Gizmodo

There’s always time for more TV, and new data published by Bloomberg earlier this week revealed that we watched a lot of it. A new report helps characterize the blackbox that is streaming shows to audiences—which is especially important in a world where Netflix has a reputation for cancelling your favorite show (I’m…Read more...

Members of the House Judiciary Committee kicked off what could be months of fiery debates over one of the US’s most controversial warrantless surveillance programs this week. In the hearing Thursday titled, “FIX FISA,” lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle voiced concerns over the scale of US citizen data…Read more...

It’s the bittersweet, powerful end of an era as Guardians of the Galaxy franchise director James Gunn—who’s now the co-head of DC Studios—bows out of Marvel. But he’s leaving on an excellently high note, as the first social media reactions to Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (which opens May 5) suggest.Read more...

Two astronauts are gearing up for a nearly seven-hour-long spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Friday, with one of them set to make history as the first Arab astronaut to take on the extravehicular activity.Read more...

SpaceX is getting ready to launch its super heavy-lift rocket for the second time this year, carrying a hefty broadband satellite to a distant orbit above Earth’s equator, as well as a pair of smaller satellites, before being disposed entirely.

After castigating OG Twitter for its cooperation with government content requests, it turns out that Elon Musk’s version of the platform hasn’t been doing much better since he took over half a year ago. Not only has Musk Twitter™️ been responding to a variety of government requests—but it’s been doing so at a much…Read more...

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Set “64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteered as tribute, and decades before Coriolanus Snow became the tyrannical President of Panem,” The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes explores the origin story of that future tyrant. After a couple of cryptic teasers, a full trailer has finally arrived.Read more...

The restoration of the Enterprise-D, long thought lost since it was broken up and crash-landed decades prior in Star Trek: Generations, was one of the biggest surprises of Picard’s final season. But now we know that parts of the ship made their way back home to be restored, this touching new short imagines just how.

With a trailer that’s been out in the world for almost a year now, expectations couldn’t be any higher for Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One. Except they can go higher, now that Paramount’s screened 20 minutes of breathtaking footage at CinemaCon 2023.Read more...

Clubhouse is downsizing, big time. The company, which launched its audio-based social platform in the early pandemic days of April 2020, is now laying off more than half of all of its workers.Read more...

Virgin Galactic appears to be one step closer to resuming its space tourism services. The company announced today a successful suborbital test of the VSS Unity spaceplane and hopes to begin rocket-powered spaceflight tests in the coming months.Read more...

Human remains unveiled in Lake Mead’s low water levels last year have finally been identified as a Las Vegas man who went missing years ago, local authorities said this week.Read more...

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Artificial intelligence and the music industry are having a moment, and it’s unclear at this point whether it’s a great one. As AI generators like ChatGPT and DALL-E get better and better, so too do AI voice generators—and that’s no better exemplified than the rise of completely fabricated songs from major artists.

The healing powers of poop can now officially come in a more palatable pill. This week, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug Vowst, an oral capsule packed with beneficial bacteria derived from human fecal matter. The drug is intended to treat recurrent infections of Clostridioides difficile by balancing…Read more...

We’ve all been there: You’re in a conversation with friends, and you desperately try to find a TikTok that you had scrolled past that could serve as a funny contribution to the current topic of conversation. You hastily search and scroll through the app and finally find it, but it’s too late—your companions have moved…Read more...

The Mexican government’s press conference from the Palacio Nacional on Wednesday looked like it was part of a late-night comedy skit. Standing behind a podium with the government seal, an official proudly announced that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had been named the top streamer in Mexico in the first…Read more...

Last year, I wrote about how West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin was acting like a bad boyfriend to the Democratic party. The man was stringing his colleagues along for months and holding climate legislation in limbo. I ate my words just a couple of weeks later when Manchin worked with Democratic leadership to revive…Read more...

It’s been less than two weeks since the European Space Agency’s (ESA) JUICE mission began its journey to Jupiter, but the spacecraft has wasted no time getting itself ready to explore the gas giant system.Read more...

“You wouldn’t want to be here on May Day,” a character cautions Edward Woodward’s rigidly Christian, notably prudish Sergeant Howie in folk-horror classic The Wicker Man. After he travels to the isolated Summerisle to investigate reports of a missing child, he’s shocked—shocked!—to discover a community steeped in …Read more...

It’s been about 20 years since the life-simulator game, Second Life, came out. Nintendo Miis first emerged on the scene more than a decade and a half ago. We live in an era where near-photo-realistic video game graphics are possible. For better or worse, you can deepfake images and videos of notable people with a few…Read more...

At Paramount’s CinemaCon 2023 panel today, producer Seth Rogen introduced a new clip from director Jeff Rowe’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, appropriately clad in a turtle-green suit. The animated reboot brings a new sense of style to the classic TMNT quartet—voiced for the first time in the franchise…Read more...

The Justice Department filed a motion on Thursday to hold Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira without bail, arguing he is a flight risk and presents “an ongoing risk both to the national security of the United States and to the community.” Teixeira, 21, allegedly released sensitive and confidential government information on…Read more...

The Transformers franchise is returning to its animated roots with Transformers: One, and now we know who’ll be lending their voice to the film.

A team of mathematicians and engineers is unraveling the wriggly mystery of blackworms; specifically, the researchers are trying to understand how the worms are able to disentangle even quicker than they (intentionally) intertwine.Read more...

