Gizmodo

The government of North Korea rejected almost 3 million doses of China’s covid-19 vaccine Sinovac this week, claiming they should be sent to countries that are struggling with the coronavirus pandemic, according to U.S. state-financed broadcaster Voice of America. The authoritarian country has reported zero cases of…Read more...

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has “consistently” praised the “social policies” of the state of Texas during his “frequently” chats with Greg Abbott, the Texas governor said Thursday, in an interview focused on his state’s landmark abortion ban.

Here’s some Mr. Robot-level intrigue for you: Imagine an innocuous-looking USB-to-Lightning cable that, once plugged into your machine, actually helps hackers steal all of the data from your iPhone and inject malware onto your device. If that sounds like something from a far-fetched TV show, it is, surprise, actually…Read more...

The first clip from Netflix’s He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series (as always, not to be confused with Kevin Smith’s recent series Masters of the Universe: Revelation, which is middle-aged nerd-targeted) has arrived! It looks fine! It also looks like many, many other modern kids’ cartoons! Which is also fine!

Of the myriad reasons why Google’s Wear OS platform has struggled over the years, Qualcomm’s sluggish smartwatch chips are largely to blame. The chipmaker’s current Snapdragon Wear 4100+ platform is over a year old, running outdated process tech, and likely won’t run the upcoming Wear OS 3 nearly as well as Samsung’s…Read more...

Hugo nominee Robert Jackson Bennett began his critically acclaimed Founders trilogy in 2018 with epic fantasy Foundryside, followed by 2020's Shorefall. Next year, he’ll reveal the much-anticipated concluding volume, Locklands—but we’ve got a sneak peak, including the cover and an excerpt, to share today.Read more...

China’s National Space Science Center is working on an aerial drone that bears a striking resemblance to NASA’ Ingenuity helicopter, currently on Mars. It’s got four outstretched wiry legs, two rotors stacked atop each other, and a simplified fuselage. It’s China’s take on NASA’s wildly successful aerial drone.Read more...

It’s been a while since the last Apple mixed reality headset rumor, but the latest news hints the device will likely need to wirelessly connect to an iPhone. You know, like every other VR headset or pair of smart glasses that has ever existed.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 “Fanspell: Flowers in Spring (RobYung, NSFW)” by Anya Ow. You can read the story below. Enjoy!Read more...

The Perseverance rover had a bit of a false start to its science campaign on Mars last month, when it appeared to have successfully collected a rock only to find its sampling tube empty. In its second coring attempt, NASA directed the rover to a different patch of rock, and images received on Earth today suggest the…Read more...

It’s a relatively known fact that if you buy an Android device, especially a cheap one, you’re bound to run into some bloatware. It’s an issue that’s plagued the platform since its launch, and though phone and tablet manufacturers have adopted better practices over the years, it remains a prevalent problem on…Read more...

Satellite images taken before and after Hurricane Ida swept through Louisiana this week are showcasing the upsetting extent to which people have suffered without power in New Orleans.

Selling a new Star Wars product to a Star Wars fan isn’t difficult. Usually the conversation is something along the lines of “Oh, hi, we made a new Star Wars...” “GIVE IT TO ME NOW.” So when the team at Lucasfilm does go the unexpected extra mile, it’s really appreciated. They certainly don’t have to.Read more...

This week’s Gab screed is in, and another regime topples in the wake of the platform’s offensives (usually emails). The target of the latest screed: the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Protest at the United States Capitol. Congratulations to Congress, you’re a Gab-certified authority figure.

In an effort to get more people onboard with their whole sharing-intimate-thoughts-and-opinions-with-strangers-on-the-internet thing, Twitter plans to trial a host of new features that will allow for greater privacy customization.

Alarming new details are emerging about the historic Virgin Galactic flight that took billionaire Richard Branson to the edge of space.

The European Union’s top court has flipped the bird to German mobile network operators Telekom Deutschland and Vodafone, ruling in two separate judgements that their practice of exempting certain services from data caps violated the bloc’s net neutrality rules.Read more...

