A four-legged robot in China that looks similar to Boston Dynamics’ Spot has gone viral again on platforms like Twitter and Reddit, but this time there are a couple of new twists. The machine can be transported via drone, according to the new video. And, perhaps most importantly, the robot has a gun attachment on top.Read more...

Amazon will be throwing a lot of Prime Early Access deals at consumers over the next 48 hours, but it turns out not every “deal” offers as big a discount as it claims. Sure, the sticker might say 50% off, but price history is a volatile thing: If a product is advertised as 50% off the manufacturer’s suggested retail…Read more...

Halloween is a few short weeks away, and it’s time to make your final costume selections. Trust me, at this point most aisles have been cleared of decor and that’s because spooky event season is about to kick into high gear. It’s better to be prepared and run out to your local Halloween store or get speedy shipping…Read more...

This week’s episode of AMC’s Interview With the Vampire starts with Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) observing a piece of art that does not really exist. The painting depicts Jesus reaching upwards to the heavens as small devils try to pull him down. As Molloy looks it over, Rashid (Assad Zaman) mentions that it was…Read more...

Read more...

As this season of House of the Dragon sets up the wars to come, a feeling of peace is briefly granted to the ailing King Viserys (Paddy Considine) in “The Lord of the Tides.” For the first time in years, his entire family descends on King’s Landing to grapple over control of Driftmark—resulting in some, uh, spicy…Read more...

A rash of cyberattacks targeted over a dozen major U.S. air travel websites on Monday, including those of several large airports. Security experts believe that the incident, which downed multiple sites but failed to meddle in any operational capacity with air travel, is the work of a pro-Russian hacker group…Read more...

YouTube is headed further down the TikTok-ification rabbit hole, but this time it could be kind of a good thing. The Google-owned video platform is introducing “handles,” a not-so-new, new way for creators on the site to uniquely identify.

This was quite the read over the weekend: the Wall Street Journal reported that the car crash detection feature built into the new iPhone 14/14 Pro and Apple Watches is sensitive enough to be set off by a roller coaster.

One of the Southwest’s most familiar plants may be in deep trouble. The towering, multi-armed saguaro cactus, which is found only in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, California, and parts of Mexico, has faced increasing instability as climate change alters its natural habitat through droughts and wildfires. The cacti…Read more...

Rivian, the Amazon-backed electric vehicle upstart and long-rumored Tesla killer once valued at $100 billion just had to recall nearly every vehicle it’s ever made.Read more...

A large, 10-year randomized trial has found that simply recommending a common screening procedure for colorectal cancer may not be as beneficial for the general public as hoped for. The study found no difference in cancer death rates between healthy middle-aged people who were or weren’t offered a colonoscopy, though…Read more...

Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer wanted to congratulate Fallout on Monday for 25 years of… yadda yadda, but what’s that? Up there on the top shelf, could it be? An Xbox streaming box?

The Western drought has come for pasta sauce and ketchup. Processing tomatoes, used in innumerable grocery store staples, are suffering from years of subpar rainfall and snowpack in California. The state, which has historically produced about one third of the processing tomato crop’s global supply, is slated to fall…Read more...

Tech layoffs appear to be striking everywhere, and Spotify is the latest victim. The streaming company has reportedly laid off 38 employees from its Gimlet and Parcast studios, which produce Spotify Original podcast content. With the layoffs come the cancellation of 11 of those Spotify Original podcasts, 3 from Gimlet…Read more...

Coalinga, California, is set to run out of water before the end of this year.Read more...

A 65-year-old woman in Japan paid the equivalent of $30,000 in a recent online scam that defied gravity. The con artist tricked the woman into believing he was a Russian astronaut who just couldn’t afford a ticket back to Earth, local media in Japan reported.Read more...

The upcoming film Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is parody squared. It supposedly tells the true story of the parody songwriter “Weird Al” Yankovic, but pretty much all of it is complete bullpucky. It’s a farce of music biopics that stretch the truth in order to tell a more engaging story. From what filmmakers have…Read more...

PayPal, the company co-founded by right-wing darling Peter Thiel, was caught in a firestorm of conservative backlash over the weekend for daring to say it would not allow its services to be used to promote misinformation. Now, the company has walked everything back, and further claimed that policy was one big…Read more...

If you haven’t been tracking it, Game of Thrones is back—and it’s up to its same old tricks: namely, violence, incest, and great power politics. My opinion is that House of the Dragon is a mediocre follow-up to the original series, but it’s still an interesting meditation on power and rivalry in a brutal world.Read more...

Massachusetts-based audio giant, Bose, recently released the successor to its first gen QuietComfort Earbuds, which came out two years ago. The newly released buds, named the QuietComfort Earbuds II (QC Earbuds II), brought with them a plethora of upgrades. Enhanced Active Noise Cancellation (ANC), a trimmed down…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 “Primordial Soup and Salad” by Gene Doucette. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on Lightspeed’s website. Enjoy!

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

Didn’t make it to New York Comic Con this past weekend? Don’t worry about it. We did, and we’ve compiled every iota of news, trailers, and descriptions of all the other footage that debuted at the convention, including the bananas teaser for season three of Star Trek: Picard, a look at the epic finale to Lord of the…Read more...

The potential for a nuclear armageddon has seemingly increased in recent months, much to the confusion and worry of some of the American public. That potential appears to be crystallizing into a legitimate concern for the U.S. government, which recently announced the purchase of a drug used in radiological and nuclear…Read more...

The InSight mission on Mars is currently waiting out a continent-size dust storm that has caused the lander’s power levels to drop.Read more...

