Gizmodo

For those in the northern hemisphere, it is officially the season to bust out the box of holiday-themed sweaters. I used to have a couple I'd cycle through, but then my house got crowded, and I had to find them new homes. Now, I live vicariously through press releases and my coworkers who try on these sweaters to get...Read more...

The bright star Betelgeuse, a prominent member of the Orion constellation, is set to be occulted by the asteroid Leona on December 11. This occurrence, expected to last no more than 10 seconds, will cause the star to temporarily vanish from sight, a phenomenon visible along a narrow path on Earth.

There are a lot of AI image generators on the market, and it's hard to know which ones are great and which ones can be skipped. We put some leading AI image-generating models to the test and found that there are huge differences.Read more...

Elon Musk's electric car company has suffered a reversal of fortune in its ongoing battle with Sweden's labor unions. Turns out, Teslas won't be getting license plates in the Nordic country-at least, not for the foreseeable future.Read more...

Which Christopher Nolan Batman film is your favorite? Most people would say The Dark Knight-which, clearly, is incredible. Personally, my pick is Batman Begins, just because of the way it handles Batman's origin. And we'd imagine someone out there is just such a big Tom Hardy fan, their favorite is The Dark Knight...Read more...

At a boarding school in the early 1970s, a student who's been eagerly awaiting winter vacation gets a call with bad news: they'll be spending Christmas at school instead of with their family. Is it Alexander Payne's new Oscar-buzz movie The Holdovers-or Jenn Wexler's new Shudder release The Sacrifice Game?Read more...

On the internet, most news gets forgotten very quickly. Anything that sticks around for more than a few days does so with good reason, usually because it's so incredibly weird. In the world of movies, an example of that is the rumored Avatar sequel titles that were first reported way back in 2018.Read more...

When Hayao Miyazaki announced that The Boy and the Heron might be his last picture, Studio Ghibli's U.S. distributor GKIDS knew it had a big task ahead, assemblinga very special dub cast for the English-language version of the film.Read more...

This weekend, Neil Patrick Harris will do battle with the Doctor and Donna Noble in the third and final Doctor Who 60th anniversary special-playing a new version of one of the show's oldest and most obscure villains. Mostly obscured by the fact the last story they were in aired 57 years ago, and 75% of it is lost to...Read more...

In what's become a holiday tradition (and in the wake of free viewing windows for the Peanuts Halloween and Thanksgiving specials), A Charlie Brown Christmas will be streaming free on Apple TV+ on Saturday, December 16 and Sunday, December 17.

A day after asking the world to stopwith the Deadpool 3 set photos, Ryan Reynolds made a surprising next move. Reynolds not only released some new Deadpool 3 set photos, but he made sure the photos were filled with yet-to-be-revealed cameos.Read more...

Elon Musk's snarky, anti-woke chatbot, Grok, started rolling out to X Premium Plus users on Thursday. X users who paid $16 a month, or $22 via the app, for a blue checkmark started receiving the added feature of getting roasted by xAI's premiere generative AI chatbot.Read more...

Panera Bread is once again being blamed for causing someone's death with its highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade" energy drink. The family of 46-year-old Dennis Brown has filed a wrongful death suit against the chain this week, alleging that Brown's heart-related death in early October was caused by the drink. It's...Read more...

We have officially reached that stage in AI popularity, where it's no surprise that it could change the way we interactwith our phones. We just saw that happening with the Google Pixel 8 Pro with therecently revealed Gemini AI model. Of course, Apple had to catch up, too. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo published a Medium...Read more...

More Batman holiday mayhem is on the way, this time in the shape of young Damian Wayne taking up the Caped Crusader's mantle in Merry Little Batman.Read more...

Police alleged a historic chocolate plantation owner murdered and burned the body of one of the leading figures in Hollywood who helped bring us the incredible special effects of some of the 1990's best films, Dominican police said.

Every holiday season, I sit down and watch the classics. Films that fill me with joy and bring together friends and family. Films like It's a Wonderful Life, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Scrooged, Home Alone, A Christmas Story, and Die Hard.Read more...

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED's current issue. This month's selection is Carbon Zero" by D. Thomas Minton. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED's website. Enjoy!

Nintendo quashed its first live event of the new year and similarly postponed the tournament finals for two of its mainstay franchises due to a wave of threats" targeting employees, spectators, and venue staff centered around an upcoming Splatoon 3 tournament.Read more...

Angelina Jolie is setting up a return for Maleficent 3. Natalie Portman says she'd be open to a return to Star Wars. Iman Vellani shares her ideal villain for Ms. Marvel season 2. Plus, more looks at Netflix's live-action Yu Yu Hakusho. Spoilers, away!

Google's launch of Gemini yesterday was like a bellowing announcement that a new king has arrived in the AI space, but Apple had its own AI launch, or more like a quiet whimper that tried to go unnoticed. The iPhone creator released an open-source machine learning framework, MLX, that runs on Apple's chips. MLX could...Read more...

Great things can come in small, slightly repulsive packages. Scientists in the Philippines have detailed the molecular secrets of Stichopus cf. horrens, a sea cucumber species that bears more than a passing resemblance to something else. Their findings indicate that these animals contain several compounds that could...Read more...

It's almost time to jet-set for the holiday season in your fandom best to turn heads and raise brows at airport lounges.Read more...

California Forever, the quixotic, billionaire-backed effort to craft a new city out of $800 million in Bay Area farmland parcels, continues to struggle. The project, which is owned by an opaque parent company, Flannery Associates, and backed by a slew of Silicon Valley luminaries, envisions a utopian new community...Read more...

Today's big Gemini AI announcement from Google was inevitably going to suck all the air from any other big Pixel product updates. However, amid all the talk of native AI on Pixel 8 Pros, Google is also dropping a big feature-rich Android 14 update for Pixel cameras that the company claims will enhance your videos...Read more...

