Part of the versatility of the human hand’s ability to pick up almost anything comes from being able to apply a gentle touch for frail or oddly-shaped objects. That’s something robots struggle with, particularly when functioning autonomously, and unfortunately the solution could lie with an unorthodox gripper design…Read more...

Chad Stahleski’s Black Samurai adaptation finds a new writer. Anson Mount is ready for Strange New Worlds season 2. Plus, what’s coming on Stargirl and American Horror Story: NYC. To me, my spoilers!

The earliest mirrorless cameras played catchup to DSLRs, which have decades of development behind them. Today’s models are different, capable of everything from professional portraits and video to documenting a night out.

Freeway, a UK-based crypto platform that promised annual returns up to a mind-boggling 43%, halted withdrawals on Sunday, according to a notice published to the company’s website. Freeway’s native cryptocurrency, which goes by the ticker FWT, plummeted 74% following the announcement and, to top it all off, the Freeway…Read more...

Damon Lindelof is working on a Star Wars movie and now it has a director. Deadline reports that Lindelof, best known for his work on Lost, The Leftovers and Watchmen, is co-writing a script which will be directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who directed two episodes of Ms. Marvel.Read more...

Good news, Walking Dead fans—er, people who have been watching the show so long that they feel compelled to watch it until the end, regardless of how much pleasure they may or may not be getting from it! Pamela Milton has finally declared war on all the people who have made her cushy life difficult since their…Read more...

The last two months, House of the Dragon has offered a look into the twisty, messed up Targaryen family before their inevitable fall. As the various family members have spent years scheming and trying to dick each other over, the physical condition of Paddy Considine’s Viserys had gradually worsened until his death…Read more...

Black Adam is out this weekend, and as is often the case with superhero movies, its post-credits scene teases some interesting possibilities for the future of the DC movie universe. Chances are you already know what it is (either by just seeing the film or various other means), but just in case: don’t read this if you…Read more...

You may recall that a few years ago, Disney released a live action remake of the 1941 animated film Dumbo. Directed by Tim Burton of Beetlejuice fame (or any number of films, really), the remake wasn’t particularly well received, even by the standards of Disney’s various remakes over the decade and change.

It’s taken 15 years and several pandemic-forced delays, and now Black Adam has finally arrived in theaters. Dwayne Johnson’s been attached to the film since 2007 when his star power was nowhere near what it’s at today. The idea of this movie getting made, much less coming out, seemed impossible as Johnson continued to…Read more...

The last several years, both DC and Marvel have released anthology stories celebrating heroes that are queer or of a particular marginalized identity. DC’s output is considerably smaller than Marvel’s, but no less important, as Kevin Conroy’s story from this year’s DC Pride will attest. And come 2023, the publisher is…Read more...

House of the Dragon viewers have had themselves some fun watching the Game of Thrones prequel over the last two months. But it isn’t Game of Thrones without some kind of drama happening, and ahead of this Sunday’s season finale, the episode up and got leaked out of nowhere.

For nearly a full decade, Warner Bros. Conjuring franchise has been steadily going. Between The Conjuring 2 and last year’s The Devil Made Me Do It was five years, and that long wait has filled by various spinoffs like The Nun or Curse of La Llorona. If it seems like the franchise is gradually slowing down as…Read more...

Just as AMC’s Interview with the Vampire has enjoyed a strong viewership and fanbase, the network is also adapting another of the late Anne Rice’s works. The Mayfair Witches is coming right as 2023 begins, and now AMC’s pushed the show’s premiere back a few days.

This Halloween we want to celebrate Disneyland’s original macabre monument the Haunted Mansion, which for many has served as a rite of passage as a first friendly introduction to horror when visiting the theme park. It definitely was for me growing up in Southern California—I can still remember my first few rides,…Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the coolest merchandise on the internet lately. This week, Mondo’s Masters of the Universe toys get a major upgrade, Transformers pulls into the train station, and it’s already time for festive nightmares. Check it out!

Prime Video’s new William Gibson adaptation, The Peripheral, is produced by Westworld’s Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan and follows the high-stakes, high-tech tale of a young woman (Chloë Grace Moretz) who realizes the virtual world she’s been visiting in a video game is actually the future—a very bleak future, with a…Read more...

If you ever wondered how long it takes for conspiracy theories to start gaining steam on social media, a study published this week may have a possible answer for you: a little more than one day.Read more...

The fourth episode of Interview With the Vampire belongs to Bailey Bass. Her Claudia is unlike anything we’ve seen. She’s not the five-year-old of the book, nor the 10-year old of the film. She’s 14, just far enough into puberty to know that something is changing, but not far enough along to know what to do about it. …Read more...

It is our human nature to tinker with rules, as anyone who has argued over dubious interpretations of the game Monopoly will attest. Rule-breaking may hold the key to giving us an edge over machines that, for all their emerging capabilities, are tied to fixed directives. A close look at how mathematics comes to be…Read more...

