Gizmodo

And so, it’s come to this—the end of another long and winding year. It’s had ups and downs, things we loved and things we didn’t, and, frankly, Too Much Content. Speaking of which, should you find yourself wanting to look back at io9's 2021, here’s a nice big list of all our year in review pieces from throughout the…Read more...

I have spent, I would say, a distressing amount of the last month with my eyes streaming tears—not for work obligations, personal reasons, or even really “still in that Global Pandemic” reasons. If anything, I’ve been doing it for fun, as I’ve worked my way through Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker, and the reasons it’s…Read more...

We’re at episode four of The Expanse’s six-episode final season, which means all the drama that’s been simmering is about to start boiling over. Thanks to a pair of exclusive clips io9 debuted this week, we know Amos and Naomi are going to confront Holden about one of the biggest shocks in episode three, “Force…Read more...

Forget quitting booze or starting an exercise regime—the only New Year’s resolution worth making (because it’s the most fun to stick with) is “read more books.” io9's got you covered with a robust list of sci-fi and fantasy releases coming in January, including new titles from James Rollins, Charles Stross, Nnedi…Read more...

A team of archaeologists and geoscientists just found victims of an ancient tsunami on the Turkish coast. The victims—a human male and a dog, now just skeletons—were likely killed in the aftermath of a gargantuan volcanic eruption 3,600 years ago.

Get another look at Rob Zombie’s Munsters reboot. Star Trek: Discovery teases its return in February. Plus, a new clip from the latest season of Cobra Kai, and what’s coming on Outlander for Brianna, and an adorable new clip from We Baby Bears. It’s the last spoilers of 2021!

It turns out 2021 wasn’t the mental reprieve we’d all been hoping for after the challenges of 2020, and unfortunately, the finalists of this year’s Best Illusion of the Year Contest aren’t going to leave your brain feeling any less raddled, confused, or exhausted as we quickly approach the new year. As they do every…Read more...

If you’ve spent even a minute on the internet this week, you have surely seen something about Don’t Look Up. The Adam McKay-directed flick is Netflix’s top movie. It’s also perhaps the top reason for people shitting their pants online recently.Read more...

We review a lot of gadgets here at Gizmodo, and honestly, many of them are good. We detailed our favorites here. But we also see a lot of really bad products—some are just plain bad, while others are capable and well-designed but fatally flawed in one way or another (usually when it comes to privacy). Still others…Read more...

Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver who unintentionally helped originate the viral rightwing chant “Let’s Go Brandon” (which many people believe means “Fuck Joe Biden”), has decided to partner with a memecoin based on the slogan.Read more...

Before I joined the cult of iPhone, of which I have happily been a member of for many years now, my first big phone purchase was a BlackBerry. Time made it as slow as a turtle, and it began its new life in a drawer in one of the many apartments and houses I’ve lived in. Over the years, I forgot about BlackBerry…Read more...

Release dates rarely, if ever, have an impact on storytelling. Maybe a movie is set during a specific holiday so a studio wants to release it around that time of year. But even then, you can watch a Halloween or Christmas movie anytime you want. One place where release dates have everything to do with story, though,…Read more...

A series of unprecedented December wildfires coupled with raging winds of more than 105 mph (169 kmh) forced the evacuation of thousands in northern Colorado on Thursday. It’s the latest freak weather calamity to unleash chaos in a bizarre December of chock full of them, one that has taken an unimaginable toll.

Kyoto University, a top research institute in Japan, recently lost a whole bunch of research after its supercomputer system accidentally wiped out a whopping 77 terabytes of data during what was supposed to be a routine backup procedure.Read more...

Despite some truly important medical advances this year, the covid-19 pandemic is far from over, both in the U.S. and even more so in poorer countries with low vaccination rates. But there is hope on the immediate horizon. Cheap, easily stored, and effective covid-19 vaccines are set to be mass-produced and…Read more...

Bad news for furniture shoppers out there: on Thursday, IKEA confirmed that the company would be raising prices on a good chunk of its historically budget-friendly catalog. The culprit IKEA’s blaming for the price hike is—you guessed it—the dreaded supply chain.Read more...

