Gizmodo

“[The Falcon] has never looked better than when Lando had it,” says Donald Glover in a new video to promote Solo: A Star Wars Story. And we have to agree.Read more...

A Southwest Airlines flight traveling from Chicago to Newark, New Jersey, was forced to make an emergency landing in Cleveland today. The cause was reportedly a cracked window, an eerie reminder of the emergency landing last month when a Southwest engine exploded, breaking a window and killing a passenger.

Our species, Homo sapiens, weren’t the first humans to leave Africa—not by a long shot. The remarkable discovery of a 709,000-year-old butchered rhino fossil in the Philippines shows that so-called archaic humans were romping around the islands of southeast Asia a full 400,000 years before our species even existed.

Stephen Hawking may have passed away in March, but his final work has now been published in a scientific journal.

The only thing more terrifying than being stuck on a roller coaster, is being stuck at the highest part of the ride. And the only thing more terrifying than that is if it happens to be one of those coasters where you’re hanging upside down from a harness, leaving nothing but 98-feet of free-fall space between you and…Read more...

Just when you thought all data breaches amounted to hacker shenanigans, the largest bank in Australia has belatedly confirmed a different sort of breach story. BuzzFeed reports that the Commonwealth Bank lost 12 million customers’ data after magnetic tape backups containing their personal financial history from 2004…Read more...

Facebook’s consistent lack of transparency has helped fuel the pernicious notion that the company deliberately censors conservative views, and the problem has reached a boiling point. Now, the company is reportedly launching an internal probe of potential conservative bias and it will be led by a man who’s spread fake…Read more...

On Monday, Facebook said that it was investigating claims that one if its security engineers was using their data access privileges to stalk women online. Facebook confirmed to Gizmodo that the employee has been fired.

The walls of your house keep the roof up, give your family some privacy, and maybe provide a place to hang some art. But researchers at Disney and Carnegie Mellon University have come up with a way for walls to do more. A cheap paint treatment turns them into giant sensors, creating new ways to interact with a smart…Read more...

Hulu subscribers are soon going to be able to watch their favorite shows offline. On Wednesday Hulu announced that the streaming service has plans to offer a new, “ad-supported downloadable content experience” sometime “during the 2018-19 upfront season.”Read more...

NASA announced today that it has completed tests of its Kilopower portable nuclear fission reactor, a device designed to one day power bases on Mars or the moon. The tests met or exceeded expectations on all metrics, which means the device can now go on to more serious flight testing.Read more...

Another day, another company snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. This time it’s Nokia, as the company has decided to sell its health division— formerly known as Withings—which it purchased for $191 million in 2016. The sale itself seemed inevitable, and its price undisclosed, but its buyer is a huge surprise:…Read more...

Mathematician Kokichi Sugihara, of Meiji University in Japan, once again proves he’s the greatest illusion inventor of our time. Instead of just creating mind-melting images, he creates real-life 3D objects that appear to ignore the laws of our universe. How can this arrow, that perpetually points right, no matter how…Read more...

Deadpool 2 may not be in theaters for another few weeks, but fans are already toasting their favorite Merc with a Mouth at Sister Margaret’s School for Wayward Girls. Fox opened up a pop-up bar in Brooklyn in celebration of the upcoming film (with a sister bar in Los Angeles), and io9 was there for all the drinks,…Read more...

Security researchers are warning that malware with suspected links to Russian cyber-espionage group and alleged Democratic National Committee hackers Fancy Bear is turning up in installations of Lojack, an anti-computer theft program used by many corporations to guard their assets.

A new report out Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highlights a scary reality: Diseases spread by six- and eight-legged bugs are becoming more common. And worse than that, health officials across the country seem woefully incapable of dealing with them.Read more...

There’s more rumors about the comics that could inspire the He-Man movie. James Gunn teases a certain ravager’s role in Marvel’s post-Infinity War world. A little more Legion is on the way. Plus, new looks at Amunet Black’s return to The Flash, and an Agents of SHIELD star hints at a connection to Infinity War.…Read more...

United Airlines has announced that it will allow cats and dogs to travel in the cargo holds of its planes again starting this summer. Earlier this year, the airline suspended its cargo hold pet program following two high-profile incidents involving dogs on its flights, one of which died. United is partnering with…Read more...

Vulnerabilities in two applications widely used by manufacturers and power plant operators may have given hackers a foothold in America’s critical infrastructure, prior to being discovered by a Maryland-based cybersecurity firm.

For all the tortuous interactions with now-President Donald Trump that Apple CEO Tim Cook has endured over the past few years, in late April he was still making the rounds at fancy White House events—probably because his company has, all told, been a major beneficiary of Republican-backed tax cuts. On Tuesday, Apple…Read more...

Code repository GitHub warned “a select number of users” on Tuesday that due to a flaw in its password reset system, the company had stored their passwords in plain text on internal logs.

Dr. Harold Bornstein, Donald Trump’s personal doctor—not that one—has told CNN that Trump personally dictated the superfluous December 2015 letter which said Trump’s “physical strength and stamina are extraordinary” and that he would be the “healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”Read more...

The thing we’re most likely to not know when filling out a government form—our blood type—might mean the difference between life and death following a traumatic injury, a new study published Tuesday in Critical Care suggests.Read more...

We’ve all been guilty of raiding the office supply closet for non-work reasons. Maybe it’s to build a paperclip chain, or to cover a co-workers cubicle in sticky notes. But few of us have gone so far as to create a tabletop Star Wars mural using 28,800 painstakingly embedded thumb tacks.Read more...

