Gizmodo

It’s overwhelming to think about how polluted our oceans are—so much so that it’s increasingly tempting to think of technological solutions to clean it all up. Two new studies shed light on what, exactly, happens to plastic once it enters the ocean, and how some natural processes may be helping to break a lot of it…Read more...

A week after a calamitous ransomware attack struck the city of Oakland, local officials have declared a state of emergency. The California city’s ongoing network issues continue to hamper city services and operations, officials said earlier this week.

Over two wildly different seasons so far, Star Trek: Picard has tried to navigate just what it wants to say about its titular legend. Are our memories of Jean-Luc Picard justified or warped through rose-tinted recollection? Is he too tied to the past, or the only figure Starfleet could turn to to navigate a tumultuous…Read more...

Instagram is getting a new ‘channels’ feature added to its platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Thursday on Facebook. The new addition to the app is a broadcast channel feature that will be familiar to Telegram users. That’s right, once again Mark Zuckerberg is trying to steal his way to innovation.Read more...

Soon, Paramount+ subscribers will have to shell out more per month to access the same subscription tiers. The streaming service announced it will increase the cost of both its “essential” and “premium” plans in 2023, during a Thursday morning earnings call with investors.

Virgin Galactic’s carrier aircraft VMS Eve took to the California skies yesterday for an important two-and-a-half-hour flight test. It’s the latest sign that the Richard Branson-founded company is preparing to resume suborbital flights.Read more...

Early in today’s Hasbro earnings call, Chris Cocks—the CEO of Hasbro and former president of Wizards of the Coast (2016-2022)—spoke about the Dungeons & Dragons Open Gaming License, though he focused more on talking around the issues rather than directly engaging with them. No specifics were given; instead of delays,…Read more...

With its strange rings and tilt, surprising seasonal variations, and 27 moons, Uranus is the solar system’s weirdo planet. The enigmatic ice giant has a lot to teach us, which is why astronomers are clamoring for a mission to explore the planet up close.Read more...

A secretive Israeli cyber company is engineering ongoing influence operations directed at elections all over the world, a consortium of more than 30 news organizations reports. The CEO of the company, a former Israeli special forces agent named Tal Hanan, boasted to undercover journalists that his team of…Read more...

Thanks to a skinny, torpedo-shaped robot, scientists have been able to better observe the forces eroding Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier, aka the ‘doomsday glacier’ that could rapidly raise sea levels if it melts.

With an earnest, can-do attitude, Taron Egerton stars as Henk Rogers, the video game designer and producer who helped bring the ‘80s video game Tetris out of the Soviet Union and into the hands of the world via the GameBoy. Following the beats of a heist thriller, Apple’s Tetris recreates a historic series of events…Read more...

Tech waste is a real thing, and while the majority of tech companies are focussed on making the next thinnest, fastest, or most powerful laptop, Framework is doing things a little differently. The San Francisco based company is shunning the throwaway culture we’ve all become used to and instead have released a laptop…Read more...

Four unidentified flying objects have made their way across North American airspace since the end of January, and were subsequently shot down. While the first object was identified as a Chinese-owned surveillance balloon, U.S. lawmakers say they are no closer to discovering the truth behind the other three.Read more...

On Thursday, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who has been on the job since 2014, told staff she was stepping down from her position. It’s the end of an era for Google’s mainstay video platform and one of its mainstay execs.Read more...

The heroes in a half shell are no stranger to crossovers, especially in the realm of IDW’s comics continuity. They’ve tussled with the Ghostbusters, they’ve teamed up with Batman, they even crossed paths with X-Files’ Mulder and Scully. But their latest crossover is pitting the Hamato Clan against a cast of video…Read more...

Hope you weren’t expecting to finally catch a glimpse of Apple’s mixed reality headset any time soon. Anonymous sources familiar with the planned debut told Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman that the MR “Reality” series headset was set to be announced in April, but is now being pushed back to June in time for the company’s…Read more...

In 2021 and 2022, Marvel Studios released 10 brand-new projects on Disney+: eight shows and two specials. This year was looking like it might follow suit with plans for What If season two, Secret Invasion, Loki season two, Echo, Ironheart, and Agatha: Coven of Chaos all potentially set for release. However, with Bob…Read more...

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Earlier this week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted new patents to Apple Inc. that hinted at intriguing hardware features, including wraparound touch displays and foldable screens. The patents might indicate what to expect in upcoming new products —rumors have swirled about a foldable iPad for almost two…Read more...

Samsung isn’t the only Android manufacturer conjuring up foldable smartphones. Overseas, OnePlus parent company Oppo has announced it’s launched the Find N2 Flip. The phone technically launched two months ago in China, but is now hitting shelves elsewhere in the world, like Europe and the UK. While it’s not coming to…Read more...

Here’s a fun fact: Teen Titans Go, the extra kid-friendly, comedic reboot of the beloved Teen Titans cartoon, has been airing for a decade. A decade! That’s seven years more than the beloved original, but there are still some fans who grumble about the (immensely successful) switch. Now a new, super-sized episode of Go…Read more...

Christophe Gans says he’s returning to Silent Hill soon. Filming has wrapped on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Ash’s final Pokémon journey continues with a Pikachu and Meowth team-up. Plus, new posters for John Wick Chapter 4. Spoilers get!

Keanu Reeves recently mentioned that the action in John Wick: Chapter 4 hits an all-time high, which, if you’ve seen the other movies in the bullet-filled franchise, would be really saying something. This newest trailer for Chapter 4 would seem to indicate Reeves is not lying. At all.Read more...

