Gizmodo

The world is changing, and oh, how the tables have turned. On Thursday, Snap showed up behemoth-sized rival Meta, formerly known as Facebook, by reporting a profit for the first time as a public company. Meta, on the other hand, experienced the worst crash in stock market history, losing $251 billion in value in one…Read more...

As surveillance controversies have raged in connection with Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, another, lesser known spyware firm from Israel has also apparently been helping hack iPhones all over the world.Read more...

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Plausible Realities, Improbable Dreams” by Isabel J. Kim. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!

As one of, if not often the, primary protagonists of Star Wars, the saga at large has often existed in various forms to ask one single question, with a thousand answers: who is Luke Skywalker? Farm boy, pilot, Jedi, teacher, learner, master, legend, Luke has been so many things across his life, in so many stories,…Read more...

If you rely on Amazon Prime to get necessities delivered to your door (or just for a hit of serotonin), we’ve got some bad news: Soon you’ll be paying more for the convenience. Amazon is raising the price to $139 from $119, the company announced in its fourth-quarter earnings statement.

In the grand tradition of JLApe: Guerilla Warfare, the superheroes of the Justice League are about to make another transcendent transformation. In a title so good I’m kind of shocked it took someone this long to think of it, Jurassic League—starring the superheroes as anthropomorphic dinosaurs—is about to rock the…Read more...

An apparently successful weapons test on Sunday included a camera mounted onto the warhead of a North Korean intermediate-range ballistic missile. The new photos of Earth from space seem pleasant enough, but they’re meant to convey a message about the country’s growing military power and reach.

Star Trek: Prodigy almost seems to have left us again as quickly as it returned at the start of the year, but that doesn’t mean that the latest animated series in the franchise is made of lighter stuff. If anything, it just went out having finally delivered a truly fascinating premise for the series... and some very…Read more...

Clearview AI, the shady face recognition firm which claims to have landed contracts with federal, state, and local cops across the country, has landed a roughly $50,000 deal with the U.S. military for augmented reality glasses.

Yet another thunderous crypto theft has descended from the heavens, predictably threatening to bankrupt everyone involved. The aptly named Wormhole, a DeFi cross-chain protocol, announced Wednesday that it had been the victim of a previously unknown exploit, the likes of which allowed a hacker to suck some $325…Read more...

Watching Wayne’s World in 2022 is like riding a time machine that’s going backwards and forwards at the same time. Going one way, it’s a picture perfect snapshot of the early 1990s. The music, clothes, references, attitude, all of it is as 1992 as you can imagine. And yet, looking in the other direction, it’s ahead of…Read more...

At a Glance on Android presents contextual information on a phone’s home and lock screens, so users can quickly view relevant details without sifting through apps. In its current state, At a Glance contains basic info like current weather conditions and calendar alerts, but it appears Google at one point had much…Read more...

It’s official. A second Scream 2 is coming to a theater near you. Paramount and Spyglass just announced that the directing and writing teams behind the brand new Scream are all returning for a sequel. That’ll make it the sixth Scream movie overall, but also a sequel to a film just called Scream so who the heck knows…Read more...

If you’re not totally sold on the United States Postal Service’s new, flattened duck-shaped, gas-powered monstrosity of a mail truck, you’re not alone. The Biden administration on Wednesday made a last-minute plea to halt the USPS’ fleet, claiming the new trucks’ laughably poor fuel efficiency would further worsen the…Read more...

Got a bunch of cryptocurrency burning a hole in your digital wallet and want to own a piece of the wild? You’re in luck. The World Wildlife Fund UK announced this week that they will sell NFTs in the form of digital art of 13 endangered species, which they’re calling “non-fungible animals,” or NFAs. Thanks! I hate it…Read more...

Just when you thought you had a handle on all the big blockbuster genre films coming in 2022, Netflix smashes through the door like the Kool-Aid Man. The company just released a bonkers three-minute trailer highlighting only some of the movies it has coming out in 2022, including new films from directors like Paul FeigRead more...