The third act of Ghostbusters: Afterlife is filled with huge reveals. Some of them, even if you haven’t seen the film, you probably know about—like the fact that Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Ernie Hudson all appear, reprising their roles from the original. Others, however, have still remained relatively secret…Read more...

Welcome back to io9's the Nerd’s Watch, where we pare down the enormous lists of new films and television shows arriving on all your favorite streaming services into the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror titles we think you’ll like most.Read more...

A critically endangered Malaysian tiger living at the Naples Zoo in Florida died this week after being shot by a deputy trying to save a 26-year-old maintenance worker from being mauled to death.Read more...

If you watched the finale of The Witcher’s second season, you got a good look at what will be season three’s new villains—the Wild Hunt, a group of seven spectral riders on skeletal horses who travel through the sky and are deadset (pun obviously intended) on capturing Princess Ciri and magic-granting Elder blood.…Read more...

Play-to-earn (P2E) games where users trade their playtime for crypto earnings are the latest trend to take the crypto community by storm, and the latest subject of a crackdown over in South Korea. Regional newswire Naver was first to report that South Korean authorities have asked Apple and Google to block these games’…Read more...

Star Trek: Discovery’s fourth season, much like the seasons that came before it, has put a lot of emphasis on the idea that perhaps the most important ideal any of its heroes, Federation or otherwise, could hold is a sense of unity and communal understanding. As it heads into a surprise mid-season hiatus this week, it…Read more...

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Tesla is facing its second major U.S. recall in as many months. The EV maker was forced to recall 356,309 Model 3 sedans and 119,009 Model S vehicles this week over potentially dangerous functionality issues with the vehicles’ rearview camera and the front hood according to two National Highway Traffic Safety…Read more...

While they say most myths are based somewhat in fact, almost all of them have been embellished, exaggerated, and evolved over time to be something more than the original story. So it’s honestly kind of refreshing to hear that the long-standing rumor of how young up-and-coming director James Cameron managed to land the…Read more...

Building a motherboard, it turns out, requires the same precision as defusing a bomb—one seemingly small, stupid mistake and the entire thing goes up in smoke.

Fox News spent the better part of 2021 telling its viewers blatant lies about the covid-19 pandemic. The network has claimed covid-19 vaccines are dangerous, that masks don’t help slow the spread of the virus, and that immigrants are worsening the pandemic in the U.S. Tucker Carlson, the most popular host on Fox News,…Read more...

Einstein famously established the relativity of time. But even his elegant theory and the refinements that have followed perhaps fail to capture time’s true elasticity. There is no truer test of what we are tentatively calling the Unified Theory of Relativity than 2021, a year where moments stretched and collapsed…Read more...

We already shared a clip from “Redoubt”—the upcoming fourth episode of The Expanse’s sixth and final season—revealing how Amos (Wes Chatham) reacted to finding out the truth about a certain very big moment in episode three. Now it’s time for Naomi (Dominique Tipper) to hear what happened directly from the guy…Read more...

Guillermo Del Toro draws parallels between Nightmare Alley and his new take on Pinocchio. Moon Knight could have bagged a very interesting director for an episode. Todd Helbing teases the villains to come in Superman & Lois’ second season. Plus, more looks at Cobra Kai’s return. Spoilers now!

The Discord platform does nearly everything you might need to communicate with friends, family and coworkers, including voice calls, instant messaging, chatrooms, and media sharing. So it’s no surprise that the service has exploded in popularity. But most new users don’t realize that Discord bots can make the platform…Read more...

Its ease of use, end-to-end encryption, and cross-platform support have helped WhatsApp rack up a ton of users, and if you use it on the web, there are a growing number of browser extensions you can install to help you get more out of the platform. All of these add-ons are compatible with both Google Chrome and…Read more...

Not even an ongoing pandemic with a brand new ultra-contagious variant can stop the world’s biggest technology trade show. In January, CES will be held in person despite the omicron covid-19 variant rapidly spreading around the globe. Yes, CES 2022 will be a physical event, but only for some. Gizmodo (and various…Read more...

Fourteen years and seven years. That’s how long has passed since audiences last saw Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man characters on the big screen. Suffice to say, it’s a lot of time and if they were to ever appear on screen again, one would imagine each actor would have some thoughts about it. If.Read more...

