Gizmodo

We’ve got some good news and some bad news. Space Force has granted NASA’s request for an extension to launch the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket—yay—but a tropical storm is brewing in the Atlantic, which could threaten its scheduled launch on Tuesday, September 27.Read more...

If last week’s Hail Mary love-in between Miriel and Galadriel made you think The Rings of Power was done telling you good things happen when people trust in each other and work together, well, I’ve got good and bad news for you: that’s it, that’s the show.

Scientists may be able to turn a long-time germ foe into a cancer-fighting ally, new research this week suggests. In preliminary data from a Phase I trial, a genetically modified version of the herpes virus has shown promise in treating difficult-to-eradicate tumors, with one patient having experienced a complete…Read more...

Want to help bring encrypted messaging to a despotic regime that treats women like shit? Well, now’s your chance.Read more...

Tesla filed a countersuit against the California Civil Rights Department (formerly the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) this week. The action comes in response to the state agency’s ongoing lawsuit against the automaker, which alleges that the company has operated a “racially segregated workplace,” at its…Read more...

Project Veritas, the conservative “investigative journalism” outlet known for shoving hidden cameras anywhere they can fit them, reportedly violated wiretapping laws.

Don’t Worry Darling has style. And we don’t just mean Harry Styles. It’s got an incredible look and feel about it. Impeccable production and costume design. Bright, beautiful cinematography. Memorable, impactful musical choices and a hypnotic, distinctive score. There’s no doubt that director Olivia Wilde has crafted…Read more...

Watch out, climate-conscious businesses: The guy who draws Dilbert is out to get you.Read more...

There’s been lots of chatter about the iPhone 14 Pro/Pro Max’s Dynamic Island since it was introduced a few weeks ago. It’s garnered enough buzz that even Android users are attempting to spoof the feature on their devices. But what’s so special about the Dynamic Island, anyway?

Billed as “for fans of Black Panther and Children of Blood and Bone,” Nubia: The Awakening has another draw: it’s co-written by actor and producer Omar Epps, whose dozens of credits include Scream 2, Love & Basketball, House, and This Is Us. io9 has an exclusive excerpt to share today from this upcoming release.Read more...

Hurricane Fiona made landfall over Puerto Rico this past weekend, and the resulting widespread flooding and strong winds knocked out the grid for the island’s more than 3 million residents.Read more...

There’s no real formula for a great horror movie. A great horror movie can be poignant and slow. It can be fast and exciting. It can be gross, it can be understated. Really as long as a horror film is scary, interesting, or engaging, anything goes. Smile, the directorial debut of Parker Finn, wants to be many of these…Read more...

On Monday, NASA will attempt to smash its car-sized DART spacecraft into a non-threatening asteroid, in what is an important first test of a planetary defense strategy against hazardous celestial objects. A host of telescopes will be watching, including the Hubble and Webb space telescopes.Read more...

Cloverfield, the 2008 found-footage creature feature, has received a surprising number of sequels that have had very little to do with each other but are still in the same universe. I’ll be honest; I don’t understand it, but Deadline reports that there is a new Cloverfield franchise film in the works, this time with…Read more...

Amazon has switched up its return policy for those who purchase ebooks on its marketplace. The tech company will only accept ebook returns from users who have read no more than 10% of the book.

Another day, another crypto scandal. The Southern District of New York has authorized the IRS to dig into the records of (should be) U.S. taxpayers who are customers of the crypto broker SFOX. The new IRS summons is specifically targeting M.Y. Safra Bank, a New York-based financial institution which offers SFOX users…Read more...

It’s a little weird, to be honest, but 2022 somehow became the year of Pinocchio. Multiple studios have made multiple movies based on the classic tale, and while at first it was probably easy to get excited about a Tom Hanks/Robert Zemeckis version, the truth of the matter is only three words really matter in the …Read more...

London cops, assisted by the UK’s National Cyber Crime Unit, arrested a still-unnamed 17-year-old reportedly living in Oxfordshire on suspicion of hacking, according to a tweet posted by the City of London Police Friday morning.Read more...

A modern smartwatch can run circles around the giant desktop PCs of yesteryear when it comes to processing power, but counting how many steps you take seems like a waste of all that horsepower. Why not turn a modern wearable into a lilliputian PC, complete with an equally tiny keyboard that looks like it was hijacked…Read more...

The newest head of one of the more controversial crypto exchanges apparently isn’t backing down from his company’s reputation of making controversial, anti-regulatory pronouncements.Read more...

Spooky season is truly upon us, as we get a look at the new Monster High movie, and other frights. La Brea’s cast expands for season 2. Plus, another look at the Supernatural prequel, what’s coming on Stargirl, and Peter Capaldi is maybe a creepy time traveller in The Devil’s Hour. To me, my spoilers!

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Adam Levine, frontman for Maroon 5, recently had his sexts leaked by a woman who was very much not his wife. And if you thought something so awkwardly horny couldn’t be turned into social media marketing by the biggest brands on the planet, we’re here to tell you it can. Yes, Levine’s messages went from mildly…Read more...

A Kenyan court has set a new date to hear submissions in a lawsuit brought against Meta and one of its outsourcing partners by a former Facebook content moderator, who accuses the companies of exploitation and union busting.

Imagine meeting the person you want to spend your life with—but you live in a community where partners are forcibly switched via a lottery on a regular basis, and no amount of true love makes any difference. That’s the premise of Heartless, an Icelandic sci-fi short directed by Haukur Björgvinsson, first spotted on …Read more...

