Gizmodo

Generative artificial intelligence is everywhere you look these days, including on the web: advanced predictive text bots such as ChatGPT can now spew out endless reams of text on every topic imaginable and make all this written content natural enough that it could plausibly have been written by a human being.

The latest Apple Watch's big main draw was the double tap gesture control, but now the wearables maker is performing a more lethal kind of double tap on its latest Series 9 watches and premium Ultra 2 device. The company has already taken the device down from its online store, and in just two days, you'll be cut off...Read more...

When Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury ended earlier this year, it did so by taking a step forward in the franchise's history that few other series had the chance to make explicit in their own prior examinations of queer love. But after parent company Bandai pushed back on what was, in the show, a textual...Read more...

Midjourney released an upgraded version of its AI image-generating service, Midjourney V6, on Thursday. The update is a significant improvement that has truly wowed users with its shockingly realistic photos and attention to detail. It may not be here for long, so here's how to get V6 working now.

Few actors in the entire world are more qualified to talk about franchises than Djimon Hounsou. The man who most people first met when he did Steven Spielberg's Amistad has since made an incredible career for himself jumping between fantastical film worlds. He's worked with Marvel. He's worked with DC. He's been in...Read more...

Last month, astronomers focused the Webb Space Telescope on the galaxy MRG-M0138 and found something surprising: a supernova in the ancient universe, magnified for your viewing pleasure by the gravitational lensed galaxy.Read more...

It's been a year of ups and downs, so in 2023 we're particularly grateful for one source of reliable joy: sci-fi, horror, and fantasy entertainment. Here are the fictional characters-be they live-action, animation, made of plastic, or from galaxies far, far away-that helped guide us through.

Will the promise of fewer ads entice more viewers to stream sports on Peacock? NBCUniversal hopes so, having announced Saturday, December 23's match-up between the Buffalo Bills and the Los Angeles Chargers will feature a commercial-free fourth quarter.

Anthropic is reportedly in talks to raise $750 million from Menlo Ventures, which values the startup at $15 billion, according to The Information. Like OpenAI, Anthropic also has a complicated board structure with misaligned values, and this recent influx of cash begs the question: is Anthropic bound to be the next AI...Read more...

With just 11 days left in the year, it's clear that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will not reach his stated goal of achieving 100 Falcon 9 launches in 2023. Nonetheless, the company's achievements during the calendar year are damn impressive, with 2024 poised to be even more remarkable.

Not getting enough sleep is bad for both your physical health and your emotional well-being, as new research shows. The study, a review of existing data from clinical trials, found that even short bouts of sleep deprivation can reduce people's positive emotions and make them more anxious.Read more...

Lego's Technic line of mechanical construction sets mostly sticks to vehicles-lots of cars, trucks, bikes, even the occasional plane. But while it has dipped into the world of science and space exploration before, its latest addition is one of its best ideas outside of its typical wheelhouse. Within the wheelhouse...Read more...

Tinder isn't the best at reading the room or taking a hint. Even though its announcement of the outrageous $500-a-month tier, Tinder Select, led to considerable backlash back in September, the company has recently been expanding the membership offering by inviting additional users to apply for it.

Time's just about up for holiday shopping, and the pressure is on for anyone doing last-minute runs to the mall or searching online for the quickest delivery. If you're looking for that perfect Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, One Piece, Wonka, or Disney100 gift-don't worry, io9's got you covered with this handy list of...Read more...

This story was originally published by Gristand co-published with Fresnoland. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here.

Read more...

Following the launch of its next-generation satellite, Hughes Network Systems is now starting to offer faster internet speeds to compete with its main industry rival SpaceX.Read more...

It's time to look back at spaceflight in 2023, a real two steps forward, one step back" kind of year, filled with highs, lows, and everything in between.

The Einstein Probe, an X-ray telescope managed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, will be ready to launch next month. The probe will look for transient events in X-ray light and try to answer some fundamental questions about black holes and gravitational waves.Read more...

Doctor Who's Millie Gibson introduces her new companion, Ruby Sunday. Snowpiercer's unaired final season will appear... somewhere. Time is up for Shining Vale. Plus, Frank Darabont could direct some of Stranger Things' final season, and a new look at What If? season two. Spoilers, away!

Just when we thought gaming monitors were already going a little too hard on high refresh rates, LG shared Thursday details on a few of next year's pro gamer monitors that put too much stress on the pro." The company's upcoming display is yet another 4K OLED that can hit 4K resolution at 240 Hz. Sounds solid; I guess...Read more...

The initial pitch for the $380 Logitech Astro A50 X Lightspeed headset sounds like an infomercial. It's as if a revived, gamer-ified Billy Mays made a 30-second TV pitch sounding off: Are you tired of shoving all those dongles in your consoles? Do you hate that it's so hard to use the same headset across all your...Read more...

At one moment in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, characters are running through a mutated jungle, chased by lion-sized cockroaches while avoiding violent, human-eating plants. In another moment, multiple characters are standing around, their hair flowing wildly, delivering wooden dialogue that's almost as painful for...Read more...

Over 90,000 users on X experienced an outage on Thursday morning, marking the platform's most severe outage since Elon Musk's takeover in October of 2022, according to Bloomberg. Data from Google Trends shows that many users rushed to Mark Zuckerberg's Threads during the outage.Read more...

