Gizmodo

The latest in a slew of speculative AI research papers is making some pretty outlandish claims about how deep learning models have some subtle, unrealized cognitive abilities akin to, or even surpassing humans. Though researchers found a modern pre-training transformer model does well at multiple-choice tests that...Read more...

If you haven't been to the official Star Wars website in a while, today's a perfect day to do so. Besides being a place to find excellent Star Wars-themed interviews and videos, it also has a near-encyclopedic database on most of the canon storytelling. So movies, TV shows, animated series, and more almost all have...Read more...

Elon Musk finally dismantled the obnoxious, flashing X" sign on top of Twitter's headquarters on Monday following complaints from city authorities and residents. San Francisco's Department of Building Inspections (DBI) received 24 complaints about the unpermitted structure, including concerns about its structural...Read more...

Police in New Orleans have been using facial recognition for the better part of a year, but the tech hasn't had much of an impact on the city's violent crime crisis. NOLA's recently published quarterly public safety review, compiled by city consultant Datalytics, shows that during a nine-month period-between October...Read more...

The James Webb Space Telescope captured the eerie punctuation mark, found buried within an image of Herbig-Haro 46/47-a tightly bound pair of actively forming stars located 1,470 light years from Earth.

Halloween started this past weekend at Midsummer Scream, the season's official kick-off convention in Long Beach, CA.

TCGPlayer employees have filed an unfair labor complaint against parent company eBay, The Verge reports. The company, which sells and authenticates trading cards was acquired by eBay in 2022. The complaint accuses eBay of ignoring the union's existence after workers organized in March.Read more...

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Witch From Mercury broke ground for the Gundam franchise with-and sales records spurred in part by-its depiction of the burgeoning romantic relationship between its main characters Suletta Mercury and Miorine Rembran. But while the series itself came about as close to text as it could on their bond, Bandai itself is...Read more...

A man in the UK has become a medical first, though not in a great way. In a recent paper, scientists say he's the first known person to have caught a newly discovered bacteria from a stray cat's bite. Though the feline encounter resulted in a gnarly infection of his hands, the man was eventually treated successfully...Read more...

We may never definitively know the content of Subway's tuna" after all. A class action lawsuit filed over the alleged mystery meat has now been dismissed two and a half years after it was filed.Read more...

August will kick off with a full supermoon, which is set to rise less than 226,000 miles (363,300 kilometers) from Earth tomorrow night.Read more...

It's the summer of Barbenheimer in the west, as the twin successes of Greta Gerwig's Barbieand Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer have bought a soothing balm to an industry wracked by uncertainty, and plenty of memes to social media. But not everyone is exactly pleased with the latter.

It's been seven years since the Switch first hit the market. Noting how many folks still pop out their Switch for a lengthy subway ride or just how many new, ingenious inventions are still flowing out of Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Knowing all that, Nintendo's next mobile/docked device could be far more of...Read more...

Paul Reubens, the actor who rose to fame as the iconic character Pee-wee Herman, died this week after a long fighter with cancer. He was 70 years old.Read more...

Watching trailers for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, one of the first things to come to mind is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Spider-Verse was such a game changer in animation that when you see any animated movie after it that looks a little bit different, it's very easy to link the two. Especially...Read more...

Record-breaking heat in Arizona is killing off the iconic southwestern saguaro cactuses. Yes, cactuses are desert life and they're made to withstand heat. But there is such a thing as temperatures that are too high, even for cactuses that grow in locations that have seen triple-digit temperatures this summer.Read more...

Rafaela Vasquez, the operator of a self-driving Uber vehicle that was the first-ever involved in a pedestrian fatality, has pleaded guilty to endangerment in the criminal case that followed the crash. The guilty plea, filed nearly five years after Vasquez's fatal collision with a woman crossing a street with her bike,...Read more...

It was another bustling month for spaceflight, the dog days of summer are blazing with the added heat from botched engine tests and a trove of fiery rocket launches. As always, the past month of spaceflight presented a plethora of captivating visuals.Read more...

Attention all R.A. Salvatore fans: the fantasy author will be returning to the world of DemonWars next year with a sister series," kicking off in April with Pinquickle's Folly. Simon & Schuster will be marking the occasion by re-releasing all seven previous DemonWars books with updated covers. Today, io9 is excited...Read more...

San Francisco authorities are targeting Twitter, rebranded as X, for installing an unsafe sign" on the roof of its office building, but have yet to gain access to review the potential safety violation. Twitter installed a giant X" sign on Friday without proper authorization, according to city officials who say a...Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's weekly roundup of the coolest toy news around the internet. This week, Hot Toys delves into Kamen Rider, Bandai debuts its chonky new Godzilla, and NECA's Gargoyles line gives us the Iron Man Jonathan Frakes of our dreams.Check it out!

Apple is reportedly hoping that .7 mm will make a big difference for iPhone fanatics as the upcoming iPhone 15's screen stretch near to the very edge of the device. There could be more onscreen real estate for your fingers as well, as the Cupertino company may nix the notch and replace it with the Dynamic Island on...Read more...

Coinbase's CEO Brian Armstrong reportedly told the Financial Times that the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission asked him to halt trading in the exchange with all currencies except bitcoin. According to Armstrong, the suggestion came just before the SEC sued Coinbase last month.

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As suspected, the canister-like object that washed ashore in Green Head, Western Australia, in mid-July likely belongs to a discarded third stage from an Indian rocket, the Australian Space Agency announced over the weekend.Read more...

Dracula strikes in more new Last Voyage of the Demeter pictures. Listen to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's TMNT: Mutant Mayhem soundtrack. Warwick Davis wants to reprise his Rogue One character. Plus, get a glimpse of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode. Spoilers now!