Andor is a show about the messy side of the galaxy far, far away and the even messier people who inhabit it. Angry people, unpleasant people, liars and killers looking for any way to focus their frustrations at a universe in the grip of totalitarianism. But it’s also about the bell guy.

Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican Congressman and alleged sex criminal, is now on Twitch. Gaetz (or at least whoever runs his social media accounts) announced his arrival on the streaming platform in a tweet. “I’m joining @Twitch to bring my America First message to a new generation of viewers,” he wrote.

Aiming to be the next Hunger Games by way of Pacific Rim—which admittedly does sound rather awesome—best-selling YA sci-fi fantasy The Iron Widow has been acquired by Erik Feig’s Picturestart.Read more...

Meta, the company founded on the principle of building connectivity and giving people a voice worldwide, did just the opposite last year and enforced speech policies that violated Palestinian’s freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. That assessment, which claims Meta’s policies negatively impacted…Read more...

Regional wildfire smoke is significantly lowering air quality for millions of people across the country.Read more...

What, if any, is the impact of a severe hack earlier this week going to be on Rockstar Games’ business? The game publisher’s systems were breached just days ago in what some are calling the biggest hack of its kind in recent memory. Known for popular franchises like Red Dead the Grand Theft Auto, Rockstar said that it…Read more...

Meta is terrified of TikTok’s domineering presence in the social media market, and now it seems the company behind the app, ByteDance, is coming for Meta’s own stake in the Metaverse with a headset that’s the closest we’ve seen in price to the Quest 2.Read more...

A new report from the American Association for Cancer Research this week offers a good prognosis about the state of cancer care in the U.S. More Americans than ever are surviving cancer, and the long-running decline in mortality has only sped up in recent years. At the same time, some groups continue to face a higher…Read more...

If you’ve gone online this week or turned on the TV, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about the gross and potentially fatal practice of cooking chicken in NyQuil. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration warned about the “recent NyQuil chicken” challenge, and by the amount of coverage it’s gotten, you would think…Read more...

Voyager Space announced a new collaboration with Hilton, the American hotel and hospitality company. Together, the companies are planning to bring crew lodging to Starlab, Voyager Space’s upcoming commercial space station which will be consistently crewed by four astronauts.

Into the Odd takes its taglines of rules-light and flavor-heavy very, very seriously. This Old-School Roleplaying (OSR) tabletop game has the veneer of a simple dungeon-delver, but once you dig into the book itself, the straightforward rules lead you into an incredible wealth of lore that emphasizes the…Read more...

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is being circled by a bubble of hot gas, according to recent analysis by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The gas is whipping around the black hole at about 30% the speed of light.Read more...

It bears repeating that trying to emulate an iOS feature that isn’t native to Android often results in something too hacky to use daily. That’s how I feel about a new attempt to bring Apple’s dynamic island iPhone feature to Android.Read more...

Star Trek: Lower Decks’ third season has struggled to find a point for itself, regressing its ensign heroes and relying on the charms of its pastiche rather than the growth of its characters to find something to say—a charm that was beginning to quickly run out. Thankfully, at the season’s halfway mark it decided to…Read more...

If you’re able to access your Instagram account right now, I guess you can consider yourself lucky. The app was reportedly down for some users Thursday according to thousands of user-generated reports on Downdetector.com.

Donald Trump could be back to his old social media antics in just a few months. The two-year ban, barring the former poster-in-chief from Facebook, expires at the beginning of 2023. And Meta, Facebook’s parent company, hasn’t revealed whether it’ll be extending Trump’s virtual exile.

SpaceX is expecting to see its gigantic Starship rocket take off on its first flight very soon. CEO Elon Musk revealed that the company is gearing up to attempt the first-ever orbital test flight of the two-stage reusable system as early as late October, but with a launch in November being more “likely.”

It’s been over two years since I reviewed Darkwalker on Moonshae, the fabulously titled first book ever set in Dungeons & Dragons’ venerable Forgotten Realms campaign setting. It’s been less than a week since I read the sequel, Black Wizards, but when I tell you I’ve forgotten nearly everything about the book since…Read more...

Michael Bloomberg is taking on plastic producers. The billionaire announced Wednesday that he will launch a $85 million campaign to fight against the expansion of the petrochemical industry.

NASA’s upcoming Artemis Moon program is serving as a stepping stone for an eventual crewed mission to Mars. A revised list of planning objectives details a strategy for accomplishing this daunting feat.Read more...

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West Virginia coal baron and Senator Joe Manchin released the final text for his anticipated permitting reform legislation on Wednesday evening.

“It’s scary as shit. I’m working on Sandman as my first staff writing job?” Vanessa Benton shook their head as they said this, leaning back a little; we’re talking in the morning over video chat. “It was an incredible learning experience, diving headfirst into that.”

Samsung’s newest hardware for the U.S. market is a pair of rugged devices made for hiking or jobs that would put them in harm’s way. The Samsung Galaxy Tab Active4 Pro tablet and the Galaxy XCover6 Pro smartphone feature military-grade device protection and 5G connectivity. But their most interesting feature is that …Read more...

MyPillow CEO and proverbial yeller at clouds Mike Lindell is under investigation by the Department of Justice for potential identity theft and intent to damage a protected computer potentially connected to a 2020 Colorado voting equipment security breach.Read more...