Gizmodo

On Wednesday, a Twitter user going by the name Homo Digitalis published a two-and-a-half-minute clip with the caption, “This is how Walmart envisions Shopping in the #Metaverse.” And that vision, I gotta say, is looking pretty bleak.Read more...

Alien director Ridley Scott may have slammed the idea, but we’re very interested in what Legion and Fargo TV show creator Noah Hawley is going to do with the Alien franchise. (Certainly more than any additional Alien movies Scott makes.) And while we’re not going to see new Xenomorph shenanigans on our TV sets for…Read more...

Astronomers looking over data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) recently came across something weird: an object called TIC 400799224 has been fluctuating in brightness, like a star being routinely eclipsed. Their analysis of the observations suggests that TIC 400799224 is actually two stars, one of…Read more...

The full trailer for Apple TV+’s reboot of Fraggle Rock is here and as you watch it, you’ll believe it’s 1985 all over again. All the same characters, costumes, and more are back, with a look that feels as if nothing has changed down at the Rock in 30 years, except a few more lights and some new Fraggle additions.Read more...

Popcorn Time, the popular video piracy app, is officially dead—again. Developers behind the once immensely popular torrenting platform announced Tuesday that it had been retired due to a downturn in public interest. A visit to the project’s website reveals what appears to be an illustration of a dead popcorn box,…Read more...

New research details the devastating impact of an extreme weather event on a colony of Magellanic penguins living along Argentina’s east coast.

In these frigid, fraught days of early 2022, a singular bright spot has emerged: Wordle. The simple online game, in which you have six chances to guess a 5-letter word, has exploded in popularity in recent months, helped along this week by a sparkly story in the New York Times.

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival was set to be the big comeback after a fully virtual event in 2021. With vaccines and boosters now in full effect, the festival was meant to be both Hollywood’s return to Park City, Utah, and an evolution of its virtual component. Even with the rise of the covid-19 omicron variant over…Read more...

The seasonal flu is back, and it’s occasionally teaming up with everyone’s least favorite coronavirus. On Wednesday, testing site officials in Los Angeles reported the city’s first apparent case of the newly coined “flurona”: a co-infection of influenza and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The unlucky infected person, a teenage…Read more...

It’s not all fun and games, fighting vampires. Sometimes you just have to put your head in the game, before someone loses theirs entirely.Read more...

The founder of Utah-based property management software company Entrata, Dave Bateman, has resigned from the company’s board after sending an anti-Semitic mass email warning that coronavirus vaccines were a plot to “euthanize the American people,” adding “I believe the Jews were behind this.”Read more...

A wildfire that wrought a path of destruction through communities outside of Boulder, Colorado, before New Years’ may have started on the property of a fundamentalist Christian sect, authorities said this week. The group has a long history in the Boulder area and runs several businesses—and has some disturbing…Read more...

Chicago Public School teachers attempting to teach students remotely on Wednesday discovered they’d been locked out of their digital classrooms, an apparent effort by city officials to prevent a return to remote education amid recent spikes in covid-19 cases among students and teachers.

CES took one step closer to replacing auto shows this year with not only new car introductions, but glimpses of conceptual automotive technologies that might one day be commonplace. Looking into its own crystal ball, BMW sees a future in which cars are equipped with monstrous 31-inch 8K screens that turn vehicles into…Read more...

Choosing a car color isn’t just about personal preference; there are other, more practical factors that come into play. Dirt stands out on a light-colored car, while a vehicle painted a darker shade can become extremely hot inside as it absorbs sunlight on a warm summer day. BMW imagines a future where no one has to…Read more...

A Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau Star Wars show isn’t a Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau Star Wars show without some deep cut Easter eggs. Episode two of The Book of Boba Fett, “The Tribes of Tatooine” (recapped here), was no exception, and while there were several really fun callbacks, our favorite is probably not the one…Read more...

The sprays and cloths designed to keep eyeglasses fog-free may come with more than people bargained for, new research suggests. A small study found that these products can carry high levels of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), a class of “forever chemicals” that are suspected of having subtle but…Read more...

At this point, it’s a bit of an open secret that Google likely pays Apple billions of dollars each year to remain the default search engine that crops up on people’s iPhones and Mac computers. Now, a new class-action suit is alleging that the tech titans’ dealings go even farther than that. An antitrust case against…Read more...

First there was Sadako and the VHS tape that killed you if you watched it in The Ring. Then there was the 2013 found-footage horror anthology V/H/S, which was followed by three sequels. Now, Netflix is premiering Archive 81, in which a series of video cassettes are going to drive a man insane... and he may be the…Read more...

When we were shopping around for our family car last year, one of the first things I put down on my list of must-haves was Android Auto support. Google’s in-car platform has become essential for my drive, even if I’m heading down the street to run a quick errand. At CES 2022, Google revealed more features coming to…Read more...

Every CES, Razer reveals some far-out concept (like this year’s Project Sophia) that grabs the headlines and excites its fanbase, but never materializes into a real product. That changed when Razer’s Project Hazel, an RGB-illuminated smart face mask, gained enough fanfare to force Razer into actually selling the thing.

The best part of CES is walking over to the Razer booth to see what outlandish concept the gaming hardware brand is showcasing.

If you’re deep into Google’s platforms—and I mean, you’ve got an Android phone, a Chromebook, and a Google TV set up in the living room—Google’s CES 2022 announcements might sound like a payoff to you for sticking with the ecosystem. The company revealed details for some of its most anticipated features, including a…Read more...

The Ultraman franchise wouldn’t really be what it is without a big team-up between myriad Ultra warriors. The first season of Netflix and Production IG’s adaptation of the Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi Ultraman manga already gave us a trio of rival Ultramen to deal with, but now the party’s getting quite a…Read more...

