Gizmodo

Blood testing huckster and former Arrayit president Mark Schena has been convicted in a covid-19 and allergy test scheme that allegedly resulted in nearly $80 million worth of fraudulent claims. Schena, who was convicted on five separate charges, could potentially spend decades in prison, according to the Department…Read more...

Even among the select group of 40-something nerds who cherish even the awful content of our youths, there are not many who remember the short-lived cartoon Turbo Teen. This is a good thing. Its premise was lazy at best—a teen named Bret who can transform into a sports car—and executed horrifically, as Bret’s body…Read more...

A team of scientists in Canada say they’re a major step closer to creating an easy-to-take oral insulin tablet. In new research, they found that rats dosed with their dissolvable tablet seem to absorb the insulin the same way they do when given a typical insulin shot. Should their work pay off, it could lead to a more…Read more...

Late night talk show host James Corden disclosed how to trick a Tesla’s autopilot feature during a cheeky conversation with musician Reggie Watts to his millions of viewers earlier this week.

Do we know much about Mike Flanagan’s newest television show, The Midnight Club? Not really. The synopsis provided by Netflix reads, “At a hospice for terminally ill young adults, eight patients come together every night at midnight to tell each other stories—and make a pact that the next of them to die will give the…Read more...

The world could create more sustainable batteries with an unusual source: crustaceans. In a paper published this week in the journal Matter, researchers say they have made a biodegradable battery with a substance found in crab and lobster shells.Read more...

One of the biggest films of all time just got bigger. This weekend, Spider-Man: No Way Home is being re-released in theaters with 11 minutes of additional footage. Referred to in some places as the “More Fun Stuff Edition” (but more commonly just as an extended edition), the film adds multiple brand new scenes while…Read more...

Each of the four RS-25 engines currently positioned at the base of NASA’s Space Launch System has gone to space many times before, and each has an interesting story to tell. One first flew in 1998, boosting astronaut John Glenn to orbit. Soon, if all goes well, these veteran boosters will propel NASA into the Artemis…Read more...

Movie fans love to rank their favorite franchises. What’s the best Star Wars movie? What’s the best Lord of the Rings movie? What’s the best James Bond movie? The potential lists go on and on. But one list is absolutely, positively, never-in-doubt definitive.Read more...

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The Cinema Foundation, in an effort to make up a holiday that would appeal to both consumers and theaters, has announced that this Saturday—September 3—is National Cinema Day. Some 3,000 theaters across the U.S. are officially participating in the promotion, from chains like Regal and AMC to smaller art-house…Read more...

It was all good-natured competition, until it wasn’t. E-commerce selling platform Shopify has put on its boxing gloves to brawl with the heftiest heavyweight in its industry over checkout buttons. Specifically, Shopify doesn’t want to see Amazon’s shiny new “Buy with Prime” option on its sellers’ stores, and it’s…Read more...

A few hundred protestors gathered in San Juan, Puerto Rico for several evenings last week to voice their anger at LUMA, the company responsible for electricity on the island. They crowded the streets of the city near the island’s capitol building, chanting to the rhythm of drums and the banging of pots and pans,…Read more...

Live Nation, the company behind some of your favorite concerts, wants you to know that it has a soul. The events promoter and venue operator pledged $5 million to TURN, an environmental startup, to bring their high-tech, reusable cups to its events and shows.

Mark Zuckerberg’s recruiting some help to inch his metaverse vision closer to reality.Read more...

Excited to watch the debut of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power over at Prime Video today? Perhaps you might want to check out the platinum blond problems of the Targaryen family instead? Happily, you can do both, thanks to HBO Max releasing the first episode of the Game of Thrones prequel series House of the…Read more...

Each September brings the annual Mineral Cup, a fierce competition to determine Twitter’s favorite mineral. This year’s contest is well underway, with kaolinite narrowly beating schorl in the first matchup.Read more...

Alessandra Nivola talks about being Kraven’s villain. Get a look at the new Hellraiser. Jerry and Morty get slimed in new, mysterious Rick and Morty season 6 art. Plus, another look at Supernatural spinoff The Winchesters, and Vincent D’Onofrio keeps teasing his return to the Marvel universe. Spoilers get!

Humans are going back to the Moon and this time they’re seeking to stay. NASA’s Artemis program promotes a sustainable vision of people living on and around the lunar surface, prompting some truly innovative ideas about how we might make that happen.

President Joe Biden delivered an important speech in Philadelphia on Thursday night about the threat that Donald Trump and his followers pose to the future of American democracy. It was fiery and blunt by Biden standards. And there’s probably no better proof that Biden’s speech was desperately needed than the reaction…Read more...

On Friday, Russian cosmonauts will attempt a second go at a spacewalk to continue the installation of Europe’s Robotic Arm outside the International Space Station. The first attempt ended prematurely owing to a spacesuit battery glitch.

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Mobile Suit Gundam, like all huge franchises, can be a little intimidating to get into—especially since, chronologically speaking, the mecha anime series is about as wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey as you can get for something that doesn’t actually involve time travel.

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It’s been nearly 10 years since swiping left became the gesture of choice for millions of daters with the advent of Tinder. Since that app first came on the scene Sept. 12, 2012, it seems every single application has tried to suss out the best way for users to burn through potential dates at a pace that can set fire…Read more...