Researchers in a new paper this week say that a highly virulent variant of HIV has been silently circulating in the Netherlands, likely for decades. Thankfully, the variant still responds to conventional treatments and its spread appears to have declined in recent years. But the discovery may offer a timely lesson…Read more...

Amazon has spent years being very cryptic about just what its Lord of the Rings streaming show was going to be about. We got a rough time period, give or take a few thousand years. Hell, we very recently just got a name—The Rings of Power—which only tells us that this Lord of the Rings show will be about rings! And…Read more...

The end of the International Space Station is finally approaching, with NASA declaring the retirement of the orbital outpost in 2030 and a dramatic deorbiting early in the following year.

In what could be a prophecy for the future of this year’s Academy Awards, Dune: Part 1 has conquered this year’s nominations for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards like a potential Kwisatz Haderach might conquer fear, aka the Mind-Killer. The sci-fi epic will be featured in 11 categories, more than…Read more...

As predicted, Winter Storm Landon™ is making life and travel miserable for Americans in a dozen states as it delivers ice, snow, and bitter cold across much of the eastern half of the United States.Read more...

One of the most outspoken proponents of the metaverse is struggling to find its place in this hypothetical virtual world. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped plans to make a HoloLens 3—what would have been a successor to its current mixed reality headset—and infighting within the mixed reality division has fueled…Read more...

The first results from a UK trial that deliberately exposed people to the coronavirus are finally here. Among other things, the research found that people who caught the infection became symptomatic within two days and remained infectious for longer than a week. None of the volunteers became severely sick, though a…Read more...

Though at times it seemed unlikely this day would ever come, the Facebook era of unrelenting user growth has finally come to an end. For the first time in its nearly 18-year-history, Facebook’s users have actually declined.Read more...

It’s no surprise that after the massive, massive success of Spider-Man: No Way Home that Sony would want to fast-track other Spider-adjacent movies for its Spider-Man Universe. For reasons I cannot personally fathom, that seems like it’s going to be Madame Web, as Deadline reports that The Social Network and 50 Shades…Read more...

To make it harder for stalkers to abuse them, Apple included (and has since upgraded) several safety features that will alert someone to the presence of a nearby AirTag that’s not their own, including an audible beep. But according to PCMag, one Etsy seller was, up until very recently, selling AirTags with the speaker…Read more...

Halle Berry still has hope she can get her own John Wick spinoff. Legends of Tomorrow recruits a mystery new character for its season finale—who could return for more adventures. Showtime’s Let the Right One In expands its cast. Plus, new looks at Uncharted and Naomi. Spoilers now!

Rumor has it Samsung is getting ready to reboot the Galaxy Note in the form of a Galaxy S22 Ultra with built-in stylus, but Motorola has a new option for those who want to draw on a screen but don’t want to pay Samsung flagship phone prices.

Freezing your butt off thanks to February’s bitterly cold temperatures? It could be so much worse: You could be on a tropical vacation from hell! As these 12 horror, cult, and thriller picks will prove, sometimes there’s no more worse place to be than a warm, sunny beach.Read more...

It’s the big question for the big game: How do I watch the Super Bowl online?Read more...

You can now have Optimus Prime read you a bedtime story. This is not a sentence I expected to write today, and yet, it is now an inescapable fact that you can go to bed listening to the dulcet tones of the leader of the Autobots... as he describes the horrible wars that enveloped his home planet Cybertron before…Read more...

NASA won’t be performing a wet dress rehearsal of SLS in February as planned. This latest delay to the Artemis I mission means the 322-foot-tall rocket won’t roar through Florida skies until April at the earliest.

It’s a strange time of late in Tesla land. That’s particularly true for an increasing number of drivers who’ve had to endure their vehicles seemingly violating local laws, and now, a surge of others who claim their Teslas are suddenly slamming on the breaks for no reason.Read more...

