Gizmodo

I love Circle to Search on the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. It has added multitasking to Android that I have not felt in a long time. At its core, Circle to Search is not an entirely groundbreaking feature. It snaps a screenshot and then transcribes any words or pictures you highlight into a Google Search. But that's...Read more...

For anyone who ever wondered where Andy's mom might've gotten Buzz and Woody in Toy Story-it turns out one particular San Francisco toy shop sparked the imaginations of Pixar creatives. Now, after 86 years in business, it's closing its doors.Read more...

There's a glimmer of hope if you're looking for last-ditch strategies to save your child from the halls of stupidity. A study published this week in the journal Frontiers of Psychology found that good ol' cursive handwriting seems better at promoting learning than typing, and if we want to pump smarter kids out of our...Read more...

Elon Musk says that the first person has received a neural implant from his controversial brain chip startup Neuralink. Musk revealed the information in a tweet posted on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter). The tweet reads merely:Read more...

James Gunn's new DC Universe has found its Supergirl, and she already knows how to fly. Milly Alcock, who played the young dragon-riding Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen on HBO's House of the Dragon, has been cast as the Kryptonian, beating out several other actresses for the role.Read more...

Twenty-eight years ago, Star Trek asked a daring question, one fitting of a franchise that triumphs boldly going and facing the unknown: should experimental FTL travel culminate in a captain and her helmsman turning into amphibians and doing the scaly deed? The answer is unequivocally no, but it has given us a...Read more...

Earth orbit is getting its own space doctor in the form of a small cyborg arm reaching out for the scalpel. A surgical robot is launching to the International Space Station (ISS) to test its ability to slice through human flesh in a microgravity environment.Read more...

TikTok has grabbed the world's attention in recent years, averaging 73 million American users every month. The app knows exactly what you like, and now it's rolling out phase two: selling you something with every single video. TikTok is testing out a new feature that will identify objects in a video automatically, and...Read more...

A single man is responsible for leaking the tax information belonging to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and others. Trump's tax information was leaked to the New York Times and became the basis for a big story, while Bezos and Musk had their financial information handed over to ProPublica, which similarly reporte...Read more...

There are lots of reasons to re-watch movies-the obvious being you love them so much, you just want to enjoy them again. There are also situations where a movie has so much going on, or whips out a big third-act reveal that upends all of act one, that you just soak in more when you go back for seconds.Read more...

Amelia Earhart was declared dead in January of 1939, two years after her around-the-world flight in her Lockheed Electra 10E Special ended in an unsolved disappearance. Earhart was the world's most accomplished and famed female pilot in 1937, and her ill-fated flight is still the kind of thing that haunts a person. Rea...Read more...

Shall I compare thee to the Webb Space Telescope's latest image drop? Well, for starters, thou art less ancient and far less spectacular. The new collection of 19 images reveal face-on spiral galaxies, meaning they are oriented toward Webb's perceptive gaze. The shots were taken as part of the Physics at High Angular...Read more...

Last year, Witch From Mercury radically improved the already pretty great world of Gundam by adding an amount of lesbianism that not even its parent company could deny. Alas, sapphics have yet to see a successor to the gay mecha throne yet, but lovers of men and giant robots may have found their own show to claim this...Read more...

A medical treatment given to children in the UK may have led to some developing Alzheimer's disease decades later, new research out Monday suggests. The study presents evidence that at least five people contracted the neurodegenerative disorder from having received human growth hormones contaminated with rogue amyloid...Read more...

Microsoft laid 1,900 employees in its gaming division, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge on Thursday, with a majority of the layoffs hitting its newly acquired Activision Blizzard employees. Some Xbox and ZeniMax employees were also affected, according to the memo. The layoffs come roughly three months...Read more...

Amazon abandoned its $1.4 billion acquisition of Roomba maker, iRobot, on Monday after regulators in the European Union threatened to block the deal. The deal's implosion means the robot vacuums, and the company's maps of 40 millionfloor plans across the globe, will not join the growing list of smart-home devices...Read more...