The James Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed the tripod that holds the observatory’s secondary mirror, in what is a critical milestone for the mission.

HTC wants to make it easier for Vive virtual reality headsets to track the movement of a user’s hands and the tools they might be holding. The company’s solution, a blobby bracelet called the Vive Wrist Tracker, promises accurate data from the fingertips to the elbow, even when the headset can’t see the tracker or…Read more...

There was a brief moment when it seemed like the most exciting laptop developments—folding screens and multiple displays—were hitting an insurmountable roadblock. Sure, various PC vendors showed off their versions of these devices, but that was before Microsoft canceled Windows 10X and component shortages strangled…Read more...

We may have just suffered through the year the billionaires traveled to space, but Asus wants you to know it made it there first, and it’s commemorating the achievement with a laptop that looks like it was designed for another planet.

That the Arctic is a hot mess due to climate change is well-established at this point. But it’s always nice to have a reminder of just how out of whack things are getting, isn’t it?

Have you been enjoying the thrilling mid-air action sequence of Tom Holland’s Nathan Drake getting knocked out of a moving plane, then having to pull himself along a dangling series of cargo boxes while fighting a dude and dodging debris, as already seen in both Uncharted trailers? I hope so, because here’s more of it.

Putting out gaming rigs with top-notch performance is a never-ending battle, so at CES 2022, Lenovo is giving its Legion gaming laptops a full refresh with new tech and even beefier performance.Read more...

CES 2022 has been strange for a lot of reasons, and now you can add another, because one of the coolest things shown at this year’s event is a...business laptop?

Every company wants to make a smartwatch, but Razer—a company best known for gaming peripherals decked out in RGB lighting—at least had the good sense this time to partner with an experienced watch maker.

The origins of a notorious bacterial superbug can be traced back to hedgehogs that lived centuries ago, new research this week suggests. The study found evidence that one particular type of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA, first emerged on the skin of hedgehogs. The bacteria likely…Read more...

My XPS 15 is in bad shape. In an ironic twist of fate, the 4-year-old laptop slid out of my hand as I slide into my car to drive to Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas. When it hit the concrete, a chunky of the back spine cracked off, leaving a window to the exposed hinge.

If you refuse to take a side in the console wars, you probably have several gaming systems all connected to the same TV through multiple HDMI ports to make it easier to switch from one to the next. With IOGEAR’s new KeyMander Nexus Gaming KVM (which stands for keyboard/video/mouse), it gets even easier if you console…Read more...

The premiere of The Book of Boba Fett painted a portrait of Boba Fett that fans have wanted to see for decades, even if that portrait added little to the larger Star Wars tapestry. Its sophomore episode sees the show start to build Boba into something more.Read more...

In a time when taking temperatures is a required daily routine for some as part of Covid-19 safety precautions, instant-read digital thermometers are a welcome convenience—assuming you don’t pull it out of a medicine cabinet with dead batteries. The BCool’s solution to that problem is to trade batteries for a…Read more...

A bizarre experiment from Israel suggests goldfish are capable of navigating environments far removed from their natural habitats.

Ice Age returns in our first trailer for The Adventures of Buck Wild. Ming-Na Wen discusses returning as Fennec Shand for The Book of Boba Fett. Plus, get a glimpse at Snowpiercer’s return, and the new Scream gets some classically retro posters. Spoilers go!

A reality TV star who sells her farts in jars has decided to stop selling them, despite making $1,000 per jar. But fans of her work shouldn’t worry too much. She’s still going to sell her farts as non-fungible tokens, more commonly known as NFTs.

It now seems inevitable that one day all of our food and beverage needs will be delivered in pod form. The Keurig showed us how easy it was to make brown caffeinated water from beans, and now Black+Decker’s Bev will do the same thing for cocktails, mixing ingredient-filled capsules with five different liquors for…Read more...

Wireless earbuds effectively work like sound-blocking earplugs when crammed into your ears, and while that’s great for tuning out distractions, it’s not so great when it’s safer to hear what’s going on around you. Shokz’s solution to the problem has been to skip the ears altogether and deliver sound through a user’s…Read more...

When it comes to modern, customizable media-viewing experiences, Samsung seems to get it better than almost anybody. While the brand’s Frame TV advanced the art of incorporating your TV into your living room’s eclectic design, the Freestyle portable projector is designed for those who want to make the world their…Read more...

Samsung has previously tested the limits of monitors with displays like the Odyssey Neo G9, but now the company is pushing boundaries even further with the absolutely gigantic 55-inch Odyssey Ark and its wild “flexible” display.Read more...

Samsung is continuing its quest to make its SmartThings platform your smart home app of choice, overhauling the interface, making the platform more friendly to tinkerers, and even bundling it with the company’s line of fancy Bespoke kitchen appliances.

The Federal Trade Commission has a message for companies that aren’t taking the threat posed by log4j to heart: Patch up or lawyer up. Consider yourselves warned.Read more...

A Russian businessman and accused hacker may have critical information on Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to a recent report from Bloomberg. Luckily for U.S. authorities, the businessman in question was arrested and recently extradited to the U.S. on unrelated criminal charges.Read more...

What would it take for you to leave your whole life behind and set off into the stars in search of a mystery from the past? Bryan Tan’s short film The Emissary explores the lonely journey of an astronaut who decides the risk is worth it.Read more...

Mutantkind’s revitalization at Marvel Comics in the Dawn, Reign, and now Destiny of X—something that has given mutants a secluded home and status as a global superpower on the sovereign, living island of Krakoa—has raised all sorts of fascinating questions about what it means for the publisher’s oft-persecuted…Read more...