Gizmodo

Seeing when someone was last online inside an app can help you figure out whether or not they’re available to chat, and can also give you pointers as to whether they’re ignoring your messages or just haven’t gotten around to replying yet. But if you don’t like your status being broadcast to your contacts like this,…Read more...

Finding the best Bluetooth speaker is like picking the right major in college. Unless you have an idea going in–in this case, brand preference–there isn’t enough time or money to try them all. So when Marshall–a premium audio brand coveted by musicians and music lovers alike–released the Emberton, a portable Bluetooth…Read more...

Fourth of July parades and fireworks were interrupted in at least five U.S. cities by crowds fleeing what they thought were mass shooters on Monday. But only two of the incidents involved firearms, while the other three were misunderstandings that sent people running for their lives in a country overflowing with…Read more...

Last week’s episode of Strange New Worlds gave us a kind of horror that Star Trek has never really seen before, largely thanks to its transformation of the Gorn into something akin to an Alien Xenomorph. Petrifying as they were though, it turns out they actually had a physical presence on set to help really scare the…Read more...

The more we get to learn about the future of the Force in a post Return of the Jedi, post Rise of Skywalker era for Star Wars, the more we’re getting echoes of its long past—and thanks to the latest novel from the galaxy far, far away, Luke’s attempts to rebuild the Jedi Order have even more connection’s to the…Read more...

It isn’t just Transformers that’s celebrating a milestone this holiday weekend. Back in 2012, Sony returned to Marvel Comics’ most popular hero with The Amazing Spider-Man, a reboot completely separate from the original Sam Raimi trilogy, for better and for worse. And ten years later, the two-film franchise (well, …Read more...

An important milestone has been reached in the newly launched CAPSTONE mission, as the tiny probe, moving in excess of 24,000 miles per hour, has escaped low Earth orbit and begun its four-month trek to the Moon.Read more...

Taika Waititi has made it his goal with his Thor movies to Do The Most Possible with his take on the God of Thunder, in a way few other Marvel movies do with their own heroes. Love and Thunder appears to be following on from Ragnarok in fine form in this regard, with both its Thors—and if this taste of the soundtrack…Read more...

Over the weekend, while many in the United States were pre-gaming today’s Fourth of July holiday celebrations, in the UK, the British Army was scrambling to regain control its Twitter and YouTube accounts that had both been hacked to promote NFTs and other crypto investment scans.Read more...

With Westworld now two episodes into its fourth season—and its seven-year time jump established—it’s clear that the HBO Max sci-fi series is navigating some fresh terrain as far as its setting goes. But for all the newness, there’s no escaping a certain... familiarity that hovers over certain scenes.Read more...

An international team of scientists has shown that two species of giant water lily are actually three, and that the newly discovered species, at 10.5 feet across, is the largest of the bunch.Read more...

Star Wars might have only just got done with one TV series, but it’s already on to the next—and Andor might be one of the most intriguing shows in the galaxy far, far away so far, if only for the immense span of time it’s going to cover.

Some of the best hacks don’t solve any real world problems or reinvent the wheel. They’re usually nothing more than an exercise in trying to make something work that is either seemingly impossible or pointless: such as getting YouTube to work on a 40-year-old computer with a hideously outdated display.Read more...

July’s hefty pile of new sci-fi, fantasy, and horror releases brings lesbian vampires, politically motivated magic, interstellar bounty hunters, a jazz musician who teams up with mecha pilots, mermaids, robots, fairy-tale riffs, and so much more. There’s still plenty of summer reading time left, so what are you…Read more...

Over the course of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, a lot of us finally upgraded from an old-school “where do I stick this?” glass thermometer to an easier to use infrared model for detecting fevers. But those hankering to upgrade their Apple Watch in the Fall could end up with an ever easier fever-detecting tool.Read more...

Is Westworld even Westworld if it’s not trying to break your brain? It’s a valid question, and I think “no” would be a valid answer. But since the show left the park at the end of season two to explore the dystopia of the real world, the third season felt like everything was a mystery until the final pair of episodes,…Read more...

