Gizmodo

The only thing more attractive to 5th graders than snow days are the days when the teacher wheels an A/V cart into the classroom. Even educational videos are a welcome reprieve from a teacher lecturing at the whiteboard, but according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a new recall means there’s now reason to…Read more...

I can’t stop thinking about it. Since the minute it was officially announced that James Mangold would be writing and directing a film about the Dawn of the Jedi, I just keep dreaming about the possibilities. Sure, I’m curious about what Rey is doing with the New Jedi Order, though I wish we could’ve seen Luke try…Read more...

After decades of hype, biometrically enabled “smart” guns are officially on the market. Colorado-based Biofire Technologies this week said it released the first commercially available smart handgun which uses a fingerprint and facial recognition biometrics identity verification tool to unlock a 9mm handgun intended…Read more...

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A warning to those of you looking forward to celebrating 4/20 in style this year: Your weed might not be as potent as advertised. In a new study this week, scientists found that cannabis products bought from legal dispensaries in Colorado were often much lower in THC levels than their labels indicated.

The viral word game Wordle has spawned its fair share of clones, from Octordle to Absurdle to the movie-based Framed. Unfortunately, Heardle, the Spotify-owned, music-based version of the word guessing game, will be shutting down next month.

The streaming wars might be in a weird place right now, as all over the place the boom of Content has seemed to slow as studios rebalance their expectations for their platforms’ futures. But that’s not stopping Amazon from going full steam ahead on a swathe of reboots.

Parler is apparently getting another lease on life, but first it has to die. The “free speech alternative” social network, popular among conservatives and the likes of Alex Jones, officially has a new owner. And that new owner has put the site on hiatus for an unspecified length of time.

Melissa Barrera is heading to her Scream 6 directors’ Universal Monsters movie. A new Deadite rises in clips from Evil Dead Rise. Plus, behind the scenes on The Little Mermaid, and wedding bells ring for Archie and Cheryl on Riverdale. Spoilers, away!

A major software update to the Curiosity rover will allow the robot to drive faster on the Martian surface and reduce wear on its wheels, potentially boosting the mission’s lifespan.

Nothing gets the conservatives riled up quite like companies promoting progressive values. As a result, a conservative nonprofit named Consumers’ Research is providing “Woke Alerts” to notify you when your favorite company goes too woke.

Seanan McGuire is one of the most prolific fantasy authors writing today, but there’s no drop in quality to go with all that quantity, as her astonishing array of literary awards and nominations can attest. Her Hugo-nominated October Daye urban fantasy series has been going strong for 14 years, and this year brings a…Read more...

This week’s Twitter kerfuffle is all about public funding. Elon Musk decided to label National Public Radio’s account first as “government-influenced media,” which it previously applied to state-operated media outlets that shade into propaganda. Later, the label was changed to “government-funded media.”

The EU’s European Data Protection Board, or EDPB, is launching a task force to monitor ChatGPT, a move that indicates that the bloc’s privacy regulators are getting serious about looking into the LLM’s potential privacy violations.Read more...

If you were among those who had problems with their Apple weather app last week, you’re not alone. Keeping an eye on the forecast for practical reasons (what to wear, outdoor plans) is important. And knowing the forecast is especially critical when wild weather hits, whether it’s dealing with flooding, hurricanes, or…Read more...

A highly-anticipated mission to Jupiter and its intriguing moons is officially underway, with an Ariane-5 rocket successfully delivering the JUICE probe to space earlier today. The craft will now begin an eight-year journey through the solar system to reach icy worlds that may host some form of life.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced on Thursday that users will be able to offer subscriptions to their followers, piggybacking off the platform’s previous “Super Follow” function. The new money-making effort will allow users to offer subscription content to their followers for a small fee.Read more...

The time is quickly nearing for SpaceX to perform the first fully integrated orbital flight test of Starship. Here’s how the historic launch will unfold and what you can expect from Elon Musk’s revolutionary megarocket.Read more...

The happy experiences guests have at Disney Parks are the sum of the many moving parts that go into the creation of all the attractions—including new ride Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway and nighttime spectaculars like World of Color: One. io9 talked to a trio of Disney employees, all women in STEM, whose work…Read more...

Radio Silence—directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, and producer Chad Villella—successfully rebooted one of horror’s biggest franchises with Scream and Scream VI. Now they’ve tapped the star of those films, Melissa Barrera, to join another movie reviving a beloved property from horror’s past, in the form…Read more...

Debuting in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #16, Monica Rambeau has had a hell of a superhero career. She was the first female Captain Marvel, even before Carol Danvers. She’s been on countless teams, including multiple versions of the Avengers. Her ability to become and project anything on the electromagnetic scale makes…Read more...

Police have made an arrest in the murder of Bob Lee, 43, the tech executive and co-founder of Cash App who was found stabbed to death in downtown San Francisco last week.

As more companies realize it costs quite a bit to create generative AI content, we may be coming to the end of free, open source AI models. One of the biggest companies that once proclaimed open source from the rooftops to all that would hear is quickly trying to sell a bigger, badder, more deep fake-capable AI model…Read more...

A Massachusetts service member who has been described as both a “young, racist gun enthusiast” and an internet “troll” has been arrested in connection with the series of national security leaks that have roiled the U.S. government over the past week.Read more...

