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Editor’s note: This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a crisis, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.

Stadia may not have blossomed into the cloud gaming service that Google had hoped, but the technology behind it may live on by powering other services.

You’d be forgiven if you thought that the Olympics had just happened—the delayed summer Olympics, postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic, were on a mere six months ago!

Spotify pulled down at least 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience from its archives on Friday. However, the disappeared episodes don’t have much to do with the platform’s ongoing controversy over covid-19 misinformation.

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of the latest and greatest in all things merch. This week, Lego dusts off its spring line up with Star Wars, Marvel, cool cars, and... Elvis Presley? Meanwhile, Hasbro gets retro with the Ghostbusters, and The Boys heads to the Figma lineup. Check it out!

We first heard an ethereal, sinister whisper that a live-action Goosebumps TV series might be coming to haunt us back in 2020. But now that whisper has become a piercing scream of utter terror, such as one might make when menaced by a sentient ventriloquist’s dummy, which shrieks, “That live-action Goosebumps TV…Read more...

For some, artificial intelligence represents nothing more than one tool among many aimed at increasing productivity and maximizing economic output. For others though, AI looks like more of a destination, a couple of words pointing to a tectonic shift in global society capable of ripping the ground out from under…Read more...

Why is Facebook struggling? Clearly, it’s not that the site itself is garbage, or that its parent company Meta’s pivot to the “metaverse” positions its future on a buzzword, or even that it’s racked up enough scandals that it spends more money on lobbyists than Exxon or Phillip Morris.

An expedition departing for Antarctica this coming weekend is seeking to uncover the lost ship of famed British explorer Ernest Shackleton. The crew will attempt to succeed where so many others have failed.

Gettr, the MAGA-minded social media platform that recently saw a big spike in membership, seems to be on a mission to get hacked. Or at least, that’s what you’d be led to believe by the company’s reported decision to fire pretty much everybody in charge of making sure the company doesn’t get hacked.

It’s almost surreal that after years and years of joking about it, the most recent Fast and Furious movie, F9, actually sent characters to space. Seriously, io9 and the rest of the internet has been joking about the conceit forever. Then it happened. And it was hilarious, wonderful, and perfect. Now, the moment has…Read more...

Pennsylvania is dealing with a potentially serious tick problem. Environmental officials have recently warned the public that a population of ticks in the state appear to be carrying incredibly high levels of a rare but potentially deadly tickborne virus. They’re now preparing to contain and further study these ticks,…Read more...

Star Wars is perpetually a mystery in search of answers. We all have questions about it, from what its biggest reveals mean, to narrative thoughts, to questions of character. The Book of Boba Fett is, of course, no exception... and while we’ve already had several questions about its latest chapter, one massive query…Read more...

If you’ve been watching Peacemaker, you know the titular, anti-heroic douchebag has been having a rough time of it lately. If you haven’t been watching Peacemaker, good news—you don’t really need any context to enjoy this incredible moment from yesterday’s episode, “Murn After Reading.”

Good news/bad news, Orville fans: Hulu has released a new sneak peek at the long-on-hiatus sci-fi series’ third season... as well as the news that instead of arriving in March, it’ll now begin streaming in June. Fortunately, the peek is a juicy one and will almost make you forget about the latest delay. Check it out!Read more...

New research this week affirms the grim reality of medical crowdfunding. The study found that few GoFundMe campaigns over a five-year span raised enough money to meet their goals. And those started by people living in areas with higher levels of medical debt, uninsurance, and low income raised less money than others…Read more...

Residents of a town just north of Dallas, Texas were awoken in the middle of a cold night this week to what sounded like a volley of gunshots outside their home. When they finally made their way outdoors, the residents learned those shocking sounds didn’t actually originate from firearms but were rather the result of…Read more...

A major milestone has been achieved in the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope, with an onboard instrument detecting its first photons from a distant star. This means engineers can now begin the three-month process of aligning the space telescope’s 18 mirrors.

It’s not much of a hot take to say that director Roland Emmerich’s continual attempts to return to the disaster movie genre after 1996’s Independence Day have produced diminishing returns. But it’s tough to imagine a cinematic apocalypse that’s less epic than Moonfall, in which even the film’s characters can’t be…Read more...

Toilet paper is one of the last things you’d assume the grocery store would ever run out of, but back in early 2020, at the start of the pandemic (some 15 years ago, according to my brain) TP rationing was suddenly a thing. The dire bathroom situation has improved, but for anyone still wanting to carefully ration…Read more...

Renfield starts filming, and adds one more member to its cast. HBO’s Last of Us series will tweak the chronology of the games slightly. We’re getting at least two seasons of Halo. Plus, what’s next on Riverdale, Batwoman, and Legends of Tomorrow, and a new look at the next Peacemaker. To me, my spoilers!

How much do you love and/or rely on Amazon? Is it enough to put a giant Alexa screen on your wall?

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.