Gizmodo

The Biden administration is appealing a bombshell ruling from a federal judge barring government agencies from contacting social media companies to make takedown requests or recommend other content moderation. State Department officials had already halted routine meetings with Facebook in response to the July 5th...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 Six Months After All Life on Titan Died" by JB Park. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED's website. Enjoy!Read more...

Strange New Worlds has made a name for itself over the course of its first season, and now the first half of its sophomore, in taking the vibes of the original Star Trek-and sometimes literal episodes-and translating them to a modern television show, and the expectations that come with them. But what happens when the...Read more...

Meta successfully triggered a response from Twitter on Wednesday amid the rollout of its new rival app, Threads. Elon Musk's longtime attorney Alex Spiro sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, threatening to file a lawsuit against the company for engaging in systematic, willful, and unlawful misappropriation of...Read more...

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is consider yet another ranking of Mission: Impossible films.Read more...

A giant shape-shifting orb has invaded the Las Vegas metropolitan area. If you've seen pictures, you'd be forgiven for being alarmed because it sorta resembles something that might land on Earth during an alien invasion. A pulsating ball that likes to change its color and appearance, the orb sometimes looks vaguely...Read more...

Astronomers imaging the cosmos with the Webb Space Telescope have found the most distant active supermassive black hole yet. The black hole was seen" as it was around 570 million years after the Big Bang.Read more...

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SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voiceover artists, and other media professionals," according to its site, has begun sending out surveys and communications...Read more...

The Barbie movie has achieved what was once thought impossible: getting us even more hyped for its release, as pop star Billie Eilish has announced her latest single What Was I Made For?"-written for the Greta Gerwig film.Read more...

It wasn't the hardware that made the iPhone a hit, or even iOS, it was the potential unlocked by the introduction of the App Store, and one of the earliest must-have apps for Apple's smartphone was a game about slingshotting enraged fowl that, almost 14 years later, will be the branding focus of a new cafe coming to...Read more...

The first thing you notice on the What We Do in the Shadows set is that they really built a whole ass haunted house. Shadows is made alongside a busy street in a Toronto suburb. The outer facade of the house-the steps, topiaries, and stained glass windows-face traffic, and cars slowed down as a group of media...Read more...

OceanGate, the owner of the Titan submersible, is suspending all exploration and commercial operations" following the fatal implosion of its vessel, which killed all five crew members on board. The suspension comes only weeks after the Titan deployed to the Titanic wreckage site, located about 12,500 feet below the...Read more...

With Meta, there's always a catch. Sure, you can sign up for the company's newest Twitter clone Threads. You can use your Instagram account to get a unique badge to show you're now a Thread head. The thing is, you can deactivate your Threads profile, and you can delete the app, but deleting your profile on Threads...Read more...

It's been a little less than a week since Turner Classic Movies was saved from being ground up in Warner Bros. Discovery's relentless content sausage grinder. Film preservation takes a lot of work, both from official, mainstream providers and some-well-less authorized sources. Over the past week, eagle-eyed classic...Read more...

It's time to get creeped the hell out all over again because The Nun is back.Read more...

Tardigrades. Water bears. Moss piglets. No matter their name, the microscopic invertebrates are notoriously tough, and now, a team of researchers studied the tardigrade's ancestors to figure out how the animal evolved.Read more...

The creative team of comics writer Scott Snyder and artist Rafael Albuquerque (American Vampire) are back with Duck and Cover, billed as a post-apocalyptic adventure series with a historical twist." io9 has a first look today!

While news of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange's crumbling castle has come and gone, there is a new wrinkle in the tale involving one of the world's largest singer-songwriters. After reports that Taylor Swift knew all too well that the exchange would fail and declined to sign a deal with Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX, news...Read more...

Despite attempts to turn them into keyboard-less laptops, tablets remain primarily media consumption devices for most users. Sony's new HT-AX7 Bluetooth speaker promises to expand on that use by transforming your tablet into a portable home theater with a pair of detachable satellite speakers.Read more...

Following a series of setbacks that has hindered the next-generation Vega launcher, the European Space Agency (ESA) is looking into what caused the rocket's motor to fail during a recent static fire test.Read more...

If you're a longtime Spotify Premium subscriber, your account could be set for a shake-up. Spotify is ending all support for payments made via Apple's App Store billing system, and consequently, some subscribers are slated to get the boot.

It's that time of year again: Chengdu WorldCon has released the full list of nominees for this year's Hugos, the premiere science fiction and fantasy awards ceremony highlighting the best in books, film, TV, and criticism in genre material.

Amidst ongoing protests in France, the country has just passed a new bill that will allow police to remotely access suspects' cameras, microphones, and GPS on cell phones and other devices.

Foundation, a gloriously over-the-top space epic from Apple TV+, is back for a second season. Based on the series of stories by science fiction legend, Isaac Asimov, the series takes the original ideas and tweaks them to fit in with contemporary sci-fi considerations, creating a massive saga about the inevitable...Read more...

