Gizmodo

There'd be no science fiction without a 19-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816 writing the tale of a scientist who their undead creature to life. Ever since, her tale of creation has inspired adaptations that have propelled the evolution of genre in film, television, and even music.Read more...

Sean Gunn has been tapped to play Maxwell Lord in James Gunn's new DC Universe.Read more...

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

Indiana Jones movies always end with the impossible. Ghosts coming out of an ark, a rock healing a village, a cup granting immortality, aliens with crystal skulls. So, when Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny gets to its big third-act moment, it's shocking, but also fits right in. However, getting to that idea...Read more...

Note: As I was getting ready to publish this piece, Beeper's servers began faltering. TechCrunch reports that Beeper Mini had lost access to Apple's servers, though I'm still able to send text-based messages with a bit of delay. This piece covers the experience before this breaking news hit. I reached out to Beeper to...Read more...

Presto, the self-acclaimed leader in drive-thru voice automation" wants artificial intelligence to take your order. The drive-thru AI company works with Carls Jr, Chili's, and Del Taco, and it partially runs on ChatGPT. However, SEC filings from November reveal that Presto's AI may not be capable of taking your...Read more...

Hideo Kojima's in the news for his appearance last night at the Game Awards where he announced he's working on a spooky Xbox game, OD, alongside Oscar-winning horror director Jordan Peele. Now, fans wishing to know more about the popular game designer (Metal Gear, Death Stranding) can look forward to the streaming...Read more...

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Godzilla Minus One's critical and public acclaim has skyrocketed it to box-office heights-heights so worthy of such a titanic being that Toho has had to dash its plans to bring the film's theatrical run to an end and extend screenings. But now the King of All Monsters is now also the king of live-action Japanese cinemaRead more...

If you want a Star Trek or Transformers fix, Paramount+ is your go-to. But once you've landed on the streamer, you'll find plenty of sci-fi options beyond just those big franchises. Here are 10 sci-fi tales to get keep you going after you've finished watching Bumblebee or binging Strange New Worlds.

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A team of paleontologists revealed a remarkable fossil: a young tyrannosaurid with the hindlimbs of two year-old dinosaurs in its stomach. In other words, this theropod was chowing down on baby legs.Read more...

It's been Denis Villeneuve's plan since day one: adapt Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel, Dune, in two parts, and then bring the story of Paul Atreides to a close with an adaptation of the follow-up, Dune Messiah. He's been saying that since before the release of Dune: Part One but, at that time, it was more a dream...Read more...

On paper, The Cello is fascinating. It's directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who's made four Saw movies; it features Saw villain Tobin Bell and Oscar winner Jeremy Irons, and most of it takes place (and was filmed in) Saudi Arabia. It's also about a demonic cello. Unfortunately, those elements don't quite come together,...Read more...

It seems the universe is always trying to push us back in time. We just saw JBL releasing a turntable like it's 1994. Yamaha is returning to the glorious Y2K with its new CD-C603RK rack-mountable CD player.

The Game Awards brought with them, alongside a host of rapid-fire award ceremonies, the usual and unfortunately actual main event of the show: a whole bunch of new looks at upcoming video games. Here's the best of what we saw from the genre worlds of sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and then some out of last night's show.

The curious case of the conspicuously absent cherry tomato has finally been put to rest eight months after the lab-grown edible went missing.

Google is trying to sprinkle a bit of AI spice into the staid flavor of note-taking apps with NotebookLM, an AI assistant app focused on helping writers, educators, students, or other creative types.

Google released Gemini, its newest generative AI chatbot that promises to be better than ChatGPT, alongside a splashy demo video showcasing its capabilities. A Google developer blog post reveals that the viral showcase was edited, sped up, and used different prompts than the ones shown in the video.

The Minecraft movie expands its cast. David Rysdahl teases just how different the Alien show is going to be. Plus, what's coming on Quantum Leap. Spoilers, away!

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...