Gizmodo

A man from the town of Dildo, Canada captured images of a remarkable penis-shaped iceberg off the country’s east coast. The natural wonder set off a viral frenzy, but sadly seems to have since lost its rounded tip.

Although I’m now just a few screen taps away from watching nearly every Disney animated movie ever released, this new Lego set, featuring a brick-built recreation of a VHS copy of The Little Mermaid, is making me nostalgic for a time when my shelves were stacked with plastic tapes of my favorite Disney films.Read more...

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) last night authorized a strike. It has been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) for better compensation and equity structures and, in mid-April, held a strike authorization vote that saw record numbers of unit members (97.85%) voting yes.…Read more...

I have no mouth and I must scream—the AI workforce appears to be full steam ahead. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that the company is planning to pause or slow hiring in the coming years for roles in which AI could replace humans.

Get a new look at Hammer’s re-imagining of Dr. Jekyll with Eddie Izzard. Mia Goth and Halsey feature in the first look at MaXXXine. Jodie Comer may have left Amazon’s Blade Runner 2099 series. Plus, what’s coming on Superman & Lois and Riverdale. Spoilers, away!

Global weather patterns may be changing this year.Read more...

In the blink of an eye, Wall Street Bets’ once-favored trading app burned a hole in one of meme stock traders’ favorite gambles, AMC Entertainment. On Monday, the stock trading platform briefly and erroneously told users that the company had suddenly gone belly up.

Solar geoengineering is a controversial proposed strategy to block sunlight from reaching Earth in order to slow down climate change. One of the leading geoengineering ideas involves adding reflective particles to the stratosphere. But before humanity makes any more big changes to our atmosphere, it would probably be…Read more...

The Federal Aviation Administration is facing a new lawsuit following SpaceX’s April 20 Starship launch. Conservation groups claim that the FAA rushed its approval of SpaceX’s expanded launch operations in Boca Chica, Texas, without adequate environmental review and without requiring sufficient mitigation efforts from…Read more...

Building official Lego sets has always been a linear experience: you start on page one of the instruction book, and work your way through each step, one by one, until you end up with the model pictured on the box. But with Lego’s new DREAMZzz line, builders finally have a say in how the model they’re building turns…Read more...

Pornhub disabled access to its website for people in Utah on Monday to protest the state’s new age verification law, which requires websites with adult content to confirm users are 18 years of age or older.Read more...

Microsoft issued a Windows update that broke a Chrome feature, making it harder to change your default browser and annoying Chrome users with popups, Gizmodo has learned.Read more...

The Writers Guild of America, the union that bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s screenwriters, has called a strike after negotiations with major studios failed to produce a favorable contract this week. The strike, which is the first involving WGA to occur in 15 years, seeks to bring firms to the table on a host of…Read more...

Taika Waititi has spent time in both the Star Wars and Marvel galaxies, and he’s adding another sci-fi project to his to-do list: a big-screen adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun.Read more...

Leading global human rights organization Amnesty International is defending its choice to use an AI image generator to depict protests and police brutality in Colombia. Amnesty told Gizmodo it used an AI generator to depict human rights abuses so as to preserve the anonymity of vulnerable protestors. Experts fear,…Read more...

For as long as Gundam has existed as a franchise, the specter of its first major antagonistic standout, Char Aznable, has lingered over it. And that’s not unintentioned on Gundam’s part—for almost as long the series has grown, it has put morally dubious people in face masks and coined the “Char Clone” trope as a…Read more...

Is your employer monitoring your mouse clicks, keystrokes, or webcam? What about your location or pace of work? If so, the White House wants to hear from you—from the confines of your digitally enabled professional panopticon.

Let’s get streaming! Welcome to io9's latest edition of the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most. (And sometimes, just the ones that we like most.)

The private space industry has set up shop at Florida’s Cape Canaveral and the state is looking out for its billionaire space entrepreneurs. The Florida House passed a bill that would protect commercial space ventures against legal liability in the event of a crew member’s injury or death.Read more...

Balloon hysteria in America might strike again. After some hullabaloo involving mysterious spy payloads drifting into American airspace earlier this year, the U.S. military says it’s tracking yet another balloon.

Folks who want more streaming content without paying through the nose have quite a few more options this spring. Amazon announced Monday that it’s planning to drop a few more crumbs of content from its mainline Prime Video streaming platform to its Freevee ad-based video service.Read more...

This past weekend in Manchester, England, Games Workshop invited legions of its tabletop wargaming fans to the first in-person Warhammer Fest since 2019. And it brought with it a ton of news from across its portfolio of sci-fi and fantasy miniature games, including a new look at the future of Warhammer 40,000. Here’s…Read more...

Do or do not, there is no try, and nowhere is that better exemplified than at the Museum of Failure. The Museum of Failure is a traveling showcase of over 150 of the worst failures in tech, medicine, food, and sex we’ve seen over the last few decades. Notable failures include 3D TV’s, Cyberpunk 2077, and many ventures…Read more...

It’s been quite a few months for ChatGPT: The AI chatbot has gone from relative obscurity to powering web searches and passing medical exams and plenty more besides, and it’s only going to get more powerful from this point on. All of which might leave you wondering if you can use it on your phone in place of those…Read more...

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.