Ending a Marvel movie is tricky. On the one hand, there has to be closure and growth for the story and characters at hand. On the other, there needs to be enough room to move forward to continue the overall franchise. Each film does its best to balance those two things, usually with post-credit scenes, and Chloé…Read more...

A hard-to-kill, occasionally deadly fungus has once again popped up in a U.S. hospital. This week, Oregon health officials reported a hospital outbreak of the hardy fungus known as Candida auris. Though C. auris infections remain rare in the U.S., its presence seems to be growing, with these being the first ever…Read more...

Stand-up comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan has invited his fair share of controversy over the past few years, but despite all that (or maybe because of it) he’s also managed to sit regularly across from some of the biggest names in science, entertainment, and politics. Possibly the two most dynamically opposed guests…Read more...

When there are countless ride-hailing apps out there, there are only so many ways for newcomers to distinguish themselves from the Ubers and Lyfts of the world. Well, leave it to Alphabet’s self-driving car branch, Waymo, to do exactly that: on Wednesday, the company announced a new kind of ride-hailing vehicle…Read more...

The company that makes your iPhone is in trouble again. According to reports, Apple has put its long-running computer parts contractor, Foxconn, on probation, after a factory run by the notorious Taiwanese company accidentally made hundreds of its employees violently ill earlier this month.Read more...

Kang the Conqueror is having something of a moment right now. Hot off the heels of helping to establish the multiversal concept that currently holds court in Marvel Studios’ cinematic universe in Loki—ahead of things to come in the next Ant-Man and the Wasp film—Nathaniel Richards is also the star of a new one-shot…Read more...

When the Webb Space Telescope successfully launched from Earth on Saturday, most everyone was just relieved that it didn’t blow up in the process. But now there’s even better news: The launch was precise enough that the spacecraft may have enough propellant to continue its scientific operations for longer than planned.Read more...

Turns out the Scarlet Witch cast a spell on much more than just the town of Westville. Marvel’s first Disney+ TV series, WandaVision, has been the most pirated TV show of 2021. But Marvel’s other shows also dominated the top 10, with only a few—but always nerdy in nature—exceptions.

It’s no secret at this point that Uber and Lyft’s arrival to the ride-hailing scene in the early 2010s dealt a huge blow to the traditional cab industry, but charges filed this week by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) show just how far one firm, New York’s Medallion Financial, was willing to go to stay…Read more...

It’s been a month since the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission launched on its way to the binary asteroid system of Didymos and Dimorphos. DART captured its first images three weeks ago, an important operational milestone as the spacecraft hurtles toward a collision with Dimorphos.

The premiere episode of The Book of Boba Fett looked forward as well as backward. For the bulk of the episode, director Robert Rodriguez explored where Boba had been since we last saw him in Return of the Jedi, moving toward his reemergence on The Mandalorian. The other part gazed ahead at what Boba Fett returning to…Read more...

Behind every TikTok, Zoom call, and cat meme is a data center that stores, processes, or reroutes that data around the world. The more we do online, the bigger these data centers and their energy footprint get.

The year 2021, like 2020 before it, has been rough for us all. In many ways, it’s been defined by a continued sense of loss. As the year comes to a close, we’re looking back on a few of the notable actors, directors, artists, writers, and sci-fi icons we lost this year, in tribute to their influence on some of our …Read more...

One of Norway’s largest local news publishers, Amedia, had its operations come to a screeching halt on Tuesday following a major cyberattack on its central computer systems. The 78 newspapers that the company owns can’t be printed, readers can’t subscribe (or unsubscribe) from their local paper, and there’s no clear…Read more...

I love my old car. It’s officially a teenager—13, to be exact—but its in-dash entertainment setup makes it seem a whole lot older. For the longest time, I’ve been using the Android Auto app on my smartphone as my car’s “infotainment” system. Years ago, I yanked out the 30-pin proprietary iPod hookup in my glovebox to…Read more...

Dehydration is already a leading cause of death among migrants crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S., and conditions will become worse as the climate continues to warm, according to new research published earlier this month in Science.Read more...