After re-settling into its typical groove in the wake of a status-quo-resetting first few episodes, this season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is still trying to grapple with some of the trust issues between its ensign heroes. How well do they really know each other? Why do they all have the weirdest ways of processing…Read more...

The New York metro area turned into a lake on Wednesday night following a 1-in-200-year-plus rainstorm from Hurricane Ida’s remnants. The streets were flooded, but underground was even worse.Read more...

We said something very similar when we reviewed Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror at SXSW earlier this year, but don’t be put off by its running time, particularly if you have any interest in the folk horror genre. Yes, 192 minutes is a lot of minutes, but the movie is so…Read more...

As Tropical Depression Ida transformed New York City into a lake on Monday night, Amazon, absurdly, kept its warehouses open and expected staff to work.

Audiences are about to get a peek into the twisted mind of Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro—actually, eight peeks, to be precise. Netflix just announced the cast and crew for a new show called Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. It’s a series of genre-bending stories, curated by The Shape of Water …Read more...

Amazon is urging the fleets of contract delivery drivers that get packages to its customers to advertise themselves as 4/20-friendly employers, according to Bloomberg.Read more...

Speaking out for the first time amid a maelstrom of speculation that he is a CGI character, Ted Lasso actor Brett Goldstein took to Instagram on Thursday to confirm that he is a “normal human man” who does “normal human basic things, like rendering and buffering and transferring data.”Read more...

New research from the UK is some of the first to examine the potential risk of experiencing lingering symptoms after a case of covid-19 in vaccinated people, a phenomenon often known as long covid. The study suggests that vaccinated people who become infected are half as likely to experience long-lasting symptoms than…Read more...

Some men just want to watch the world burn. Or tear itself to pieces. Or explode several million times. One of those men is director Roland Emmerich, whose career mainly consists of disaster movies both large (Independence Day, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow) and small (Midway, White House Down, the godawful 1998 U.S. …Read more...

Welcome to Burning Questions, a series where Earther answers the most common asks we get on how to address climate change. Many people want to do something, anything to help address the climate crisis. We answer your questions about how to help change your life—and the systems that will save us. Check out our past …Read more...

Things are looking grim for Locast, a streaming service that once provided free online access to broadcast TV stations. A federal judge just sided with the Big Four broadcast networks in a lawsuit that accused the nonprofit of copyright infringement.Read more...

Look what’s rolled into town! Why, it’s the first trailer (finally) for Amazon’s much-anticipated fantasy television series The Wheel of Time. It’s later than we expected, given the show is currently set to premiere on November 19, but was it worth the wait?

Horror movies, especially ghostly ones, often pull from the idea that restless spirits are drawn to people who are going through some kind of turmoil or trauma. That seems to be the case in Martyrs Lane, a spooky new film from writer-director Ruth Platt that’s arriving on Shudder next week. We’ve got an exclusive clip…Read more...

As part of a settlement with the Japan Fair Trade Commission, Apple announced today that it would tweak its App Store rules to allow certain app developers to include a link to an external website to set up or manage accounts. This will be rolled out globally beginning in early 2022 and essentially allows developers…Read more...

At any given point in time, the Pokémon Company is hard at work developing different kinds of projects meant to remind the world what an absolute chokehold the franchise has had on people’s childhood nostalgia for almost three decades. This year’s celebration of Pokémon’s 25th anniversary has been marked by new games,…Read more...

The Muppets recruit a familiar face for their Haunted Mansion special. HBO Max teases its upcoming animated Aquaman miniseries. Plus, new looks at Supergirl’s next episode, and what’s to come on American Horror Story and Riverdale. Spoilers now!Read more...

An enormous randomized trial of communities in Bangladesh seems to provide the clearest evidence yet that regular mask-wearing can impede the spread of the covid-19 pandemic. The study found that villages where masks were highly promoted and became more popular experienced noticeably lower rates of covid-like symptoms…Read more...