Somehow Pantheon is AMC Networks’ first traditionally animated series, a style that contrasts with its near-future tale of technological horrors—and how love just might be able to transcend them. Based on short stories by multiple Hugo-winning author and translator Ken Liu (“The Paper Menagerie,” The Dandelion Dynasty…Read more...

Neopets, the company that sells virtual pets to tweenagers (and also a weird amount of adults), suffered a pretty devastating data breach earlier this year, but a recent update seems to show it was far worse than we previously thought.Read more...

If you grew up in a time when book fairs were a thing, you almost certainly know Bunnicula. Every kid in the 1980s and 1990s had Bunnicula. Written and created by James and Deborah Howe, it follows a pet rabbit found in a movie theater playing Dracula which leads the family dog to believe it’s a “vampire bunny.” The …Read more...

Readers hoping to receive up-to-date reporting on today’s legal flash between Trump lawyers and the Department of Justice will have to wait.Read more...

A new study this week suggests that long-term exposure to blue light may not be so harmless, at least for fruit flies. Researchers found that chronic blue light exposure prematurely aged the flies and damaged their brains, likely due to certain metabolic changes. But it’s not known whether blue light could cause…Read more...

I’ll be honest here, smart lights are something I haven’t paid much mind to—for such a revolutionary piece of technology, I just thought they were a missed opportunity to make something fun to look at. Imagine my surprise when I saw today that Signify—the company behind Philips Hue—may have just achieved the full…Read more...

Last week’s bit of a reset for Star Trek: Lower Decks’ premise has primed our ensigns to re-learn some of the lessons they need to understand before they go off trying to be the big heroes of their lives on the Cerritos. This week, at least two of them get to start learning them... by taking pages out of each other’s…Read more...

Thanks to the internet, sometimes unnecessary planetary damage is gleefully filmed and proudly posted. On TikTok, the ever-growing social media behemoth that teens love, trends come and go quickly—but some of them can’t vanish soon enough. Here are a few of the worst bad-for-the-Earth fads that have swept through the…Read more...

There it is, in four different bands of the infrared spectrum: the gas giant HIP 65426b, the first exoplanet directly imaged by the Webb Space Telescope.Read more...

When a Marvel character cameos in another character’s movie, Marvel fans get excited. But when one of music’s biggest superstars does the same thing? The world gets excited. That’s what happens on this week’s episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law when Grammy-award winning rapper and icon Megan Thee Stallion makes a…Read more...

It’s understandable that a man so attached to social media would be a bit frazzled when one day it was all taken away. Alex Holder, the filmmaker who got incredible access to the 45th President and his family while filming a documentary leading up to the January 6th Capitol riots, says he saw firsthand how upsetting…Read more...

California’s largest single source of electricity has lived to see another day. In a surprisingly overwhelming vote, the California Senate early on Thursday morning moved to extend the life of Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant and a major source of carbon-free electricity.Read more...

Fall is nearly upon us and book publishers seem especially excited for the new season, unleashing dozens of new releases for fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror tales. September brings monsters, time-travel, witches, sneaky royals, supernatural killers, hostile alien planets, mermaids, and so much more.

A record-breaking heat wave has descended over the U.S. West and is forecast to extend into Labor Day weekend. Officials in California are asking residents to reduce their electricity use in hopes of heading off blackouts, as the grid is likely to be strained by increased reliance on air conditioning amid the…Read more...

U.S. officials are on a tear with their belated bid for chipmaking dominance. After passing a $52 billion bill that aims to jumpstart American semiconductor manufacturing, officials are now restricting companies from exporting powerful GPUs to rivals like China and Russia.Read more...

Say what you want about She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, but every time it seems to have a big issue, it gets addressed immediately. A big question at the end of the first episode was quickly answered in the second—and in the third episode, titled “The People vs. Emil Blonsky,” it happens two more times. Jennifer Walters…Read more...

The European Space Agency’s giant mechanical arm just pulled off its first maneuver, quietly moving a suitcase-sized payload from one side of an orbiting science module to another.Read more...

In an excellent new feature interview with Spanish-language publication Life and Style, Tenoch Huerta admits that when Ryan Coogler offered him the part of Namor in Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever, he didn’t know how to swim—a key skill for the ruler of Atlantis.Read more...

General Motors’ big bet on autonomous vehicles, like most human drivers, could stand to improve its left turns.Read more...

Many of us have had our fun with AI art generators—like DALL-E—over the last few months, but one artist in Colorado took it a step further and won the state fair’s fine art competition with a work generated with the help of an algorithm.

If former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey liked to sing, I imagine that Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is what he started hollering in his car or on the beach when he saw that Twitter was yet again testing a feature he swore it would “probably” never implement.Read more...

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NASA has awarded five bonus missions to SpaceX for crewed flights to the International Space Station. The $1.4 billion contract extension runs through 2030, when the orbital lab is scheduled to be retired.Read more...

In David Mitchell’s 2004 book Cloud Atlas, (not the movie, mind you) sections of the story that take place in a dystopian future where characters refer to major industries as their biggest brand. Gas isn’t gas, its “Exon.” Similarly, films aren’t films, they’re “Disneys.” Though there’s no reference to online…Read more...

Even an evil fictitious organization like Star Wars’ Empire can’t just throw out a new kind of trooper for every appearance. Sometimes, the Emperor’s finest just have to make do with a new coat of paint as they go out to persecute rebels and what have you—and that seems like it’ll be the case in Andor, if some of…Read more...