Some weeks are busier than others when it comes to digital mischief, and this week was pretty damn busy. So many good hacker stories got written this week that we figured we would throw together a little round-up. It’s good to stay on your toes when it comes to the digital dangers out there on the internet. In case…Read more...

The Cyberpunk 2077 train keeps going, despite its rocky protracted launch. Now that the game’s been patched into a playable (and enjoyable) state, and DLC is on the horizon, it’s the perfect time for Netflix to release that Edgerunners tie-in anime they offered us a first look at last month during their week long…Read more...

Illumination’s Minions—those goggle-wearing, babbling yellow monstrosities—have very clearly outgrown the Despicable Me franchise they first appeared in all the way back in 2010. Beyond their titular spinoff movie releasing in 2015 and earned $1.16 billion at the box office, the creatures have become a cultural fixtureRead more...

Ever since the late 1990s, we’ve been living in an era of IP-focused filmmaking that’s proceeded to get more elaborate and louder with each year. There are plenty of genre films one could point as being important or iconic in some way, from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films to Batman Begins and Independence Day. And…Read more...

Just a few weeks ago, it was announced that Trigun, one of the most beloved anime series of the late 90s, was getting a remake. Surprisingly, the first look at this new version of the sci-fi western has come pretty quickly, as footage debuted on Saturday at Anime Expo in Los Angeles.

Shonen anime fans rejoiced late Saturday evening when, at Los Angeles’ Anime Expo, new footage debuted for the return of Bleach. The popular Toonami series ended back in 2014, just two years before the manga by creator Tite Kubo would wrap up with 2016's “Thousand-Year Blood War” arc. Late last year, it was announced…Read more...

Ever since Fox got themselves snatched up Disney and Kevin Feige made it clear that the mutants would be making their way to the MCU eventually, there’s been no shortage of speculation about who’ll be playing the new batch of X-Men. Moreso than Professor X or Magneto, Wolverine is the one that everyone’s got some…Read more...

*cracks knuckles*

Writer Dan Slott has had a long, sometimes controversial history with Spider-Man. He’s the man behind the story for the Shattered Dimensions video game, along with the architect behind the “Superior Spider-Man” arc where Peter Parker died (technically) and had his body jacked by Doctor Octopus. When he jumped ship…Read more...

She’s over 30,000 years old, and yet her preservation is astounding: She has her skin, her tiny tusk nubs, her toenails, and her little tail. She still has tufts of fur, and her trunk—with its prehensile tip—is complete and malleable. Looking at the initial photograph from where she was found at a Yukon gold mine, she…Read more...

There’ve been no shortage of IP crossovers in recent years, particularly from Warner Bros. Space Jam 2 was basically WB’s crossover Comic-Con, and it doesn’t appear that they’ll be stopping anytime soon. On the game side, they’ve got Multiversus, where DC superheroes will get to fight alongside Cartoon Network and HBO…Read more...

Are you one of the many, many people that gets a tingly kick from watching soft-spoken YouTubers tapping and whispering into their mics from hours on end? Have I got some bad vibes for you.Read more...

On July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN confirmed the observation of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle first proposed in the 1960s. The boson’s discovery was a momentous occasion, as it meant physicists were a step closer to probing the field associated with the boson, which gives particles mass.

This week, the Twitter account for RadioShack went from just weird to totally apeshit. In short order, the company’s entire feed became a veritable trove of NSFW material, including musings about vibrators, “big tittes” (misspelling theirs), and tweets trolling celebrities and other corporate accounts. Remarks ranged…Read more...

Small app developers pried $90 million from Google in a legal settlement announced Friday, hot on the heels of a similar agreement with Apple.Read more...

There’s a timelessness to Steven Spielberg’s E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial—which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year—that can’t be denied. It encompasses movie magic on a level that transcends the screen through its music and its story of a friendship between a boy and an alien that defies the odds. It’s set to…Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest and greatest nerdy toy news. This week wraps up Obi-Wan Wednesdays with two more Hasbro figures, Super7 heads back to Springfield and beyond for even more Simpsons Ultimates, and: do you dare to bop Darth Vader? Check it out!

