Gizmodo

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is reportedly calling on his staff to implement a “Simplicity Sprint” initiative meant to crowdsource employee ideas around product development, drive up efficiency and, “get better results faster.” The proposal comes on the heels of a hiring freeze and a series of worrying emails that has some…Read more...

The U.S. is apparently moving on two fronts to try and create an edge for itself in the chip-making market. One is to try and emphasize American chipmakers with billions of dollars in funding. That could be years and years before we even see a change in the market thanks to new factories, however, the White House is…Read more...

Another day, another wildfire. The McKinney Fire began burning in northern California on July 29, and since then it has scorched a total of 52,000 acres, making it the largest wildfire in California’s 2022 wildfire season.

Godzilla vs. Kong 2 has begun filming. Jameela Jamil talks She-Hulk’s Titania. Plus, good news for Moonhaven, and what’s coming on Westworld, Ghosts, and Primal. Spoilers, away!

Lucasfilm has released a new trailer for Andor, as well as revealing that the series has been pushed back several weeks and will now premiere September 21.

At least 28 people have died in the floods that have hit eastern Kentucky, according to the latest update from the state. And Kentucky’s Governor warns the death toll is going to get much worse in the coming days and weeks.

“I only know what I tell me.”

Over the various Predator films, comics, games, fans have met numerous iterations of the camouflaged alien hunter, and each of them have been formidable, bloody threats in their own ways. The upcoming Prey, which releases next week, winds back the clock to 1719 in the Comanche Nation, and its Predator stands as the…Read more...

Nichelle Nichols, the original actor of Star Trek’s Nyota Uhura, has passed away on Saturday, July 30. The news broke on the actor’s Instagram account, as announced by her son, Kyle Johnson.Read more...

The big movie of the weekend is the CG animated film DC’s League of Super Pets, which famously stars a range of established actors, headlined by Kevin Hart and eventual Black Adam Dwayne Johnson. Super Pets joins Disney’s Lightyear from earlier this month, along with the now finally released Paws of Fury, in being…Read more...

Back in 2018, MGM released the Tomb Raider reboot film starring Alicia Vikander that did solidly at the box office. A sequel seemed like a sure thing for Vikander’s take on Lara Croft, which was largely modeled after the events of Crystal Dynamics’ reboot trilogy, but then the pandemic cut off its production date, and…Read more...

Digimon isn’t quite the juggernaut it was back when us 90s kids were watching it early in the morning before school, but Toei has been gradually releasing more of it over the years. For anime fans, there was a reboot of the original Digimon Adventure season that premiered last year and whose English dub is currently…Read more...

Is there a family in media who’s persisted quite so much as The Simpsons? Matt Groening’s five-person (and one dog!) family of yellow oddballs has been going on strong since 1989, as long as some of our parents have been married, if not alive altogether. Depending on who you are, time hasn’t entirely been kind to the…Read more...

The core stage of a wayward Long March 5B rocket has returned from its short stint in low Earth orbit, disintegrating above the northern coast of Borneo.

The upcoming Spider-Man: Freshman Year cartoon was shrouded in some degree of secrecy since its initial reveal last year, but last weekend at San Diego Comic-Con, more information on the show came to light. Initially, it seemed like the cartoon would tell the story of MCU Peter Parker in his early days of heroism, but…Read more...

The Avengers sub-franchise of the MCU occupies a strange spot in the larger series. Though the original 2012 film was where that first batch of movies was building up to, and ended Phase One, the same couldn’t be said of its sequels. 2015's Age of Ultron released mid-Phase Two, and though the duology of Infinity War …Read more...

Every new season of Adult Swim’s Rick & Morty is a big deal, and the same holds true for the upcoming sixth season. The sci-fi animated comedy’s future has been set in stone for years—having a multi-season renewal offers some degree of safety—but there’s still a degree of unpredictability from the show that always…Read more...

In early 2012, the New York Times Magazine put out a cover story about Andrew Pole, a statistician working for Target who was tasked with inventing a way to identify potentially pregnant shoppers, even if those shoppers didn’t want the company to know. The rationale, Pole said, was that moms-to-be are a multi-million…Read more...

One week ago, 21-year-old influencer and photographer Tati Bruening was scrolling through Instagram and became annoyed over the fact that she was only seeing a seemingly endless stream of Reels, even though she wasn’t in the Reels tab. Where were the photos of her friends? In her frustration, Bruening threw together a…Read more...

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Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest fancy toys and merch swinging its way onto your future shelves. This week: The Batman! A friendly neighborhood Spider-Man! A much less friendly dark lord of the Sith! And a very cool take on the classic Power Rangers megazord. Check it out!Read more...

I never thought I would see a good Dungeons & Dragons movie in my lifetime. When Honor Among Thieves comes out next year, I still might not have. But the movie has earned my goodwill, and that’s because it has an Owlbear in it.

Imagine buying something, then being told it’s worth more than what you paid for it. That’s how real estate works, right? At least, that’s how my millennial brain has interpreted it thus far. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all my money on avocado toast! Anyway, price increases aren’t something we typically expect to…Read more...

Given the current onslaught of ‘80s nostalgia (bolstered by Stranger Things and elevated by “sure, why not?” occurrences like the ALF revival), it only makes sense that one of the coolest characters of the era—artificial intelligence personality Max Headroom—would be angling for a return.Read more...

As record-breaking temperatures have pummeled much of the country this summer, another heat-related menace is causing trouble: flash droughts.