For better or worse, the sixth episode of The Book of Boba Fett was pure Star Wars catnip: 48 minutes jam-packed with things some fans have imagined seeing for their entire lives. Boba Fett even made a brief appearance on his own show! But eventually, the episode ended with a huge decision to be made. One that’s sure…Read more...

More than 20 women employees of Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining companies, reported a rape or attempted sexual assault while on the job, while a third of all female employees and 7% of male employees experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, the company said this week.Read more...

Did a peeved American hacker singlehandedly take down the internet in North Korea? That’s the story, according to a recent article from Wired.Read more...

Comics are a lot more open about exploring queer stories than they ever have been before. From independent queer-focused creations to even blockbuster pride celebrations from the likes of Marvel and DC, the medium has taken big steps toward bringing more LGBTQ creators and their stories into the spotlight. A new…Read more...

The White House is renewing an initiative originally spearheaded by President Biden during his vice-presidency in the Obama administration years earlier: the cancer moonshot. On Wednesday, the Biden administration announced the relaunch of the moonshot program, with an ambitious goal of substantially reducing the…Read more...

The end of The Walking Dead TV series is nigh, but the end of The Walking Dead franchise is nowhere in sight. Perhaps the most anticipated new development was the announcement of an anthology TV series set in the show’s particular zombie apocalypse. Or, at least, it will definitely be the most anticipated development,…Read more...

Meta, the freshly rebranded parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is reportedly seeking insights from right-wing think tanks and nonprofits as it goes about its grandiose plans to usher in a whole new era of digital reality.

Internet from low Earth orbit just got a lot faster—and even more expensive. SpaceX revealed today a new pricey, high-performance tier to its nascent Starlink satellite internet service.

The Archie of Archie Comics gets around. He’s met both Kiss and the Ramones. He’s palled around with Batman. He’s teamed up with the Punisher, and even been chased by the Predator. But none of these comics crossovers—not a single one—holds a candle to Archie’s next comics crossover, in which the happy, peppy stars of…Read more...

Scientists in China say they’re well on their way to developing what would be an important achievement in medicine: a blood test that can detect the early stages of the most common form of lung cancer. In a new study this week, they’ve shown evidence that the test was over 90% accurate in identifying these tumors in…Read more...

We’ve known practically since it was announced that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds would bridge the gap between the original Discovery era—before that show jetted off to the 31st century—and the road to the original Star Trek. But new details about a few of the familiar faces joining the Enterprise give us more of an…Read more...

The whirring of helicopter blades on Mars could create small electric fields in the Martian air, NASA scientists found, which may make the surrounding air faintly glow with a charged electric field.Read more...

Caribbean queen, beauty mogul, businesswoman, and artist who has not dropped an album since 2016’s Anti, Robin Rihanna Fenty has pledged to donate $15 million to climate justice organizations in the United States and the Caribbean.Read more...

Channing Tatum was planning on playing Gambit for years. News of his involvement with the popular X-Men character began in 2014, and eventually it seemed all but certain the 21 Jump Street star would bring the Cajun to the big screen—until Disney bought Fox and the movie was cancelled. In a new interview, Tatum and…Read more...

Amazon founder turned rocket-man Jeff Bezos wants to prove that, with enough money, you really can move mountains—or at least, in this case, cherished bridges. That’s according to local reports cited by Dutch News and Boat International which claim the city of Rotterdam will temporarily disable its historic…Read more...

Texans, grab your coats and winter jackets: The state is girding up for a host of wintry conditions and chilly temperatures through the end of this week. The bad weather comes less than two weeks before the anniversary of a winter storm that caused power outages across the state amid bone-chilling conditions that…Read more...

Boys will be boys. And the boys of the animated spin-off of Prime Video’s depraved superhero series The Boys will also be The Boys, in the sense that they will also be lewd, crude, and incredibly violent like their live-action counterparts. For proof, look no further than this first trailer for Diabolical, the…Read more...