The influential career of Italian horror master Dario Argento gets a well-curated tribute in Dario Argento Panico. Simone Scafidi's new documentary features interviews with the director as well as famous collaborators and admirers, including fellow boundary-pushing filmmakers Guillermo del Toro, Gaspar Noe, and Nicolas...Read more...

The fan service was strong with Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. And to please Reylo fans, the redeemed Ben Solo, formerly Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), got his reverse Uno Snow White moment when Rey (Daisy Ridley) kissed him before he died. Ultimately, the kiss didn't really please anyone-no matter if they were rooting...Read more...

Earlier in the month, a comedy special featuring an AI-generated George Carlin showed up on YouTube. The jokes weren't that great and there were questions about using a dead person's likeness without permission, and on Thursday, a lawsuit from the legendary comedian's family made it clear that this isn't a laughing...Read more...

Among movie fans, it's commonplace to hear someone call a slickly designed, artist-forward movie poster a Mondo poster." That's because the company Mondo was long at the forefront of the pop culture art wave. Last year, though, that wave crashed when Mondo's new owner, Funko, gutted much of the company's talent. Now,...Read more...

Despite taking an unfortunate tumble on the lunar surface, Japan's lunar lander has regained power more than a week after ending up face down on the Moon.Read more...

Footage taken off the coast of Santa Barbara has captured something new to science: a living newborn great white shark. The shark's discovery could help researchers finally learn where white sharks-one of the ocean's top predators-birth their young.Read more...

It didn't really start with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, but Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire has what I describe as a Force Awakens-ass trailer. A minimal suggestion of what the movie's actual plot is, and a lot of familiar faces suiting back up and everyone else reminding us they know about the specific Ghostbusters...Read more...

The wife of a SpaceX employee who was severely injured in a 2022 rocket engine test has filed a negligence lawsuit against the aerospace company, as first reported by Reuters. This case highlights ongoing safety concerns at SpaceX, with an earlier investigation revealing a pattern of workplace injuries and...Read more...

Get a look at the return of Gru in Despicable Me 4's first trailer. The Penguin's mystery cast continues to grow. The Fall of Reach grows closer as Halo preps for season 2. Plus, Isla Fisher on the hopes for Wolf Like Me's return. To me, my spoilers!

A coin flip is the quintessence of fifty-fifty chance, but a large group of researchers recently overturned its equitable reputation. Recording a painstaking 350,000+ coin flips by hand, they found that almost 51% of tosses land with the same side facing upward as before the flip (i.e. if the coin shows heads at the...Read more...

Ad-free streaming services are officially a thing of the past. Amazon injected Prime Video's movies and TV shows with ads on Monday. The company is asking users to pay an additional $3 a month to keep Prime Video ad-free, on top of the $139 a year members already pay for Amazon Prime.Read more...

If you spend a significant amount of time on YouTube, you'll want to make the most of that time-whether it's the choice of videos you get recommended or the quality of those videos when they start playing. There are actually lots of different ways you can tweak YouTube, both in the apps and on the web, to improve your...Read more...

What wasn't obvious about the new slimmer version of the PlayStation 5 was that each individual panel can be removed individually. Unlike the original PS5, the black bar running through the center on the new version separates each panel into four pieces rather than two. This means you can make interesting designs...Read more...

Star Wars: Ahsoka didn't just pick up on threads from Star Wars Rebels, it also developed some new plotlines for its returning cast. Chief among them, Rebels character Sabine Wren ended up being Ahsoka's apprentice and discovered she had Force powers, making her a Jedi Mandalorian-and the first of her kind, in the...Read more...

Suzanne Collins' first Hunger Games novel released in 2008, and went onto become a massive franchise. In the wake of last year's successful prequel film, Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Scholastic is building upon that momentum by bringing the first book to life again with an illustrated edition.

Even though the Covenant are the other side of Halo's ongoing conflict, the first season of Paramount+'s TV series largely represented them through a human proxy named Makee. With the upcoming second season, the coalition of alien races is set to become a more prominent threat, and that means they'll be getting more...Read more...

This year's Sundance film festival featured the documentary Super/Man, which chronicles the late Christopher Reeve, who played the DC character from 1978-1987. With how beloved the actor's take on Superman was for a certain generation, it's no surprise that studios are trying to snatch it up, and it may have found a...Read more...

