Gizmodo

SpaceX is gearing up to launch the first batch of Starlink satellites with direct-to-cell capability, with plans to test the technology in Earth orbit so that it can expand its reach on Earth beyond the range of cell towers.Read more...

OpenAI has a new Board of Directors following its November skirmish, but they can still overrule CEO Sam Altman on any decisions he makes, according to a set of guidelines the company released Monday. That means if OpenAI creates artificial general intelligence (AGI), an AI system smarter than humans, the Board will...Read more...

It's baffling that someone really tried to legitimize fan fiction when the estate of of The Lord of the Rings author is still actively pushing out adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's seminal work.Read more...

It's been a long year. The Titan submersible getting crushed? That was only six months ago even though it feels like it had to have been at least two years ago considering all that has happened since then. Elon Musk, especially, has been in the news constantly and rarely for anything positive. Yes, he finally managed...Read more...

Growing up with cats could have a strange effect on your mind, new research suggests. The study, a large review of existing literature, found that cat ownership at a young age was associated with a noticeably higher risk of developing schizophrenia and related disorders-a risk possibly fueled by increased exposure to...Read more...

If you've ever bought a home with the help of the well-known mortgage and loan firm Mr. Cooper, there's a good chance that your personal information has been stolen by cybercriminals.Read more...

Light a candle for those fictional characters we lost in 2023. Characters we've come to know either over the years, or maybe even over just a few short hours of a movie or TV show. But these characters left an impression on us meaning, as 2023 comes to an end, it was time to give them their final moment in the sun.Read more...

Santa's elves better hurry up and ship those new Apple Watches. Starting Dec. 21, the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 will no longer be available for sale. Christmas Eve is the last day to buy one at the brick-and-mortar Apple retail store.

Hasbro's Haslab series-a crowdfunding drop line that lets the toymaker make some truly wild toys it could never feasibly release to the mass market, should enough collectors actually want them-is meant to be a one and done thing. The campaign starts, and if it hits its goals, when it ends pretty much all that's ever...Read more...

Yes, that's Uranus. The giant icy orb looks more like an agatized dinosaur egg than a planet in this new image by the Webb Space Telescope.Read more...

There's already a niche streaming service for nearly every appetite, but indie film fans searching beyond the mainstream now have yet another new resource: Film Movement Plus, which launched on December 15 as an add-on subscription channel for Prime Video customers.Read more...

In the grim dark future of the 41st millennium, there is only... contract negotiations? A year ago Games Workshop announced that it was working with Amazon Studios to bring the universe of its legendary sci-fi miniatures game Warhammer 40,000 to film and TV. Today it did so again, but now it's even officialler.Read more...

The European Union opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk's X on Monday examining the platform's role in spreading illegal content' around the Israel and Hamas war. X has come under fire recently for antisemitic content on the platform, losing a slew of advertisers in the process.Read more...

Season two of Prime Video's Wheel of Time had a lot of high-stakes fantasy storylines to explore-but none so moving or haunting as the ordeal of Egwene, played in the Robert Jordan adaptation by Madeleine Madden. io9 got a chance to speak to the actor about her character's harrowing, powerful journey.

Apple's recent move to block Beeper Mini, the app that lets Android users chat with iPhone through the iMessage protocol, has caught the eye and a fair bit of ire of several U.S. congresspeople. Now lawmakers are calling for an investigation into the tech giant over potential anticompetitive treatment" of the smaller...Read more...

Twisters screenwriter Mark L. Smith discusses the sequel. A new Percy Jackson clip introduces Grover. Hiding In Time is coming to Amazon. Plus, what's coming on For All Mankind. Spoilers, away!

Adobe and Figma mutually agreed to end their acquisition plans on Monday after European regulators found the deal would hurt competition in the digital design space. The $20 billion acquisition would have combined the world's leading product design software, Figma, and the world's largest and most recognized supplier...Read more...

Last week, I posed this challenge: You and nine of your coworkers are sitting in a conference room when somebody wonders aloud about the group's average salary. Everyone is curious, but nobody feels comfortable sharing their own pay with the group. How can you all learn your average salary without anybody learning any...Read more...

There's something new and powerful for ChatGPT users to play around with: Custom GPTs. These bespoke bots are essentially more focused, more specific versions of the main ChatGPT model, enabling you to build something for a particular purpose without using any coding or advanced knowledge of artificial intelligence.

2023 has been a union-heavy year, and in the case of Disney, it's seen the formation of entirely new unions. VFX artists at both Marvel Studios and Disney overall successfully unionized this year, in what some referred to as a hot labor summer." Turns out, it's more of a hot labor year, because the team behind James...Read more...

In three weeks time, Marvel's Echo series will make its way over to Disney+ and Hulu. The big hook of the show isn't just giving Alaqua Cox's titular character (and Hawkeye antagonist) a spotlight of her own: unlike the other Disney+ Marvel shows, this one is aiming to be a crunchier, more violent show similar to Dared...Read more...

DC Comics sure likes releasing goofy alternate takes on the Justice League. Last year, they were mech pilots, and not long before that, they were anthropomorphic dinosaurs. Next up on the gimmick list? Why apes, of course!Read more...

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When The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King released into theaters December 15, 2003, it had the feel of a significant moment in Hollywood's trajectory, not only from a cultural standpoint (it became the second-highest grossing blockbuster ever, at the time) but from the standpoint of accelerating Hollywood's...Read more...