Star Wars is a franchise that’s taken inspiration from plenty of things over the decades to become what it is today. Sometimes it requires work to figure out what it’s drawing on for a particular character, location, or plot point. Other times, it hits you dead in the face and despite that, might still work for you.

After a wild winter of more than a dozen huge storms and record-breaking snowfall in the Sierra Nevadas, California’s big flood season is just getting started.Read more...

If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT, the uncanny chatbot from the artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, here is a quick primer on everything you need to know about the controversial program.Read more...

The Webb Space Telescope recently trained its perceptive gaze on a rocky exoplanet about 26 light-years from Earth and found that it appears to have water vapor in its atmosphere—a shock, given its extreme heat and its proximity to its host star.Read more...

If huge box office numbers for films like Top Gun: Maverick, Avatar: The Way of Water, and The Super Mario Bros. Movie weren’t proof enough, what follows will make it all but official: blockbuster movies are back.Read more...

Tony Gilroy, the Andor creator, showrunner, and screenwriter, will be launching a website to release the production scripts for all 12 Andor episodes online, for free, for everyone. This news came from journalist Jeff Goldsmith, who attended the Disney+ series’ Emmy FYC event, and io9 confirmed it with Disney.

Apple has learned from enough games of Monopoly that it’s good to be the banker as well as a player. A Monday report from Forbes based on anonymous internal sources claims users deposited close to $1 billion in just four days after Apple introduced its new Goldman Sachs-backed Apple Card savings account.Read more...

Amid a spike in carjackings, New York City is trying out a novel strategy for tackling theft: Apple Airtags. Mayor Eric Adams and the police department announced that officials would be distributing 500 of the trackers to vehicle owners in the city during a press conference Sunday morning.

As Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves heads to digital release, io9 has a sneak peek from Paramount Home Entertainment at one of the behind-the-scenes features. This particular clip details how Chris Pine and the rest of the cast performed the stunt when the giant dragon Themberchaud drives the adventuring party…Read more...

Is it a tool or a toy? A genius or a dumbass? A technological breakthrough or a flash in the pan? You’ve heard of ChatGPT, the weirdly well-spoken chatbot spawned by OpenAI. The algorithmic program has made headlines for its ability to ape human speech and automate previously time-consuming editorial tasks, but…Read more...

During its inaugural flight, SpaceX’s wayward rocket did not immediately respond to an automated self-destruct command as it began spiraling in the skies. That’s problematic, as launch providers need to demonstrate the ability to quickly destroy their rockets during launch to protect populated areas.Read more...

May’s new book releases bring favorite genre staples like dragons, rebellious magic users, space heroes, and time travelers—but also fierce mermaids, reinvented gods and legends, queer cyberpunk detectives, moody personal AIs, and so much more. Add five or 10 or 54 to your reading list!

The person responsible for churning out some of those rage-inducing, clickbait headlines crawling their way through your Facebook feed might not actually be a person at all. In a report published Monday, researchers say they’ve found 49 examples of news sites with articles generated by ChatGPT-style AI chatbots.…Read more...

Star Wars in its current era has had a relationship with queer characters that comes in fits and starts. There are now of course plenty across the comics, books, and games, but the shows and movies are still playing catch-up (some of those better than others). But the latest little queer slice of the galaxy far, far…Read more...

NASA’s plodding, iterative approach to its Artemis program gives the distinct impression that it has somehow forgotten how to land humans on the Moon. A closer inspection uncovers the many reasons—whether justified or not—for why it’s taking NASA so long to return boots to those vaunted lunar grounds.

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Late last week, reliable leakers revealed that a higher spec’d model of the Asus ROG Ally, a handheld gaming PC that’s shaping up to give the Valve Steam Deck some stiff competition, would sell for $700. But the leaks keep coming, and this week we have more details on what lower-end versions of the handheld will sell…Read more...

A Rocket Lab Electron rocket will kick off another busy week in spaceflight when it launches from the company’s New Zealand site on Tuesday.

SpaceX’s giant Falcon Heavy rocket successfully delivered three satellites to high Earth orbit on April 30. The launch marked the first time that none of the rocket’s boosters were recovered.

Tyler Gillett teases his “gory as hell” Universal Monsters movie. American Horror Story: Delicate finds a few more stars. Plus, what’s coming on The Flash, Yellowjackets, and Riverdale. To me, my spoilers!

There’s a lot of debate about how artificial intelligence will fit into our workplaces, but Akash Nigam—CEO of web3 avatar startup Genies—has apparently opted to spend over $2,000 per month on ChatGPT Plus subscriptions for every employee at the company.

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Megalithic tech companies such as Google, Meta, and Microsoft are so obsessed with AI development it seems impossible to steer any of them toward slowing down and actually thinking about the repercussions. Now one of the most prominent faces in artificially intelligence research, former Googler Dr. Geoffrey Hinton,…Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest in toy news. This week: Lego goes big for Star Wars day with new sets and special gifts, Super7 lifts the lid on more Star Trek figures, and there’s a whole new line of adorable Pokémon plushes ready to thundershock your wallet. Check it out!

Twitter founder and ex-CEO Jack Dorsey admitted he was wrong when he said that Elon Musk was the “singular solution” he trusted with the company and criticized his one-time friend for going through with his $44 billion takeover even after he got buyer’s remorse.Read more...