As Oscar Isaac took the stage at New York City Comic Con 2022 for his spotlight panel, the applause was, and I’m not being facetious here, deafening. A spotlight panel typically focuses on a single actor, and Isaac’s fans filled up the entire Empire Stage Room—the second-largest stage at NYCC. As the panel began, the…Read more...

A Twitch streamer says she broke her back in two places after jumping in a foam pit live at TwitchCon on Saturday. In a brutal video that’s painful to watch, streamer and adult performer Adriana Chechik happily jumps into the pit but then begins to writhe in pain almost immediately after she lands. Chechik told her…Read more...

“Prepare for Nuns. Demons. Murder. Some children. A Goat. And a dead priest,” warns the newest trailer for Wendell & Wild, the upcoming stop-motion film by The Nightmare Before Christmas creator Henry Selick and co-written by Get Out’s Jordan Peele. But can anyone ever truly prepare for goats and nuns?

The biggest monetary losers from crypto lender Celsius’ demise are on full public display.Read more...

Read more...

The second season of Syfy’s horror series Chucky kicked off with a bang this week. Showrunner/creator Don Mancini and the main cast teased what’s to come at New York Comic Con today: There will be oodles of trauma, new characters, and a cheeky homage to Jennifer Tilly’s 1996 crime thriller Bound in Episode 4.

If you’ve ever felt like being told to turn your camera on during the Zoom meeting was a fundamental overstep of workplace boundaries and rights, a Dutch court might be on your side. A remote employee of U.S.-based software company Chetu has been awarded about €75,000 by a Dutch judge for wrongful termination, after…Read more...

Now, even hackers are taking a page out of big advertising’s playbook to promote their ill-gotten personal financial details. Over the weekend, the stolen credit card marketplace called BidenCash announced they were offering a free giveaway of 1,221,551 credit cards, promoting the leak on multiple other sites.Read more...

V/H/S reveals another anthology, with a major new slew of directors. Mike Flanagan is no longer a part of Netflix’s Something Is Killing the Children adaptation. Plus, get a look at the latest Walking Dead spinoff, Dead City, and new Titans clips tease a showdown with Lex Luthor. Spoilers get!

Chinese government officials thanked Elon Musk over the weekend for his ideas about Taiwan which were shared in a new interview with the Financial Times. Musk said that Taiwan, which is currently independent as a self-governing democracy, should be controlled by China, something that hasn’t happened since 1949.

One of Iran’s state-run TV channels was reportedly hacked on Saturday to briefly display a message against Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, with a graphic of the Ayatollah in crosshairs, according to multiple news outlets. The message displayed in Farsi read, “the blood of our youths is on your hands,” according to…Read more...

The very online folk will know that the “Pope Francis Holding Things” meme isn’t new. It’s been around for years. However, in recent days, the meme has been given new life thanks to a Twitter feature that allows users to go wild and tweet videos, images, and GIFs—all in one tweet. Although the rise of the meme was…Read more...

They were happy. For one unexpected, shining moment, the extended Targaryen family existed as one House, together, the past at least temporarily forgotten. And then the moment ended.Read more...

What the hell was that?

Not content to just reveal Titans’ newest villains earlier this week, DC also debuted the long-awaited first trailer for the fourth season of the series at New York Comic-Con.

When we last left Doom Patrol, Madame Rouge had joined the group, Cliff’s brain was stuck in a giant robot body, and they had access to a time machine. What could go wrong? As usual for the Doom Patrol, everything.

Earlier in the week, the news broke that South Korean illustrator Kim Jung Gi passed away at the age of 47. Kim, according to his US agent, had experienced chest pains in France as he was preparing to take a flight to New York, and died after being transported to a hospital.

The Superman line of DC Comics has seen some sizable shakeups in the last few years. As Clark Kent has been on Warworld up until fairly recently, it fell to his teenage son Jonathan to take the Superman mantle and save the world in his father’s absence. (Yes, Clark’s dead right now, but let’s not pretend we don’t know…Read more...

It’s the final day of New York City Comic-Con! In between all the news that we here at io9 have been covering throughout the weekend, we’ve also shone a spotlight on some sick ass cosplay. Here’s the final batch to close things out!

Kanye West, legally known as “Ye,” is rapidly running out of social media platforms to post his antisemitic content. On Sunday, Twitter locked Ye’s account after he posted an antisemitic tweet saying he was going “DEFCON 3” on Jewish people. In the same tweet, Ye added he “can’t be antisemitic because black people are…Read more...

The Muppets’ time with Disney shows lately might have been a bit up and down, but The Muppets Mayhem looks like it wants to live up to some of the zaniness of the franchise’s most classic show—with a little help from the Electric Mayhem themselves.

Since Star Wars Rebels in 2014, the franchise has consistently featured Inquisitors as threats for Force users and veteran Jedi to face off against. Created by the Empire with the express intent of capturing or killing Jedi that managed to survive Order 66, the Inquisitors have only recently begun to feel like a…Read more...

io9 is currently be covering New York Comic-Con, and one of the many things being shown at the event is a new animated movie for the Mortal Kombat franchise. And as we’ve been wont to do throughout the year, this movie makes it as good time as any to look back on the series overall and see how far it’s come.Read more...

Whether it’s for the silver screen or pen and ink, Marvel uses the season of Comic-Con to tee up the big stories they’ve got cooking. San Diego Comic-Con in July saw the House of Ideas build up to comic arcs involving the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, and this weekend’s New York Comic-Con focused on the other heavy…Read more...