The largest lake in Earth's history is now in the Guinness Book of World Records. The Paratethys-or Lake Paratethys, if you will-and contained 10 times more water than all of Earth's modern lakes. In other words, it's long overdo for its place in the Guinness Book.

A life without burps might sound like a blessing, but a new study shows it's anything but. Researchers interviewed patients with the rare condition retrograde cricopharyngeus dysfunction (R-CPD), which makes them unable to burp or belch, about how it affected their daily life. Not only did patients report unpleasant...Read more...

An influential machine learning dataset-the likes of which has been used to train numerous popular image-generation applications-includes thousands of suspected images of child sexual abuse, a new academic report reveals.Read more...

You're not imagining things: air travel has gotten a lot worse. No checked bags, less and less legroom, charging for wifi when it costs the airline the same amount whether or not you use it - it's all part of a strategy that experts call calculated misery," where companies make your experience more unpleasant on...Read more...

Dinosaurs' reign on Earth ended explosively (and then dustily, as we'll mention in this story) when an asteroid slammed into Earth some 66 million years ago. But the dinosaurs-and the diverse ancient creatures they shared the planet with-have kept many secrets locked away in their fossilized remains, secrets which...Read more...

Last year theToronto International Film Festival played host to The People's Joker, a queer, comedic re-imagining of Batman's legendary foil in a Gotham City where crime was outlawed. Warner Bros, naturally, immediately did not care for this, and the film looked like it was destined for a life of limited showings at...Read more...

A new NASA experiment will take to the skies on a balloon, scanning the space between the stars of our galaxy and listening for cosmic ingredients to understand how the Milky Way evolved over time.

All eyes are on Warner Bros. Discovery and Paramount Pictures after the CEOs of each company met Tuesday in New York City to explore a possible merger. According to Axios, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav met with Paramount Global CEO Bob Bakish and Shari Redstone, who owns Paramount's parent company, about...Read more...

Amazon is done making an ass of itself, and making snacks out of ass, as the digital marketplace will no longer sell edible donkey meat in California. The online retailer will not allow Californians to buy hundreds of donkey-based snacks listed on the platform as part of a settlement, according to Wired. But don't...Read more...

If you thought it'd be Hasbro who first got its hands on Ahsoka's trooper repurposing, think again: Hot Toys is giving us our first actual look at Thrawn and the Great Mothers' unholy matrimony of Imperial Remnant and Nightsister witchery in action figure form... although there stands a good chance anything Hasbro has...Read more...

Things we know for certain about Robert De Niro: he's an acclaimed actor whose career is still going strong after over 50 years-and his outspoken personality means he's no stranger to controversy. His feelings on Donald Trump are well-documented, but apparently Killers of the Flower Moon producers Apple would rather...Read more...

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

With a dizzying array of streaming services available, there was no shortage of great TV this year-and while io9 has already shared our top 20 shows of 2023, today we're revealing our top TV moments... all 50 of them. These are the moments when we laughed, cheered, shed a tear, shrieked in disbelief, and/or realized...Read more...

In the last year, computers started acting strangely human. As OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever put it, you can think of AI as a digital brain", one that's directly modeled after that of a human. Just like a young child, AI has incentives and learns from those around it. If ChatGPT was a young child, it would be growing...Read more...

Scythians in modern-day Ukraine made leather out of human skin, a team of researchers has determined, likely as a macabre trophy item. The discovery affirms a claim by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote extensively on the Scythian way of life.Read more...

Every year, there are a few dates I immediately look forward to on the calendar. My birthday, of course. My wedding anniversary. Christmas. Super Bowl. San Diego Comic-Con. And, maybe above all others, DesignerCon.Read more...

We're still discovering new ways covid-19 can harm us, some four years after the emergence of this complicated viral disease. In a recent report, doctors in Massachusetts describe a teen girl whose vocal cords became paralyzed soon after a bout of covid-19. The girl required a tracheostomy in place for more than a...Read more...

Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are all set with their Moon landers. Now they just need their rockets prepped and the launch windows to swing open. But once underway, these NASA-funded missions, slated for early 2024, will chart a new course for the future of private space exploration.

This story is part of our new Future of Gaming series, a three-site look at gaming's most pioneering technologies, players, and makers.

Experimental rockets, Moon landers, planetary flybys, breathtaking spacewalks, and vintage boosters-these are just a few of the many stories that contributed to the most striking and memorable images of 2023.

Four astronauts are getting ready to travel to the Moon and back for NASA's Artemis 2 mission, and the space agency is making sure that the crew is well-prepared in case things go wrong during the 10-day journey through space.Read more...

When the sunglasses go on, Ryan Gosling disappears and becomes just Ken.Read more...

Read more...

If you ever enrolled in the Apple Family Sharing with a family member between 2015 and 2019, you may entitled to a cut from the $25 million legal settlement Apple agreed to pay. MacRumors did some math and claims you could get between $30 to $50 if you qualify.

The best sci-fi movie of 2023 is already making an early play for the best sci-fi movie of 2024 on a technicality. After its unprecedented international success, Godzilla Minus One is returning to Japanese theaters for a special release in black and white.