Mark Zuckerberg may have ditched the dark suit he wore during his congressional appearances last month, but the serious data-privacy and election-security issues raised during his testimony are still very much on his mind.Read more...

Immediately after seeing Avengers: Infinity War, if you could talk to just one actor, you would probably choose Zoe Saldana. As Gamora, daughter of Thanos, the Guardian of the Galaxy plays a key role in the film—and, luckily for us, someone did talk to her about it.Read more...

Telegram has been putting up an impressive fight against the governments of Russia and Iran in high-profile efforts to censor the messaging service over the last few weeks. But we’ve heard little about its fellow encrypted messaging app Signal. Both services have used an anti-censorship technique called “domain…Read more...

Snapchat’s big, controversial redesign—the one that really put us in our place by separating our social from our media—doesn’t appear to have done the app much good. Snapchat still has 191 million daily users, but things aren’t looking up for the company that Facebook has done everything in its power to destroy.

NASA is set to launch its next Mars lander, InSight, early Saturday morning. But something’s different about this launch. It’s taking place on the West Coast, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

It’s still unclear who, exactly, has been begging to give Facebook even more intimate data, but the social giant’s newly announced dating features nevertheless pose a significant threat to other online dating businesses. News of Facebook Dating sent shares of the Match Group (the parent company of Tinder, OkCupid and…Read more...

The federal agency charged with policing the political activity of federal employees has determined that FCC Commissioner Michael O’Rielly violated federal law in February when he instructed a crowd of people to vote for President Trump, according to a letter obtained by Gizmodo.Read more...

Two years ago, a consortium of scientists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs announced a plan to synthesize an artificial human genome from scratch—an extremely ambitious endeavor that’s struggled to secure funding. Project organizers have now disclosed details of a scaled-down version of the venture, but with a goal that’s…Read more...

During Facebook’s F8 developer conference today, human CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the availability of the Oculus Go, the company’s latest VR headset and its first standalone device for virtual reality that doesn’t require a PC or smartphone.Read more...

High temperatures are forecast to reach the mid-80s this week in New York, and I’m dreading it. But I have a plan to stay cool: just thinking of how much hotter it is in Pakistan, which is in the middle of a blistering heat wave.

It’s the sort of story that you’d find in a Marvel movie, but with far less cool consequences. Doctors in Slovenia have reported what they say is the first instance of lightning shutting down a person’s brain implant.Read more...

Westworld may have only just entered its second season, but HBO is already saying every fan’s favorite four words: “Bring yourself back online.” The network has announced that Westworld has been renewed for a third season.

At Facebook’s F8 conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg discussed how Instagram will be changing in the coming weeks. The upgrades include video chat, an Explore redesign, AR camera effects, and a bullying filter.Read more...

Facebook, still reeling from a scandal concerning the improper sharing of tens of millions of its users’ data, now wants to get even more intimately involved in your life. At the F8 developer conference on Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social network will soon offer dating features slated to roll out…Read more...

Ford might not think it can make a profit off of a Fiesta, but it does seem to like the idea of a motorcycle that pops out of a car’s face.Read more...

If you were looking for another reason to hate crypto culture, then YouTube has a plethora of Bitcoin rap videos for you to peruse. Every single one of these blockchain anthems is just as bad as you can imagine, and often worse.Read more...

No one wants to pay for both cable and internet anymore. What’s more, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, wants to pay separate rental fees to put four cable TV boxes in their family’s home. What year is this? For cord-cutters who subscribe to Comcast, it’s apparently time to get screwed.

A new analysis of internal documents from tobacco company Philip Morris demonstrates that what the firm said publicly about tobacco dependency differed from what it knew to be true about the science of addiction.

When investigators revealed last week that a genealogy website had played a major role in catching alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo, a 72-year-old former police officer, some people worried what that meant for DNA privacy. The Golden State Killer terrorized California in the 1970s and 1980s, killing…Read more...

Facebook is holding its F8 developer conference on Tuesday. Given that it’s been going through a lot of trouble related to third-party developers it brought a surprise announcement to take your mind off of privacy concerns. It will soon give you control over the information that apps and websites are seeing about you,…Read more...

For a brief period on Tuesday morning, Facebook asked at least some of its users to report whether every single post in their feed contained hate speech. Right above where one would normally like or comment on a post, Facebook users were asked: “Does this post contain hate speech?” For users who saw this request…Read more...

Starting today, Google Chrome users will encounter a full-page warning whenever visiting a website whose SSL certificate is not registered with a public certificate log.

Twenty-two years ago, the Galileo spacecraft made its first flyby of Ganymede, Jupiter’s largest moon. Scientists with NASA have taken a new look at the data collected during that historic encounter, providing tantalizing new details about this strange celestial object, its unique magnetic shield, and its unusually…Read more...

The British government keeps asking Mark Zuckerberg to testify about his company’s abysmal privacy record, and the Facebook CEO keeps turning them down. Zuck likes to send his lackeys instead, but the UK has had about enough of Zuck’s bullshit. The next time he’s in the UK, the government is going to make Zuckberberg…Read more...

In a unanimous decision yesterday, California’s Supreme Court ruled in favor of independent contractors seeking employee status from a last-mile delivery service in a case that could have wide ramifications for Uber, Lyft, Amazon, Instacart, and other companies buoyed by the sweat of the gig economy.Read more...

The Coinhive service was always intended to help people mine cryptocurrency for good, but we’ve mostly seen it deployed by bad actors hijacking people’s CPUs without their permission. UNICEF is giving everyone a chance to support refugees with the mining tool just by opening a webpage.