A local shipping authority recently found a 375-year-old shipwreck nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River in northern Germany. A team of researchers spent eight months studying the wreck, determining that 150 barrels of cargo went down with the Hanseatic ship.Read more...

Spanish police have arrested two former government contractors, accusing them of a stomach-churning assault on the nation’s system for monitoring for dangerous levels of nuclear radiation. The alleged cybercriminals were once the people charged with maintaining and repairing that very detection network.

If you’re still not over the loss of Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame, bust out the tissues before reading any further. Apparently we are now entering the phase where Marvel Studios is just going to make us cry, if the Black Panther: Wakanda Forever trailer is any indication.Read more...

It’s the end of a dirty era in Hawaii. The state’s last-ever coal shipment arrived in Oahu on Wednesday, bound for the last remaining coal-fired power plant, which is due to shut down in September.Read more...

Intel could really use a few bucks from the recently passed (by Congress, at least) $280 billion CHIPS and Science ACT. The U.S. chipmaker shocked investors on Thursday, revealing it lost nearly $500 million in Q2, its first quarterly loss in years. The company cited weakened demand for PC components and downturns in…Read more...

Babel Finance, the Hong Kong-based crypto lender, apparently had other designs when its worldwide user base handed over their crypto to the company than just borrowing and lending. It seems to have been doing what everyone else does with crypto, rapidly speculating and trying to make “line go up.” Of course, all that…Read more...

One of the dangers of going viral when you’re a pop culture reporter is that occasionally, sometimes, every now and then, your editor will ask you to start an open channel based on a silly tweet you shot off at midnight after reading a fanfic so devastating that you read it twice in two days. This is especially true…Read more...

Las Vegas was the center of some intense flooding last night as locations across the Strip and beyond were inundated after a torrent of rain battered the city. This is the second major flooding event the U.S. experienced this week after major flooding hit St. Louis on Tuesday.

Good news for PC gaming fans eager to play laying down! Valve has announced it will be able to fulfill the demand for the Steam Deck, its handheld gaming console, sooner than initially estimated.

Kenya’s national cohesion watchdog threatened to suspend Facebook from the country Friday if it doesn’t mitigate hate speech ahead of the country’s general elections next month. The regulator has given the company one week to remediate the problem, which included Facebook’s approval of ads advocating for ethnic…Read more...

Probably the biggest news to hit the haunt world lately is that global superstar the Weeknd has officially announced a Horror Nights House at Universal Studios Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood for their annual haunt events.Read more...

Apple’s next version of iOS is now available to the public as a downloadable beta. You can enroll your iPhone into the program to try iOS 16 before everyone else. The software is still in development, so you’ll have to approach it more patiently than an average build of iOS and take some of its bugs in stride. But the…Read more...

The core stage of a Long March 5B rocket is hours away from performing an uncontrolled reentry and crashing onto the planet’s surface. Here’s the latest on this unfolding event.Read more...

Tonight’s drawing in the Mega Millions multi-state lottery has an estimated jackpot of $1.1 billion. It’s only the third time in the game’s 20-year history that the jackpot has surpassed a billion dollars (or $648.2 million, if you take the cash option). A player who buys a single ticket with randomly selected numbers…Read more...

Do you remember net neutrlaity? It may seem like ancient history now, but there was a time when regulators actually came together to put in place guardrails preventing greedy telecoms from segregating internet access to the highest bidders. Then Trump and Ajit Pai happened. Now, nearly five years after the Federal…Read more...

A group of ill-equipped kids is forced to come together and battle unthinkable evil. It’s a sentence that describes two films that were released within two weeks of each other 35 years ago: Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys on July 31, 1987, and Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad on August 14, 1987.Read more...

It looks like there won’t be a hot booster summer this year. The Food and Drug Administration is reportedly abandoning immediate plans to sanction a second covid-19 booster shot for people under 50, according to the New York Times. Instead, the agency is set to speed along the release of upgraded boosters so that they…Read more...

In Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a summer heat wave descends on Brooklyn, pushing neighbors into the streets and stirring up boiling resentments. The heat is less of an environmental setting and more of a character unto itself.Read more...

In a world of seemingly endless monthly subscription services—Hello Fresh’s meal kits, Patreon’s content creator support, and BarkBox’s dog toys, for example—Twitter has also been getting in on the fun with “Twitter Blue,” a monthly subscription service with extra features that just jacked up its price.

When Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles began airing in 2018, longtime shellheads were wary—it was a show that at first largely traded goofy, short-form teen antics for serious stories, a bold design aesthetic, and a radical re-interpretation of the franchise’s usual lore, and it shook up the series in a big…Read more...

We love the Analogue Pocket, but the retro gaming handheld didn’t launch with its entire feature set. Instead, features like a wikipedia-esque library mode, more comprehensive save states, and the easy offloading of Game Boy Camera pictures were pushed off for an eventual 1.1 release. Well, now that release is…Read more...

Guess who came riding along with the passage of $52 billion in incentives to manufacture semiconductors? Congress came in like a cowboy riding a rocket (think Dr. Strangelove), waving their new bill in the air that includes funding and provisions for NASA to continue its dreams of leaving bootprints on the surface of…Read more...

In a cryptically-worded Instagram post from Jason Momoa, the Aquaman actor has seemignly revealed that Ben Affleck’s return as Batman is going to happen a lot sooner than The Flash.

Space launches, specifically morning space launches, are causing spectacular shining clouds to appear in new places, according to recent research published in the journal Advancing Earth and Space Science.Read more...