Our first proper look at the return of Loki is here, and Tom Hiddleston's God of Mischief has some proper chaos on his hands-familiar faces, familiar foes, fluorescent green pie, and oh, just a little thing like all of time itself coming apart at the seams, himself included.Read more...

Update: July 31, 8:57 a.m. ET: SpaceX successfully launched EchoStar 24 (Jupiter 3), with Falcon Heavy blasting off on Saturday July 28 at 11:04 p.m. ET. The rocket successfully deployed the 9.2-metric-ton communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit, and both side boosters performed successful landings....Read more...

Rep. Yvette Clarke wasn't exactly surprised when ex-President Donald Trump used an AI voice cloning tool to make Hitler, Elon Musk, and the Devil himself join a Twitter Space to troll Florida governor Ron DeSantis earlier this year. The former president wasn't fooling anyone with the doctored screenshot, but Clarke...Read more...

The summer movie season is often one of the most stable periods of the year: studios show off their big tentpoles (usually about a superhero, or something close to one) whose primary goal is to be crowd pleasers and make a lot of money. Since the formula's been around for about 20 years now, you'd reasonably assume...Read more...

Corporations all around the world are getting into AI, and you can now count Hasbro among them. Earlier in the week, the publisher of tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering revealed its new partnership with Xplored, the developers behind the digital board game platform Teburu.Read more...

Bandai's Digimon franchise is deeply beloved and hit at just the right time for kids who grew up in the 90s. But it's one of those properties whose earlier installments have been difficult to get physical releases of for one (usually rights-related) issue or another. Fortunately, things are about to change, because...Read more...

We've known for some time now that Saw X was on the horizon, and would return to the series' roots of people having to escape theseelaborate traps or die gruesomely. The question that's been on folks' minds, especially when it was revealed that Tobin Bell would return as John Jigsaw" Kramer was, how? Since the post-...Read more...

If you're a gamer, your graphics card is likely to be one of the most expensive components in your entire rig-so you want to be sure you're getting the most out of your investment. As with other pieces of hardware, the graphics card requires some careful care and attention over the course of its life to make sure it's...Read more...

Over the years, Seth Rogen's made a name for himself in adapting (and sometimes providing his acting talents to) lesser known comics or properties like Invincible and The Boys. You'd think by this point, and with those he'd have jumped ship to something bigger-namely Marvel or DC, similar to what indie directors have...Read more...

A24's new horror flick Talk to Me revolves around an embalmed hand that when touched, gives the other person a connection between the worlds of the dead and the living. In the film, a group of high schoolers use the thing at parties and record themselves on social media-you hold the hand, say talk to me," and a...Read more...

Marvel's Secret Invasion is now over as of a few days ago, and raised several questions during its six-episode run. Most of them we'll have to see play out in other movies or shows in the coming years (probably), but one of the most important right now is: how long has Rhodey (Don Cheadle) been a Skrull? Following the...Read more...

Mickey Mouse is one of the most famous characters in animation and Disney's most iconic character. Throughout the decades, the character's been kept alive in animation through numerous means, from the toddler show Mickey Mouse Funhouse to the likes of Kingdom Hearts for more older audiences.

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In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England bestowed a knighthood on notorious privateer Sir Francis Drake. The captain of the Golden Hind was hailed by the British crown for his exploits against Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and on what is now the U.S. Pacific coast (which did involve quite a lot of indiscriminate...Read more...

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's buzzy startup Worldcoin has a relatively straightforward pitch to prospective users. First, you fork over a scan of your eyeball to one of several thousand iris-scanning, basketball-sized metal computers called Orbs." In exchange, you'll receive a one-of-a-kind World ID" that could one day be...Read more...

Google and Apple enjoy taking each other on in as many different arenas as possible: mobile phones, maps, cloud storage, music streaming, photo management, note taking, smart assistants, tablets, smartwatches, calendars, web browsers, word processors, email, and more besides. In cars, we have Android Auto and Apple...Read more...

Jeff Bergman will soon be back as Bugs Bunny in Max's Tiny Toons Looniversity. While promoting his upcoming documentary Looney Legends in Conversation, the voice actordiscussed playing the Looney Tunes icon for the past few decades, including Space Jam: A New Legacy.

Deja pandemic: with Hollywood experiencing a sudden shutdown of work-this time due to the ongoing actors and writers strikes-release dates are being delayed. The first studio to officially announce movies shifting on the calendar is Sony, and it affects highly anticipated releases like Spider-Man: Beyond the...Read more...

After much to do, and a split season to mark the occasion, Henry Cavill has hung up his swords as The Witcher's Geralt of Rivia. The second volume of the Netflix show's third season began streaming this week, and they're a fascinatingly weird trio-but they can't escape the context surrounding them.

Facebook users are down to their last month to sign up to receive a piece of Meta's $725 million settlement for privacy violations. The company signed the settlement in December 2022 in response to a class action lawsuit filed by the Keller Rohrback law firm, for its role in sharing users' data with Cambridge...Read more...

Were you watching Futurama back in 2003? If so, you've been waiting 20 years for a certain plot-point resolution. That said, considering the show was off the air for 10 years before its recent Hulu return, even later-arriving fans have been wondering for some time about this one.Read more...

Earlier today, SpaceX performed the second test of its newly installed Starship deluge system. This test was considerably more powerful than the first one, which the company conducted on July 17.Read more...

Lots of Americans have had the potential joy of eating a juicy steak taken away from them by a measly tick, new research out this week has found. The study estimates that up to 450,000 people in the U.S. have developed alpha-gal syndrome since 2010, otherwise known as an allergy to red meat. The condition is caused by...Read more...