In expansive new research out this week, scientists around the world have started to unravel the genetic secrets behind one of nature’s greatest success stories: mammals. They’ve catalogued and compared the genomes of more than 200 mammal species, including elephants, bats, and humans. Among other things, their…Read more...

Just how vulnerable are the thousands of government-operated satellites speeding along their orbits above our heads? A team of researchers proved they could hack into a European Space Agency-owned satellite, allowing them to take full control of its communication, imaging—and even its maneuverability systems.Read more...

Balto the sled dog is famous for being part of a sled team that delivered medicine from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Nome, Alaska, through harrowing blizzard conditions in 1925. Now, a team of scientists has sequenced the dog’s genome using DNA found in his taxidermied remains.

If you’re looking to have the Force, er... your heart grow three sizes today, look no further than this incredibly charming skit from EA Star Wars that shows what happens when the legendary Mark Hamill shows up on the set of Star Wars: Jedi Survivor to give Cameron Monaghan some pointers.

House lawmakers participating in a hearing debating one of the country’s most controversial warrantless surveillance programs were left with more questions than answers Thursday. Heads of the federal government’s top intelligence agencies appeared unable or unwilling to reveal to the public just how much data is being…Read more...

Last week, BuzzFeed nuked its entire newsroom, laying off an already significantly reduced team that had never been quite the same since the company forced out droves of investigative and politics reporters last March. And while you certainly couldn’t call this the first major newsroom layoff in history, it did feel…Read more...

“I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during the Q&A portion of a 2016 interview at a Vox Recode conference. “A Model S and Model X at this point can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person, right now,” he added. Or...did he?

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues to fumble his presidential bid over unconstitutional squabbles with the Walt Disney World Resort that undermine his own political agenda.Read more...

It’s spring. Trees have leaves again. The birds are chirping. And insects are crawling back out of hell from their winter slumber, including the invasive spotted lanternfly.Read more...

Smartphone makers like Apple and Samsung spend millions of dollars to improve the quality of the cameras on their mobile devices, only for users to slap a vintage filter on their shots before sharing them on social media. The Tuner promises to give modern camera lenses a retro look by recreating the flaws of classic…Read more...

Long ago, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. That was the compromise of progress. Now, Chevy is taking what could’ve, at least, been a proverbial parking lot filled with compact, relatively affordable electric vehicles and swapping it for one stuffed with more, massive EV pick-up trucks.Read more...

Amazon has officially started up its most recent round of employee reductions. The company is kicking off its previously announced layoffs of ~9,000 staff by axing workers in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) and human resources sectors.

Twitter is eliminating its search feature for anyone not logged into an account. The change means that any person attempting to access the site’s search results would need to log in to their existing account or create a new one in what could be CEO Elon Musk’s latest attempt to drive up the number of users on the…Read more...

If Disney had to make an animated movie that obliquely celebrated the studio’s 100-year anniversary, it could have done far, far worse than an origin story of sorts for the stars that so many Disney characters have wished upon for the last century. And, according to this first trailer, that’s exactly what Wish is—a…Read more...

Initially revealed over a year ago, Dyson’s first audio product, a pair of noise-canceling headphones called the Zone that still manages to incorporate the company’s expertise with cleaning and purifying air, officially goes on sale today in the US with a price that’s as expensive as both Apple and Sony’s premium…Read more...

Sure, audiences are going to see a galaxy-spanning war, centuries of prophetic witch-women, and spice, but Dune 2 is also going to have a storyline that the first Dune installment only hinted at; romance.Read more...

Meta’s latest quarterly earnings report is hung up on the “efficiency” buzzword. In his call with investors on Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked up “efficiency work,” more than once, all while sprinkling in talk of “monetization efficiency” and “organizational efficiency.”Read more...

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The Steam Deck was a groundbreaking device when it arrived last year to change what everyone thought handheld gaming could be, and while many competitors’ devices claim to outperform Valve’s handheld, Asus’ ROG Ally could be the first true Steam Deck killer, especially if this leaked pricing info proves to be accurate.Read more...

After being convicted of wire fraud for her dealings with her failed blood startup Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes has white-knuckled herself to freedom for just a little bit longer. A last minute legal filing on Tuesday has delayed her 11-year prison sentence, which was expected to begin today.Read more...

In a groundbreaking step towards establishing a human presence on the Moon, NASA extracted oxygen from simulated lunar soil in a “dirty” chamber with similar conditions to the Moon’s environment.Read more...

It’s been five years since Paramount’s Transformers franchise underwent a soft reboot with the 80s throwback (and fairly charming) movie Bumblebee. The next entry in the series, Rise of the Beasts, operates in the same new timeline first formed by Bumblebee, and brings with it some new blood. Along with Creed II’s …Read more...

When Spencre McGowan, an herbalist and a cookbook writer in Butte, Montana, started posting on TikTok to help pull herself out of a “depressive funk” in 2021, she could have never imagined her quick, rustic videos of comforting food recipes and outdoor wanderings would net her an audience of 110,000 committed followersRead more...

At 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 2 is so far that it takes more than 22 hours for NASA’s signals to reach the probe. With its power gradually diminishing, mission planners thought they might have to shut down one of its five scientific instruments next year, but a newly implemented plan…Read more...