Months after the live-action adaptation of the popular manga/anime One Piece released, Netflixis doing...an anime remake of One Piece. Really.Read more...

Nearly 15 years ago, Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan released in theaters. Unlike other horror films involving a seemingly sweet young child, the twist of their dark tendencies was considerably more straightforward, Isabella Fuhrman's nine-year-old Esther wasn't possessed by a demon or a conduit to hell, she was in...Read more...

Japanese actor Kenpachiro Satsuma died earlier today, according to a translated post from Matomedane, from what's said to be interstitial pneumonia. The 76-year-old actor is best known for portraying various monsters during Godzilla's Heisei era, including the lead monster himself.

Space is hard, as the cliche reminds us, and that was plenty clear this week, as several groups ran into trouble: NASA with its aging Voyager 1 spacecraft, AstroForge with a struggling debut mission to prove asteroid mining can work, and a few missing-in-action satellites from a recent SpaceX launch. Back on Earth,...Read more...

Next week sees the release of Aquaman & the Lost Kingdom, DC's final movie of 2023. The original 2018 film was a billion-dollar hit, but the sequel feels like is occupying this weird space where it feels like it should've been out by now, or is farther away than it seems. Either way, if you were wondering about the...Read more...

In mid-March during the Oscars, Netflix's Pinocchio took home the award for Best Animated Feature. During his acceptance speech, co-director Guillermo del Toro said the animation medium was ready to be taken to the next step," a statement that was meant to be inspiring after animation was belittled at that very...Read more...

20th Century Fox's Planet of the Apes reboot films re-introduced the world to the dystopian sci-fi series. Led by Andy Serkis as the first hyperintelligent ape Caesar, the trilogy ended with such a finality you don't usually get with franchises, and ensured that if more films did happen, they'd have to jump forward in...Read more...

Somehow fans of Star Wars' Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker made the news for very different reasons this week. But outside of big drama in the sci-fi book world, we also got the last of Doctor Who's anniversay specials, a new Dune Part Two trailer, and more in the list of our most read stories, so here's you might have...Read more...

If you ever wanted help picking out an outfit, Meta just rolled out a beat for its Ray-Ban Smart Glasses that'll give you fashion advice based on what's in your closet. Meanwhile, the Apple and Beeper Mini messaging saga took a dramatic turn. Gizmodocovered all this news and more, and you can catch up with our weekly...Read more...

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From casting to the cutting room, One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda collaborated closely with the team behind Netflix's live-action series adaptation of his beloved tale every step of the way.Read more...

For a year, a rogue tomato was missing in action on board the International Space Station (ISS), sparking rumors that an astronaut may have eaten it during a moment of weakness. It turns out that there were actually two missing tomatoes, not just one, found squished in a tiny ziplock bag, and they're looking a little...Read more...

When people think of the DC films of the past several years, they mostly think of the failures. The controversies. What they don't usually think of are the successes, of which there were many, and none more so than Aquaman. James Wan's 2018 film starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, Patrick...Read more...

What happened with AI this week? Well, the passage of the European Union's AI Act-a landmark piece of regulation that seeks tackle the potential harms of the AI industry-is a pretty big deal. It could totally reshape how European nations' relationship to the technology. But a lot of less consequential if no less weird...Read more...

Fifty years ago, Doctor Who's 11th season began with The Time Warrior" and brought with it a notable sea of changes. It marked the debut of the show's iconic diamond" logo, which has now seen a return for the modern era with Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor. It added an immediately iconic creature to the show's monster canon in...Read more...

Americans are increasingly calling poison control centers over semaglutide, the active ingredient in popular weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy. Most of these calls appear to concern potential overdoses of semaglutide and might be tied to a rise in compounded versions of the drug, which aren't tested for their...Read more...

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A new research paper out of OpenAI Thursday says a superhuman AI is coming, and the company is developing tools to ensure it doesn't turn against humans. OpenAI's Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever is listed as a lead author on the paper, but not the blog post that went with it, and his role at the company remains...Read more...

By all accounts, the European Union's AI Act seems like something that would make tech ethicists happy. The landmark artificial intelligence law, which enjoyed a huge legislative win this week, seeks to institute a broad regulatory framework that would tackle the harms posed by the new technology. In its current...Read more...

Snyderverse." Whether you know the word or not, odds are you've heard it. And, for several years, it very clearly referred to the series of DC films director Zack Snyder directed and produced at Warner Bros. The world where Henry Cavill is Superman, Ben Affleck is Batman, and a legion of fans convinced a studio to...Read more...

In September, fragments of a near-Earth asteroid were carefully dropped off in the Utah desert. The space rocks hold clues to the origin of the solar system and can possibly answer crucial questions about how our planet came to be-if only we can get to them first.

It's once again time to crane our heads sideways in bafflement at all the strange ways people got sick or hurt this year.

That didn't take long: just two days after livestreaming giantTwitch announced a more permissive approach to certain sexual content, including artistic nudity," the company has slammed on the brakes.

Apple silently fixed an exploit that let Flipper Zero devices mass-bombard nearby iPhones with popup notifications, so much so they would essentially disable users' phones requiring a restart.Read more...

Life comes at you fast, so I'm already recapping what we expect from Samsung's Galaxy S24 flagship, just as this year's release has started popping up all over holiday gift guides. But this is within Samsung's timeline: the company launches its flagship first thing in the year before following up with something more...Read more...