This week’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds delivered what might just be the closest Star Trek has ever gotten to an episode of genuine horror. Jump scares, tension, blood, gore, and lots of screaming, it had it all—but it’s far from the first time Trek’s trended terrifying. Here’s a few more of our creepy favorites.

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If you’ve been curious to know what’s in that infamous $5,000 Star Wars-themed drink, it’s no longer a complete mystery. The Kaiburr Crystal, available exclusively aboard the Disney Wish cruise ship in its Hyperspace Lounge, is an extravagantly presented, themed cocktail that should come with the camtono it’s served…Read more...

A patchwork of individual state privacy laws isn’t filling the hole left by absent federal government regulation on facial recognition. Virginia, which approved a ban on local police use of biometric identification tools around a year ago, formally bailed on the law’s most substantive measures on Friday. Now, under an…Read more...

A group of Black Tesla employees have filed suit against the company, claiming that they were subjected to racial discrimination at its factories in California. Tesla is facing at least 10 suits alleging sexual or racial harassment, including one recently filed by a Tesla shareholder accusing the company of harboring…Read more...

Hideaki Anno seems to just be doing whatever the hell he wants after he finally wrapped up Neon Genesis Evangelion (for now, at least). He got to make an Ultraman movie and he’s now directing a Kamen Rider one, letting him live out creating a new chapter for two of his lifelong superhero obsessions. And it turns out…Read more...

Whether you loved the Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series or it left you feeling disconnected from the Force of the Star Wars franchise, it’s interesting to think about the show we might have gotten. While we heard earlier this week that the show planned to kill off the villain Reva, and that the initial plan was to make a…Read more...

Raspberry Pi is adding to its family of ultra-low-cost microcontrollers with the debut of three new Pico models. Perhaps the one DIYers will be most excited to see is the Pico W, an exact copy of the original Pico except with the addition of 802.11 Wi-Fi connectivity, a feature that will significantly enhance the…Read more...

To “gore” is to “pierce or wound with something pointy (such as a horn or knife),” according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. With that context, I can now tell you that a 71-year-old woman was gored by a bison this week in Yellowstone National Park.

Have autonomous driving cars reached AI sentience? Are the robotaxis planning a robo-takeover? It seemed like they might be when they blocked traffic for hours Tuesday night in San Francisco. Then, when you looked a bit closer, you could see that that the eight self-driving Cruise vehicles had navigated to the same…Read more...

Starlink just got the green light to expand on land, air and sea. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorized SpaceX to provide Starlink wifi to vehicles in motion, including semitrucks and RVs, planes, and boats.Read more...

Welcome back to io9's monthly 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...

The ancestor of your stir-fry might be growing closer than you think. Wild field mustard, or Brassica rapa, is an unassuming plant that reaches a couple of feet tall and produces clusters of small, yellow flowers perched atop spindly green stalks. It is the nearest wild relative to such produce aisle hits as turnips,…Read more...

TikTok executives are attempting to assuage Republican officials that U.S. data is safe and sound in company hands, but their best attempts are unlikely to make any of these GOP lawmakers stray from the warpath against the popular social app.Read more...

Ever since we first heard, approximately 17 billion years ago, that Sigourney Weaver would return for James Cameron’s Avatar sequels, we were all perplexed (even more so than with the idea of there being multiple Avatar sequels). But now we actually know how Weaver is coming back, we’re... somehow even more perplexed.

Apple products in Japan are becoming more expensive. The iPhone 13, for example, was found to be as much priced 19% higher than it . Prices of the smartphone have been rising with the launch of new models, but this price hike in Japan seems to have affected even older generations of iPhones as the value of the Yen has…Read more...

It’s been a busy week at the White House. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, a trip overseas, and calls to change the filibuster, President Biden today announced the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And Steve Jobs has posthumously made the cut.Read more...