Oregon Senator Rob Wyden alleged foreign governments may be spying on Americans through their push notifications in a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) Wednesday. Sen. Wyden asked Apple and Google to share this information with the U.S. government as well, which would evade the 1986 Electronic...Read more...

A woman's medical exam turned into a literal pain in the butt, thanks to a poorly placed firearm. An adverse event report sent to the Food and Drug Administration earlier this year details an alleged incident where the woman was shot in the right buttock by her own gun that was activated by a magnetic resonance...Read more...

As expected, HBO just confirmed that season two of The Last of Us won't arrive until 2025. Which is certainly a long time but was mostly expected, since filming won't begin until early next year. In the meantime though, fans of similar genre content have a ton more to look forward to and a new trailer puts a spotlight...Read more...

An open letter to the White House from 17 major climate change and anti-disinformation groups says President Joe Biden and his administration have largely ignored the toll AI is already taking on a fast-warming world. At the top of these groups' demands is a new rule executive order that would big tech to share just...Read more...

Google launched Gemini, its new supercharge AI model, on Wednesday, a technology that will touch on nearly every part of the search giant's business. The company has spent the last year lagging behind OpenAI, its chief artificial intelligence rival. But Gemini is Google's long-anticipated attempt to prove its AI is...Read more...

Apple may be done for the year releasing any new hardware, but fans will only have to sit tight for just a few months into 2024 for brand-new tablets and laptops. A new report claims that Apple will share details on new, more powerful iPads and MacBook Airs coming soon. Everything is supposed to get a shiny, new M3...Read more...

Disney+ subscribers may have already noticed a new addition to the carousel on the app's home screen: along with Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic, there's now a link to access Hulu content. The two apps won't officially merge until March, but the beta test is now live.Read more...

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With the actors' strike now officially over, filming is once again up and running on Marvel's next big movie, Deadpool 3. And just as was happening before the strike stopped production, photos from the set have revealed several potential spoilers and the film's star is pretty bummed about it.Read more...

Meta released a standalone AI image generator on Wednesday that will convert your text-based queries into fantastical, high-resolution images in mere seconds. The free tool, Imagine with Meta AI, is powered by Emu, the company's image foundation model.Read more...

When one of the biggest stars of a franchise dies, obviously that franchise is no longer going to be the same. Such is the case for the Fast and Furious franchise which, 10 years ago last week, lost one of its original stars, Paul Walker. Since Walker's death, several films have been made continuing the Fast story,...Read more...

Inconsistent labels in the OSIRIS-REx landing plans are what caused the out-of-order parachute deployment during the return capsule's descent to Earth on September 24, NASA stated in a release yesterday.Read more...

If you're the proud owner of a Google Pixel 8 Pro-or are soon to be one this holiday season-you're about to be the latest guinea pig for the company's big AI experiment. Google's flagship Android phone is going to be held aloft in a sweeping round of new AI capabilities thanks to the company's new Gemini AI model. The...Read more...

Kid Cudi is working on a wild new monster movie. Mahershala Ali offers a tiny update on Marvel's Blade movie. Plus, there's good news for Foundation and Fionna and Cake, with confirmations of new seasons on the way. Spoilers, now!

Update: Microsoft confirmed the issue was relating to a bug in the latest Windows update. Users on Microsoft's forums complained that their printers were all being converted to the HP LaserJet M101-M106. All the printer metadata was being converted on both Windows 10 and 11 platforms as well as Windows Server 2012 or...Read more...

Google unveiled its new AI model Gemini on Wednesday, giving the public a first look at a technology that's had the tech press mired in rumors. Gemini, the company's most powerful AI to date, comes to Bard and Pixel 8 Pro smartphones starting today, and will soon integrate with other products across Google's services...Read more...

Keychron, the brand behind some of Gizmodo's favorite mechanical keyboards for beginning enthusiasts, has launched a Kickstarter for a keyboard with a new switch. It's called the Keychron Q1 HE, with HE" referring to the Hall effect switches featured on this board, which use magnets rather than pins to detect...Read more...

Astrobiologists suspect there could be alien life just out of reach in our solar system, in oceans hidden beneath icy crusts on moons circling Jupiter and Saturn. But unlike the surface of Mars, which can be explored by rovers and landers, these mysterious oceans are currently inaccessible to us. In an effort to...Read more...

Darren Lynn Bousman has directed four Saw movies-parts 2-4, and the Chris Rock-starring Spiral-and while his latest, The Cello, has some gruesome elements, it's a big departure for the filmmaker in many ways. Ahead of the film's release December 8, io9 got a chance to ask him more.Read more...

As a mega fan of The Legend of Zelda series, news of a movie adaptation finally happening instantly filled me with fear. How could anyone possibly take this franchise, which has spanned decades and dozens of games, and turn it into a worthwhile movie? And really? The dude who made The Maze Runner is the guy to do it?Read more...

Cassian Andor will return. It's just going to happen later than expected.Read more...

Baldur's Gate 3 is an epic game of choice and consequence-who lives, who dies, who tells your story, who fails every possible perception check they can. But I fear, fellow wanderers across virtual Faerun, some of you are making the choices of cowards.Read more...

Microsoft launched the Seeing AI app on Android devices Monday, expanding the free app that narrates the world to millions more blind and low-vision users. Seeing AI is now available for free in 18 languages on the Google Play Store with plans to expand to 36 languages next year.Read more...

The final mission of the European Space Agency's Vega rocket has encountered a bizarre setback. Key propellant tanks required for its last flight were found damaged in a landfill, jeopardizing the scheduled 2024 launch.

Better late than never.Read more...