Cities and towns across the northeast turned into lakes on Wednesday night as Tropical Depression Ida wrought a 1-in-200 year flood across an incredibly wide area.

Apple added MagSafe charging to the iPhone 12 lineup last fall, and though the original MagSafe Apple used in its laptops was far more innovative, the iPhone version of magnetic charging has least one excellent use: letting you power up your smartphone on the go with a cord-free portable charger. But which one is…Read more...

Podcaster Joe Rogan says he’s tested positive for covid-19 and claims he’s taking ivermectin to treat it, along with a host of other drugs. Ivermectin has become seen as a wonder drug against covid-19 for right wingers in the U.S., sometimes leading people to buy a livestock version of the drug for themselves, but the…Read more...

For years, civil liberties advocates have criticized so-called “stalkerware” firms, an odious subset of the surveillance industry that sells products specifically designed to invade people’s lives and spy on them. As multiple reports have shown, such products are frequently used by abusers and stalkers to commit gross…Read more...

Last year was obviously awful for everyone across the globe, and if you were a movie fan, there was also that added kick in the teeth of watching all these movies you wanted to see pushed off the release calendar. Some of those, like Black Widow and F9, were finally released this year, but with the rampant spread of…Read more...

Members of the billionaire Sackler family, long accused of misleading the public about the addictiveness of the OxyContin sold by their privately owned pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, were granted sweeping immunity from civil lawsuits by a federal judge on Wednesday.Read more...

Creepshow, Shudder’s anthology series inspired by the George A. Romero-Stephen King cult films, returns in just a few weeks—and the show, which is executive produced and showrun by Greg Nicotero (The Walking Dead), has just unleashed its first season three trailer. Feast your eyes!Read more...

You might be familiar with the McFlurry machine as “the way you get a milkshake at McDonald’s” or, more typically, “the machine that’s always broken, preventing you from getting a milkshake at McDonald’s.” But according to a new report, the Federal Trade Commission is familiar with the McFlurry machine as “potentially…Read more...

A few months after Nia DaCosta officially signed on to direct the new Candyman—which has gone on to become the first movie directed by a Black woman to premiere at the top of the box office—the director happened to bump into New York Times columnist and illustrator Julia Rothman, who was randomly interviewing people…Read more...

In states like Florida and Georgia, hospitals and morgues are buckling under the weight of a new sudden surge in COVID cases with no end in sight. You might be thinking that people should focus on wearing masks and getting vaccinated to flatten the curve, but Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman thinks we should be taking a…Read more...

Even when a hurricane is all but a zombie, it can still do serious damage. The remnants of Hurricane Ida, now a tropical depression, unleashed hours of heavy rains and threatened thousands of people on the East Coast on Wednesday just two days after the storm made landfall and caused widespread destruction in LouisianaRead more...

Sunday evenings aren’t for sitting around in existential dread of the week to come anymore! Instead, they’re for families, both kids and adults, to come together and watch Warner Bros.-produced content. Specifically, families should come together starting at 6:00 pm ET on September 19, because that’s when Cartoon…Read more...

The first official tests of Joby Aviation’s all-electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle have begun. NASA is leading these tests, which it’s doing to foster the development of similarly advanced aircraft.Read more...

When is a piece of art better than another piece of art? When it’s two pieces in one. That’s the theme of “Transitions,” the latest show by pop culture artist Cuyler Smith. Smith is best known for turning sports movies into trading cards, but in recent months he’s become interested in lenticular prints and has been…Read more...

The second-generation Nest Doorbell is the first battery-powered version of the device from Google, equipped with various battery-saving features by default. But even though you can plug in the new Nest Doorbell via power wire, it won’t support around-the-clock video recording.

Even if you don’t live in Texas, you’ve likely heard about the state’s draconian abortion restrictions that officially went into effect on Wednesday. The so-called “Heartbeat Bill,” aka Senate Bill 8, makes it fully illegal for anyone—friends, family, doctors—across Texas to help women access an abortion in the state…Read more...