The U.S. ecosystem is riddled with PFAS. And a new study released this week by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) revealed that these toxic chemicals are in almost half of the country's tap water.Read more...

Ken discusses his job description in a new Barbie clip. Seth Rogen promises shocks aplenty for his Boys spinoff and the Sausage Party sequel. Netflix wants its Stranger Things play to herald clues for the show's final season. Plus, a new look at The Nun 2. Spoilers, now!

Update: July 6, 9:24 a.m. ET: Ariane 5 successfully lifted off at 6:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, delivering its payloads to space. The mission lasted for 33 minutes, ending a spectacular 27-year run for the European rocket.

Meta released its hotly anticipated Twitter copycat, Threads, yesterday, moving the app's release up from Thursday morning to early evening on Wednesday night. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, 10 million users flocked to the app in its first few hours. Things on Threads were, to be frank, pretty boring....Read more...

The Little Mermaid's iconic sunset poster art inspires what'll be a must-have for Disney movie collectors: the SteelBook release of the live-action fairy tale's home media release.Read more...

On Wednesday, New York City imposed a new law regulating companies that useartificial intelligence to screen candidates for open positions. The city's Automated Employment Decision Tools (AEDT) law requires companies to prove their AI tool is free from racial and gender bias before it can be used.Read more...

Star Wars is just one of those things everyone knows. Whether you love it, hate it, or are indifferent about it, you're almost surely aware of it. You know Darth Vader, you know lightsabers, you know John Williams' music. So, when talking to Conan O'Brien, one of the other people everyone knows, Harrison Ford, ...Read more...

When we say that Star Wars has a complicated relationship with death, it's usually about how the franchise isunwilling to let go of its own past, or how a desire to cheat the final end has driven much of the series' theological explorations recently. Sometimes, it just means you have to be persistent as hell to...Read more...

After months of secretive work, Facebook owner Meta released Threads on Wednesday, a Twitter clone that could cause an upheaval in the world of social media. Threads was originally slated for release at 10 a.m. on July 6th, but the company moved up the launch to 7 p.m. Wednesday evening.

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Justin Bieber has seemingly lost more than 1.2 million real, fungible U.S. dollars on a single digital image of a sad chimpanzee. The multihyphenate pop sensation and mega-star joined in on the crypto/NFT celeb-endorsement hype train in January 2022, when he purchased one of Yuga Labs' notoriously shitty-looking Bored...Read more...

Canadian officials say the federal government will suspend all of its advertising on Facebook and Instagram following Meta's drastic decision to block access to news links in the region as retaliation to the country's passage of the Online News Act. Major Canadian corporations like Quebecor and Cogeco Communication ...Read more...

It appears that the artificial intelligence fatigue is upon us: OpenAI's website traffic has fallen for the first time since the company launched the viral chatbot ChatGPT in November.

Superman has always had a strong pop culture presence, but in the last decade and change, Warner Bros. has put a greater focus on the character's live-action prospects (for both film and TV). The character's appeared in several animated movies over the years, but it's been a long time since he had an animated TV show...Read more...

There's nothing I would like more than for Nothing's Phone (2) to actually look like a major upgrade from the company's first cellular device to hit the market. But instead, all the hints we now have about CEO Carl Pei's jump into a more premium phone market seem to be a slight upgrade from the much-hyped, LED-backed...Read more...

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Facebook owner Meta is set to release Threads on Wednesday, a long-awaited Twitter copy-cat app poised to cause major problems for Elon Musk. Meta just pushed up the launch data for the app, and Threads is scheduled to be available at 7 p.m. Eastern Time on July 5th, . Here's how to get the app, and steps to sneak an...Read more...

SpaceX is denying allegations that its Starship rocket poses a threat to surrounding wildlife habitat in Boca Chica, Texas, hoping to dismiss a lawsuit that could potentially delay the anticipated launch of its megarocket.Read more...

This past weekend The Witch From Mercury brought a surprisingly rapid-fire end to the latest Gundam show-and in one of its most satisfying moves, finally delivered on the sapphic love story it set up from the get-go. But in truly making queer love the heart of its endgame, the series also pushed a closer examination...Read more...

Just like some people, elephants seem to prefer a rich palette of foods, research out this week suggests. Studying decades-old poop, researchers found that elephants tend to have diverse diets that can differ significantly from others in the same community. These diets are further influenced by the time of year and...Read more...

Science fiction promises us all sorts of sentient automatons once artificial intelligence becomes a part of our daily lives-not hockey puck-sized speakers. Determined to breathe more life into Amazon's smart assistant, Thomas Burns hacked together a CRT TV and a pair of moving eyes to make Alexa feel more engaging-or...Read more...

Last year, there was a rumor floating around that Tom Cruise was just about done with the Mission: Impossible franchise. The thought was that with everything that went into making the next two films in the franchise, Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One and Part Two, his character Ethan Hunt would slowly ride...Read more...

Huy Fong Sriracha prices are soaring as people become increasingly desperate to get their hands on a bottle one year into its chili shortage. Now online sellers are appealing to consumers' needs to get the highly coveted sauce... but at a steep price.Read more...