Gizmodo

It seems like just yesterday that we were decking the halls and then stumbling through them after long nights partying on New Year’s Eve. But it’s somehow now February already, and if January feels like a complete blur, we’ve rounded up the most interesting and most curious gadgets of the past month so you can catch…Read more...

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a… Chinese spy balloon? According to China, the answer is a sheepish “uh, no.”Read more...

At 9:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night in a small Manhattan comedy club, Annie Rauwerda brought down the full house with a PowerPoint slide, a blurry picture of Vienna bread illustrating a Wikipedia entry. The baked good was enhanced with motion-blur, looking inexplicably like an oncoming car. The audience, around a hundred…Read more...

Want to save money on drugs? You could head to GoodRx.com. Type in the name of a medication, and the company will give you a coupon to use at a pharmacy. But there’s a little problem, one that GoodRx forgot to tell its customers about. Going back to at least 2017, GoodRx sent details about the medications you take to…Read more...

There’s beginning to be more to Vegas than the strip, and at the forefront of the play paradise destination is Area 15, home to immersive distillery Lost Spirits (and soon to be expanding with Universal Studios, too.) Lost Spirits is themed around sci-fi adventure literature; it boasts a futuristically aged selection…Read more...

Defense officials claim that a Chinese surveillance balloon has been drifting over the northern part of the United States for the past several days. The balloon is thought to have traveled over a number of different states where sensitive defense installations (read: nuclear silos) are located.Read more...

Star Wars canon is fascinated with the homeworld of the Mandalorians—ever since The Clone Wars radically overhauled the status quo of its people, the planet has loomed large, casting a shadow of intrigue across the works of Dave Filoni. When The Mandalorian returns March 1 for its third season, we’ll be heading back…Read more...

Paizo, the company heading up the establishment of the Open RPG Creative License (ORC) in the wake of Wizards of the Coasts’ mishandling of its attempted OGL update, is now offering nearly $4oo worth of product for only $25 through Humble Bundle. A percentage of proceeds will go to the charity Code for America,…Read more...

Senators Joe Manchin and Ted Cruz have teamed up across the aisle to introduce a new bill that would stop the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) from restricting gas stoves. The legislation, titled the “Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act,” was introduced during a Thursday committee meeting and would ban any…Read more...

Pope Francis caused a bit of ruckus on the internet Thursday after he seemed to support the use of the middle finger in a Twitter post. The post, which has since been removed, highlighted the middle finger, saying it was a symbol of honesty.Read more...

In a roadside diner, an aging former boxer (Seinfeld’s Brian George) tells a friendly server (The School for Good and Evil’s Rachel Bloom) a magical tale from his fighting past—involving a very special match between a monster made of radioactive oatmeal and a steam-powered robot. No wonder he gets misty when he sees…Read more...

For the photographer who’s overwhelmed by all the equipment they need to set up before snapping the perfect shot, Benro will soon be introducing what it claims to be the “world’s first auto-leveling travel tripod,” which uses self-adjusting legs to perfectly level itself at the push of a button.Read more...

New York City has always been a major hub for financial, commercial, and cultural development with its iconic skyscrapers and dense population. But over the past decade or so, we’ve been able to see the way the city has changed like never before—with Google Maps. Google Maps allows users to (depending on the location)…Read more...

Get your Cullen squad ready, this new Twilight collection includes the coveted baseball jersey.Read more...

The Biden Administration thinks Apple and Google “act as gatekeepers” over their respective mobile ecosystems. A report from the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) published yesterday states that the current mobile app store model is “harmful to consumers and…Read more...

It’s been an exciting week for fans of superhero movies, especially if you love DC Comics. This week, James Gunn and Peter Safran, who together run DC Studios at Warner Bros., revealed the start of their 8-10 year plan to bring DC heroes like Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman back to their rightful place on the…Read more...

HBO has another bonafide hit on its hand with the recent release of The Last of Us, the post-apocalyptic TV show based on the hit video game series produced by Naughty Dog. Both the game and show (at least through the first three episodes) weave together a blend of pulse-pounding action and gut-wrenching drama, as…Read more...

TikTok has potential bans weighing heavy on its mind, so much so that it’s planning to completely remodel how it will decide to ban accounts that violate its policies.Read more...

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission completed a report on its investigation into the killing of a white rhino at Wild Florida, a drive-through safari park in Kenansville, Florida. Investigators found that the animal was shot to death after it escaped its enclosure, just a day after its arrival at the…Read more...

Fans of Hulu animated series Hit-Monkey had probably long already accepted that the show was done. The series debuted in late 2021, ran for 10 episodes, people liked it, and then it was radio silence for over a year. In today’s day and age, that length of non-news almost always means bad news. But for Hit-Monkey, it…Read more...

It’s no secret that ChatGPT, the large language model-powered artificial intelligence from OpenAI, has taken the internet by storm. Everyone is talking about it, everywhere online—Gizmodo included. The AI chatbot can almost instantly generate paragraphs of human-like, fluid text in answer to basically any prompt you…Read more...

Central Texas has been frozen since earlier this week after an Arctic front rolled into the Southern U.S. Parts of central, west, and north Texas and nearby states Arkansas and Tennessee were under ice storm warnings, per the National Weather Service Prediction Center. The freezing temperatures and sleet should end by…Read more...

Author Laline Paull scored a hit with her 2015 debut The Bees, dubbed “The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Hunger Games,” but with bees as its characters. Her latest, Pod, dives into a different aspect of the natural world—the ocean—by introducing an adventurous dolphin who follows an unconventional path. io9 has an excerpt…Read more...

Astronomers just directly measured the mass of a lone white dwarf using the Hubble Space Telescope for the first time. The dwarf—the core remnant of a star—is named LAWD 37, and it burned out about a billion years ago.Read more...