Agricultural equipment makers like John Deere will be legally required to give Colorado farmers manuals for diagnostic software and other repair tools thanks to the state’s new right-to-repair law. The first-of-its-find legislation could have wide-reaching ripple effects, especially in the tech industry where consumer…Read more...

Obi-Wan Kenobi won’t be saying “Hello there” again anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen eventually. At Star Wars Celebration last week, fans of the franchise heard all about upcoming movies and shows in a galaxy far, far away. One title that was absent from that list was Obi-Wan Kenobi, a show that…Read more...

In need of some extra cash? Well then, dust off your meteorite hunting boots and get yourself to rural Maine. A geology museum in the Pine Tree State has a mission for you, and if you succeed the prize is pretty big.

A series of swatting calls that have occurred over several months across the United States have been pinned down to a Telegram user, who claims to have left explosives in locations like high schools using a digitally synthesized voice.

A NASA probe sent to observe Jupiter’s swarm of asteroids recently caught the first glimpse of its rocky targets, capturing deep-space images of four of the mysterious Trojans.Read more...

If you’re using a Mac, take a quick peek at your desktop. It’s probably filled with lots of confusingly labelled folders full of random files as a result of a half-hearted attempt to organize your digital life. You can now add one more unlabelled blue folder to the chaos, except this one slips into your pocket.Read more...

This year has seen leakers saying the new Apple iPhone SE would be scrapped, then walking that back, and now reasserting that it’s not coming after all, at least for a while. It’s a lot of back-and-forth for what’s not even the best phone Apple makes.Read more...

Matt Taibbi, one of the “Twitter Files” reporters selected by Elon Musk himself, no longer tweets. Instead, the journalist once-hell bent on holding Wall Street to task, now “truths” on Donald Trump-affiliated social platform, Truth Social.

We all know how Stranger Things season four breakout Eddie Munson meets his end: heroically facing beasties in the Upside Down while powered by tasty riffs. But how did Eddie, who was played by Joseph Quinn in the hit Netflix series, get to be so rad in the first place? A new tie-in novel will reveal all.Read more...

It’s hard to believe you could write a computer program you can’t control. But with the latest generation of AI chatbots developed by OpenAI, that seems to be the situation. The recent chapter in this unsettling story comes from the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI. In a new study, researchers found they could…Read more...

In new video game Tron: Identity, the story of Tron and Tron: Legacy continues in a whole new Grid of Kevin Flynn’s making.Read more...

Even with the Xbox being over 20 years old (let that sink in), Microsoft has yet to jump into the booming gaming handheld console market. Still, at least its employees—both past and present—have made it clear that the company is more than capable of creating a dedicated platform for gaming handhelds, which is…Read more...

Womb City, the debut novel from acclaimed short fiction writer Tlotlo Tsamaase, is described as “The Handmaid’s Tale meets Get Out” and a “cyberpunk body-hopping Africanfuturist ghost story.” In other words, this is not your typical dystopian mystery, and io9 is thrilled to share a first look.

BeReal, a popular new spontaneous image-sharing app designed to show life, “without filters,” had the highest proportion of child users exposed to sexual content of any major social media app, according to a new survey shared with Gizmodo. Larger apps like YouTube and TikTok had more overall incidents of exposure to…Read more...

Insider’s global editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson has announced to both the newsroom and the public that the outlet will begin experimenting with ways to leverage ChatGPT for journalism.

Lower Decks as a Star Trek show already has the huge vibes of playing a tabletop roleplaying campaign in a world far more serious than the main players. So it makes perfect sense, at long last, for Modiphus’ excellent Star Trek Adventures RPG to get on the fun in an official capacity.Read more...

A large new randomized clinical trial should put people who are ever in need of a blood transfusion more at ease. Scientists in Canada have found that the sex of a blood donor had no significant effect on the recipient’s chances of survival. Several past studies had suggested a possible risk, but this appears to be…Read more...

Italy, the first country in the world to ban ChatGPT, said OpenAI could restore access to the chatbot if it adopts a series of measures to protect data privacy, including allowing users to correct or delete the incorrect things ChatGPT says about them.Read more...

When animation studios are asked to be a part of Star Wars: Visions, they have free rein to tell any story they want, as long as it’s set in a galaxy far, far away. To a point. While it’s not against the rules to make films with established characters, that’s not the intention of the series.Read more...

Even our ancient ancestors managed to figure out that, to comfortably get from point A to point B without walking, you needed wheels that were perfectly round. And yet, the determined engineers behind the YouTube channel The Q (no, not that Q) managed to build a bicycle with square wheels that rolls as comfortably as…Read more...

Finally, a movie will explore the age-old question “What would Dracula do on a boat?” It’s called The Last Voyage of the Demeter and the trailer is here.Read more...

A group of celebrities will soon have to leave the cozy confines of Earth and get transported to another world, competing against one another in a simulated Martian environment for a new reality TV series.Read more...

Snapchat is looking to expand its massive sound library—called SnapChat sounds—with a new deal between its parent company Snap and several major music distributors across the world.

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You know that classic zombie movie scene where the everyone thinks the monster is dead, but then suddenly it’s not?