The Rise of the Dragon: An Illustrated History of the Targaryen Dynasty, Volume One is described as a “lavish visual history,” and indeed this new book from George R.R. Martin (and co-authors Elio M. García, Jr and Linda Antonsson) contains over 180 all-new illustrations illuminating the world of House Targaryen. So…Read more...

One of the newest gadgets hitting Apple Store shelves this week arguably isn’t even a gadget at all, it’s a lock.Read more...

The ExoMars rover may get a second chance to go to Mars. The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to swap out a Russian-built entry and descent platform for a version made in Europe, but the space agency will need to secure a hefty budget to move forward.

Don’t expect much relief from the ongoing drought out West this coming winter.Read more...

A small-town water manager had some pretty out-there ideas about fluoride in the water, so much so that he lowered levels of the chemical in the town’s water supply for years without telling anybody for over a decade of nearly 30 years of his position.Read more...

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Bad habits lead to...jail. Adrian Kwiatkowski is facing prison after absconding with unreleased music he reportedly hacked from singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and hip-hop artist Lil Uzi Vert following an investigation that began in 2019.

The Pixel 7/7 Pro is Google’s latest flagship device. To make its new phone stand out, the company has bundled it with a bunch of exclusive features made possible by the second-generation Tensor chip powering up the Pixel 7’s insides. Some are seriously helpful. For instance, the automatic cough and snore detection…Read more...

When I first got my hands on A Restless Truth, I immediately dove in. A lesbian Romance (yes, Romance with an uppercase “R”... Romance readers know what I’m saying) on a luxury cruise ship? With magic? Ms. Marske, say less. I was there. What I found was a fast-paced book full of delightfully witty repartee,…Read more...

Halloween is right around the corner, so what better time to show off some of the more disturbing images of a world that’s invisible to our naked eye?

NASA has requested three new spacecraft from Lockheed Martin, which the space agency needs to fly astronauts to the Moon as part of its upcoming and ambitious Artemis program.

Memorable music can make or break any movie, but especially one with superheroes. If a superhero movie has the right music, it can live on forever. If it doesn’t, even a great movie might not feel as important. Which category Black Adam falls into is still up for debate, but the music does its job, and then some.…Read more...

Amazon’s beefing up its already massive international shipping behemoth with around a dozen new Airbus planes operated by Hawaiian Airlines.Read more...

Residents of the U.S. Pacific Northwest this week are breathing heavily polluted air, as wildfires blankets the region.

Yejin Choi declined the call that would transform her life—several times.Read more...

Hey YouTube Premium users! Get ready to fork over a little more cash for your family plan—YouTube has alerted users of a price increase from $17.99 per month to $22.99 per month in the U.S. effective November 21.

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has spent a long career on screens big and small doing what he does best: basically being himself across a litany of characters. But in his sizeable slice of genre roles, climaxing with the long-in-the-making arrival of Black Adam in theaters today, which of his nerdiest credits is also...…Read more...

Everything we’ve seen from tech companies’ ideas of the so-called “metaverse” have been incredibly boring. Every inch of Meta’s virtual reality playspace Horizon Worlds, for instance, is a starched, corporate rendition of a 3D, interactive space.Read more...

Engineers quip that FOD is a four-letter word, but there’s nothing funny about foreign object debris and its potential to trigger disaster.Read more...

Animation master Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) returns with Wendell and Wild, a spectacle of stop-motion oddities that was well worth the wait. The highly anticipated Netflix production is a collaboration with co-writer Jordan Peele, who also co-stars with his Key & Peele comedy partner Keegan-Michael…Read more...

It can be hard to understand what the hell is going on with the global energy market. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March, the news has been a non-stop churn of confusing updates about oil prices, gas supply, and a stew of acronyms (OPEC? SPR?). The whole thing can be intimidating to think about, even to…Read more...

We know that Wolverine has an adamantium-infused skeleton and Iron Man is just a guy with a suit, but what about someone like Man-Thing? Squirrel Girl? Thanos? Spider-Ham? What if you could literally peel back their super-skin and see what’s underneath? A new book gives you that opportunity for basically every single…Read more...

A team at TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance planned to harness data from the app to “monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens,” according to an explosive report published in Forbes Thursday.Read more...

Superhero movie end credits scenes are usually a film’s best-kept secret. No one dares discuss or spoil the big cameo or plot twist that happens after the film, setting the table for what’s to come. In the case of Black Adam though, that hasn’t quite been the case.Read more...

Is a tech company partially responsible for skyrocketing rent prices? That’s the story, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in California this week.

Space has no shortage of weird and curious planets. Astronomers using the 3.5-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory report their discovery of a Jupiter-like world with roughly the same density as a marshmallow, rapidly orbiting a red dwarf star.

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In addition to providing high-speed internet connectivity to even the most remote corners of the Earth, the over 3,000 satellites that make up the Starlink network have the potential to do even more, like replace the two dozen satellites that power the Global Positioning System. SpaceX passed on the idea, so a team of…Read more...

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Researchers looked at DNA extracted from the remains of 13 Neanderthals that lived in Asia about 54,000 years ago and found some surprising relationships among them.Read more...