Meme stocks, “stonks,” “hold the line,” were among the words and phrases popularized by the WallStreetBets community. But a new lawsuit challenges the very idea of ownership over that community, or more specifically, who should be able to monetize the very name of the famed subreddit.Read more...

In the wake of a union push that began to pick up steam this week, Tesla Workers United working with the company’s Autopilot function at Tesla’s Buffalo Gigafactory are claiming that they were fired by the Elon Musk-owned company in retaliation for their unionization efforts.

Stop me if you’ve heard this phrase in the past week: “No one is talking about the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.”

Somehow it took this long, but after a trilogy of Oscar-nominated animated movies, a spin-off TV show, a series of short films, and multiple video games, How to Train Your Dragon—inspired by Cressida Cowell’s 2003 best-selling book—is getting the live-action treatment.Read more...

Twitter’s ad revenue may have gone up in smoke recently, but the company isn’t letting that get it down. Instead, it’s taking the high road and adjusting for headwinds.Read more...

Star Trek: Picard returns for its third and final season this week, with its titular hero tasked with one last adventure alongside faces old and new. But although the season has made it clear it’s largely operating on a clean break from its predecessors, if you’re hopping on board for The Next Generation nostalgia in…Read more...

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Believe it or not, the long-rumored I Am Legend sequel is indeed on the way but it’ll be oddly at odds with the 2007 original. Producer and co-writer Akiva Goldsman just signed a new deal with Warner Bros. and it’s one of two projects he’s already working on (the other being Constantine 2 with Keanu Reeves). Michael…Read more...

Users on Reddit are speaking out after the Replika AI companion reportedly stopped responding to their sexual advances. There is now a petition to the company asking them to bring that part of the interaction back, and the experience has left users voicing their frustration online with many saying they feel lost or…Read more...

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You can stop stressing out about UFOs now, because researchers from The University of Tokyo have decided we need a more terrifying concern to keep us up all night: robot spiders that can both crawl and fly.Read more...

Just 100 days shy of its release, Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid has revealed the first glimpse of Melissa McCarthy as the film’s iconic Disney villain Ursula.Read more...

For those whose internet access isn’t reliable enough to stick everything on the cloud, or for those who simply don’t trust their data to live anywhere but on their desk, Western Digital has updated its My Book and My Book Duo external drives with significant storage boosts so users may never have to delete a file…Read more...

It’s not you, it’s the bird. Twitter users reported outages on the Twitter iOS app Wednesday, but using the social media site on a desktop seemed to be doing just fine.Read more...

It has been nearly two weeks since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in Northeastern Ohio, and emergency response agencies are still working to lower hazardous chemical exposure risk for East Palestine residents near the derailment cleanup site.

The House Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday that it had subpoenaed several of the biggest tech CEOs in the U.S., from Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta, for documents and communications related to more vague and so-far unfounded hints of government “collusion.”Read more...

Ten years ago, when it was announced that Peyton Reed was taking over Ant-Man from Edgar Wright, it was met with some skepticism. Really? The Down With Love and Bring It On guy? Sure, those movies are great, but can he really do superheroes? Well, the answer turned out to be a resounding “Yes”—and now, with the…Read more...

The Logitech G Cloud is one of the first handhelds specifically designed to play AAA games by streaming them from the cloud, or from a nearby console. Because of that, it doesn’t need AAA specs itself. Instead, it’s put that budget into being one of the most comfortable big screen portables I’ve ever used, with a long…Read more...

Google knows its AI just isn’t ready for prime time, so it has a new plan to iron out all the kinks, by forcing thousands of its workers to spend hours poking and prodding the poor AI until it won’t embarrass the company when it’s finally released.Read more...

Imagine, if you will, someone remade a classic Looney Tunes cartoon where Elmer Fudd tries to hunt Bugs Bunny. But instead of just updating the animation, that someone used the cartoon as the basis for a sprawling epic that turned Elmer and Bugs’ face-off into a sprawling, tense game of cat-and-mouse, extrapolating…Read more...

Climate change looms like a final boss that gets stronger by the day in Extrapolations, a new sci-fi limited series on Apple TV+.Read more...

Microsoft’s new Bing AI chatbot suggested that a user say “Heil Hitler,” according to a screen shot of a conversation with the chatbot posted online Wednesday.Read more...

This past Saturday, ex-astronaut Scott Kelly tweeted at SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, criticizing his company for planning to prevent the Ukrainian military from using Starlink to control drone strikes. With typical Muskian bluster, the billionaire said he didn’t want his devices to “enable escalation of the conflict that may…Read more...

El Salvador, which has already lost tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on its authoritarian millennial president’s beleaguered effort to embrace cryptocurrencies, now says it plans to open a “bitcoin embassy” in Texas. The Central American country’s continued commitment to bitcoin comes despite last year’s crypto…Read more...

A decade ago today, the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia unexpectedly found itself under assault from space, as a roughly 60-foot-wide asteroid exploded over the region. It was a shocking reminder that our planet can be struck at any time—and future impacts could be a lot more serious.Read more...

In two short weeks, audiences everywhere will once again be flying across the galaxy with The Mandalorian. Season 3 of the hit Star Wars show returns March 1 and the first clip from the new season just debuted in Apple’s App Store. Which is a little weird. But the clip itself is not. In fact, it very succinctly lays…Read more...

A new Webb Space Telescope deep field image shows the luminous realm of Pandora’s Cluster (Abell 2744), a pileup of galaxy clusters that formed over the course of 350 million years.Read more...