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2022 was a year Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook in its healthier years, would rather forget. A combination of stalling user growth on its primary social networks, continued regulatory skirmishes, and a near total collapse of investor confidence in the company’s metaverse ambitions left Meta, valued at…Read more...

Here’s the good news for Netflix’s upcoming reality game show based on the hit Korean thriller Squid Game: unlike the original series, no one involved appears to have been brutally murdered. The bad news, however, is that on top of reports that its contestants claimed to have suffered intensely during filming, now…Read more...

State officials say California’s snowpack is the highest it’s been in decades for early February, the Los Angeles Times reported.Read more...

Everyone who has seen episode three of The Last of Us has been absolutely weepy about the romance at its center. “Long Long Time”—named after Linda Ronstadt’s 1970 hit, which plays a key part in the story—sent the internet into collective hysterics over its tender old men surviving during the apocalypse. But while the…Read more...

A first generation iPhone in its original box is going up for auction and an estimate says that the tech could go for as much as $50,000.

Although Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves comes out in less than two months, Wizards of the Coast is still trying to buff the party after the Open Gaming License fiasco in January. The newest adventure book—Keys from the Golden Vault—features 13 heist-themed adventures for levels 1-11, and is a “serendipitous” …Read more...

“What did the fish say when it hit the wall?” the pixilated and jerking form of Jerr—sorry, I mean “Larry,” asks the invisible audience. Then there’s a pregnant pause that lasts too long, even for an amateur stand up comedy act. Finally, the punchline: “…dam”Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported an outbreak of extensively drug-resistant bacteria linked to contaminated eye drop products. Over 50 cases have been found to date, with most patients having reportedly used EzriCare Artificial Tears, while the CDC has found the bacteria in opened bottles of…Read more...

A small radioactive capsule has been found more than three weeks after it went missing in Western Australia while being transported from a Rio Tinto mine to a facility in Perth. The cesium-137 capsule was found under extraordinary circumstances, and WA Emergency Services Minister Stephen Dawson said in a press…Read more...

When Star Wars: Visions debuted in 2021, it was justly celebrated for how it allowed some of Japan’s greatest anime studios carte blanche to create their own, well, visions of how the Star Wars galaxy could look. The results were frequently stellar, but season two will be made beyond just Japan. The next series has…Read more...

Elon Musk’s Twitter has debts to pay. And in the billionaire’s quest to monetize everything about his recently acquired social media site, Twitter is set to start charging for access to its Application Program Interface (API).

From the outside, the community of self-described “involuntary celibates” AKA “incels” is depressingly nihilistic as much as it is misogynistic. Beyond the recent reports about so-called “incel culture’s” bogus links to movies like Joker that borders on moral panic, there is something incredibly sad about a group of…Read more...

The cast and crew of Cocaine Bear cannot emphasize enough that their movie features a bear on cocaine. James Gunn says Harley Quinn will continue in his new vision for DC. Plus, what’s coming when La Brea returns. Spoilers get!

Amazon’s drone delivery service was all talk and no action for nearly a decade, until this past December, when customers were finally able to purchase their favorite products and have them shipped via Amazon Prime Air. However, sources close to the project told The Information this week that Amazon’s drones have only…Read more...

Super Bowl LVII is coming up fast, with the Kansas City Chiefs taking on the Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday, February 12—the action gets underway at 4.30pm MST, at the home of the Arizona Cardinals, the State Farm Stadium in Glendale.

Dallas Zoo officials set the internet at ease this week when they shared that their two missing emperor tamarin monkeys had been found safe and unharmed by police one day after they were taken. The story isn’t done yet, though. The Dallas Zoo wants justice, and it’s offering a $25,000 reward for information that leads…Read more...

OpenAI has announced the launch of a paid version of ChatGPT that, for $20 a month, will allow you to...uh, keep using ChatGPT, I guess.

We hardly knew ye, Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman’s Butler on HBO Max, formerly known as just Pennyworth on Epix. The origin series for the Wayne family’s confidant and eventual keeper of the Batcave is coming to an end after its third season. Wait, it got three seasons?Read more...

Meta has released its final quarterly and full year financial results for 2022, and the results are...mixed for the company formerly known as Facebook. Meta’s revenue slightly exceeded analyst’s expectations, but nonetheless the tech giant hasn’t fully recovered from what’s been a difficult past 12-months.

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s work is instantly recognizable: the giant, colorful canvases; the Ben-Day dots; the distinctively comic book-inspired images. That last element has caused controversy over the years, as critics point out “inspired” can sure look a lot like “ripped off.” A new documentary digs in.Read more...

Researchers used data from the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope to re-calculate the total amount and distribution of matter in the universe. They found that there’s about six times as much dark matter in the universe as there is regular matter, a finding consistent with previous measurements.Read more...

The phrase, “you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain” comes to mind with Hasbro’s latest addition to its Transformers toy line, as longtime Autobot leader, Optimus Prime, is now trading his alternate truck mode for a dart-firing Nerf blaster.Read more...

A federal judge in California has rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to block Meta from acquiring virtual reality startup Within for an estimated $400 million. The decision, which all but greenlights one of Meta’s largest acquisitions in years, marks a major victory for the company and a stinging defeat…Read more...

To paraphrase Luke Skywalker, “If there’s a nice center to the universe, Mandalore is the planet it’s farthest from.” The home planet of Jango Fett, Bo-Katan Kryze, and Sabine Wren is a hellhole, and it has been throughout the entirety of Star Wars’ main continuity. So much so, in fact, that I don’t think anyone…Read more...

Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced he was making his Twitter account private early on Wednesday to determine the level of engagement his tweets received.Read more...