Remember Jennifer's Body? 2009 audiences weren't really thrilled to see Megan Fox play a high schooler eating teenage boys, but more recent audiences have been able to groove on its wavelength more. It's now got something of a cult classic status, and for writer Diablo Cody, the turnaround's been so strong that she's...Read more...

Stephen King's The Shining was heavily inspired by his time at Colorado's Stanley Hotel. In the past, it's taken advantage of the 1977 novel's success-the 1997 TV miniseries used it as a filming location, and King's hotel room 217 is now advertised with his name. But if that's not enough, Blumhouse is now giving the...Read more...

Next week's Saturn Awards are going to honor Keanu Reeves at its event, with a special honor named after his John Wick co-star, Lance Reddick.

Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender saw Aang and the rest of Team Avatar travel the world so he could master all four elements from different bending masters. For all they went through, there was always a looming threat overhead in the form of Sozin's Comet, a celestial phenomenon which served as a massive power...Read more...

The latest iOS 17.3 update will make it harder for thieves to log into your phone, but only if you turn on this feature. The Samsung Galaxy Ultra S24 is out next week, and we've got our review of the flagship phone right here. Click through for our top product news and reviews from this week.Read more...

After months of fighting with two stubborn fasteners, NASA scientists finally cracked open the canister containing precious pieces of an ancient asteroid. Click through for our top science stories from this week.Read more...

This year, at least some countries will have to say goodbye to the Netflix Basic subscription tier, the last cheap(ish) way to watch Netflix without ads. While the streaming giant had already severed the $12 Basic subscription tier for new or returning subscribers, anybody who chose to keep paying their monthly tithe...Read more...

This week on io9 The Bad Batch got us thinking about Dark Disciple, the Battle of Boz Pity, and so much Nightsister magic with the reveal that Asajj Ventress is the latest Star Wars character to cheat death. Read on for more on that, plus even more of our most-read stories of the week! -James WhitbrookRead more...

The Taylor Swift AI porn debacle seems to be snowballing into a full-blown national emergency and now the White House is involved. Yes, our nation's executive branch weighed in on Taylor's fake nudes on Friday, with the top WH spokesperson claiming that the government is concerned about the whole thing but isn't quite...Read more...

Earlier in io9's 2024 Sundance Film Festival coverage, we reviewed In a Violent Nature, one of the most unconventional slasher movies ever made. That theme continues with Handling the Undead-a most unusual zombie movie, and one that offers proof (yet again) that the genre still has the ability to innovate.Read more...

Elon Musk's brain implant company Neuralink has been in more trouble with the federal government than previously known. A Reuters report published Friday says that the U.S. Department of Transportation recently fined Neuralink for violating rules governing the movement of hazardous materials. The DOT has since settled...Read more...

We already knew the world of Alien was returning both on TV and at the movies. But now, it's returning to the world of comics too, in a very unexpected way. Marvel just announced that Aliens, James Cameron's 1986 sequel, is getting a five-issue What If...?" spin-off focusing on Carter Burke, the evil company man...Read more...

Astronauts on board the International Space Station (ISS) are about to make a new cyborg friend in the form of two short mechanical arms that will do their bidding in the cold, dark vacuum of low Earth orbit.Read more...

Grand Admiral Thrawn's return at the climax of Ahsoka heralds the beginning of a Star Wars story long in the making-whatever Dave Filoni has planned in adapting one of the most famous stories in the old Expanded Universe, Heir to the Empire, across TV shows and even a movie. But another element from that saga could...Read more...

Pornhub notified performers last week that the platform is requiring proof of consent from anyone featured in its videos moving forward, according to emails seen by 404 Media. The policy update is Pornhub's latest effort to verify that its performers are not being abused or sexually trafficked.Read more...

Welcome to AI This Week, Gizmodo's weekly deep dive on what's been happening in artificial intelligence.Read more...

The National Security Agency (NSA) is purchasing Americans' internet records, according to government documents made public on Friday. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, wrote a letter claiming the NSA goes through backchannel avenues to purchase your browsing records and location data, which government...Read more...