dead slaughtered its final Deadite last Sunday. The show may sadly be over, but its many, many gleefully gruesome fight scenes will live on in our hearts and nightmares forever. Here are our 13 all-time favorite amazingly disgusting moments from the Starz series.

Google launched its Advanced Protection Program last fall to help secure the accounts of people who are especially at risk of being hacked. Advanced Protection allows journalists, activists, and election officials to lock down their email with hardware keys (a USB key for laptops and a Bluetooth key for phones) and…Read more...

This weekend, the city of Xi’an, capital of Northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, was host to a record-breaking drone performance, even larger than Intel’s 1,218-drone performance during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics. And while drone maker Ehang Egret nailed the first showing, its second go-round a…Read more...

Scientists think they’ve stumbled upon a newly discovered mechanism that could explain why some people’s hair turns gray and others become afflicted with patches of unpigmented skin, a rare, stigmatized condition called vitiligo. Their research, published Thursday in PLOS Biology, suggests a gene that regulates the…Read more...

An Illinois bill permitting police surveillance drones at protests is igniting a fiery debate in Chicago.Read more...

Herman Miller furniture is legendary, and also legendarily out of reach for most of us. But if you have one chair, table, or bed that you’ve just been dying to get your hands on, everything they sell is 15% off today, so you won’t find a better chance to splurge.

Scientists have created time crystals out of ammonium dihydrogen phosphate, a chemical commonly found in fertilizers and fire extinguishers.

When I was in high school, I felt completely undateable. Everyone around me seemed to be pairing off, falling in love, and racking up sexual milestones while I was still, as the song says, “sweet 16 and never been kissed.” And I felt awful about it. I fumed with anger over the unfairness of it all, writing shitty…Read more...

Plants don’t like to be touched. For these immobile organisms, it means they’re likely growing too close to a neighboring plant, and that their access to available sunlight is under threat. New research shows that touch-sensitive plants can communicate a warning message to their related neighbors, advising them to…Read more...

What fan wouldn’t want to own an original piece of superhero art drawn by their favorite Avenger? Now you can and all proceeds go to charity! Just remember, they’re actors, not artists.Read more...

You like Airnb? Sure, sure, great. Would you like Airbnb as much if you knew that its mere existence was costing you, personally, an extra thousand bucks a year in rent?Read more...

New data reveals the global circulation of stolen identities is leading to major shifts in cybercrime worldwide, with developing countries cultivating newly formed internet-based economies responsible for a generous amount of fake and stolen account activity.

In addition to filling balloons at birthday parties, helium can be found scattered throughout the cosmos. To date, however, scientists have struggled to detect the ubiquitous element on distant worlds, even though the gas is certain to be there. But that’s now changed, thanks to the discovery of helium on a…Read more...