Gizmodo

With wildfires continuing to rage throughout the summer, Google is adding support for a new Air Quality Index badge to its line of Nest Hub smart displays to help you keep better tabs on smoke and other pollutants.Read more...

Robert Rodriguez has signed a big new deal with HBO Max. Get a look at Tom Hanks’ cute dog in the post-apocalyptic drama Finch. The My Little Ponys are here for a whole new show. Plus, what’s in store for Supergirl, Riverdale, Stargirl and more, and new teases for The Walking Dead’s final return.

Some of the most expensive TVs these days are huge microLED TVs designed to span entire walls. But the LG OLED R’s signature feature is being able to disappear (and reappear) on command. That’ll cost you $100,000.

Roughly 2,400 fire exit locks have been recalled in the U.S. because they fail to open, even after being pressed for 15 seconds, potentially trapping people inside during an emergency, according to a press release from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission on Thursday.

The city of New Orleans, Louisiana will require all customers at bars, restaurants, stadiums, concerts, and other indoor venues to show their proof of vaccination or a negative covid-19 test taken within 72 hours in order to gain admittance, according to Mayor LaToya Cantrell who made the announcement at a press…Read more...

Anyone who’s sent a private and important email to multiple recipients knows it can be complicated. You have to check the order of the recipients, cc assistants that remind the higher-ups to read and respond to said message, and, most importantly, make sure you don’t send the email to someone you’re not supposed to. I…Read more...

In general, I am wary of deepfakes, primarily because they can be used for evil and be kind of creepy. There are exceptions, such as the YouTuber that made a way better deepfake version of a young Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian than Lucasfilm’s CG division did. Recently, Warner Bros. debuted an impressive deepfake…Read more...

The so-called “cyber symposium” put on by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in Sioux Falls, S.D. caught fire and crash-landed on Thursday, bringing three days of sheer boredom and weirdness to a predictably unsatisfying close.Read more...

In recent days, many fans have wondered if Disney and Marvel would decide to change the release strategy in regards to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The new Marvel film has long been set to be the studio’s first theatrical-only release since early 2020, but with rising concerns about the delta variant of…Read more...

Gene Roddenberry’s personal archives are a treasure trove of insight into the early eras of making a science fiction legend in Star Trek. Now, those archives are being comprehensively digitized on an unprecedented scale—with the hopes of doing some interesting things with the material.

We’ve still got over a year to wait for Amazon’s as-yet untitled, verifiably expensive Lord of the Rings series chronicling the Second Age of Middle-earth, which won’t grace our screens until September 2, 2022. But on the heels of news that season one just wrapped principal photography in New Zealand—a country whose…Read more...

India’s space agency says an unknown technical glitch prevented the upper stage of its GSLV-F10 rocket from igniting, in what is a frustrating setback for the burgeoning space power.

At least 13 people are dead, 14 are injured and more than 40 could still be trapped in the debris after a landslide slammed into a highway in northern India Wednesday.

The Ingenuity helicopter was imaging a dune-covered region of Jezero Crater on its 11th flight on Mars when the Perseverance rover was caught in the frame of its camera. Depending on how you see the craft, it either looks like an errant rock formation trying to fit in amid the Martian landscape or a deer in the…Read more...

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is finally, finally heading to theaters and HBO Max on October 22. But you’ll have to wait a little bit longer to get your hands on these collectible figures from Dark Horse and Legendary Entertainment, since they’re not releasing until spring 2022. However, good news! io9 has the exclusive…Read more...

Let there be carnage, indeed. Sony has decided to delay the release of its upcoming Marvel sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, by three weeks, from September 24 to October 15. It’s not a long delay but the fact there’s a delay at all is giving us, and probably you, flashbacks to early last year when movies began to…Read more...

People clearly need a way to find their stuff, which is why we’re seeing a sudden spate of Bluetooth tracking devices. But behind the scenes, companies are building out robust networks for tracking your devices—including your cars. Apple’s Find My network uses Find My-enabled devices like iPhones to help you find your…Read more...

New research finds that blue hydrogen, touted by fossil fuel producers as a climate solution, actually has a 20% larger greenhouse gas footprint than just using natural gas. The study, published Thursday in Energy Science & Engineering, gives some important context on a much-hyped new fuel, one that happens to be the …Read more...

If you’re a new Verizon FiOS customer who loves gratuitous violence and heartbreak, you just might be in luck: Starting Thursday, Verizon is offering select customers up to 12 free months of AMC+, which will grant them early access to the premiere of The Walking Dead’s final season.Read more...

We might not be able to study a walking, breathing woolly mammoth in real life, but what if we could track its movements and get a sense of where it traveled, from its birth to its death? For the first time ever, scientists have done just that.

When we last left Star Trek: Lower Decks, its excellent debut season ended with an explosive sea change. Our beloved goofball ensigns had started big new chapters in their lives in Starfleet and relationships with each other—and so by the end of its second season premiere, you might find it a little odd that some of…Read more...

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is going to be a movie with a massive scale, but it seems that even our wildest imaginations of just how big it could be might be selling it short. It turns out this movie is going to be so epic, so sweeping, so regal, even its making of book will have its very own Hans Zimmer score. For real.Read more...

Social fitness apps can be a source of motivation, but there are also lots of reasons why you might want greater control over what information your followers can see. Today, Strava announced it’s introducing two new updates that will give users greater flexibility and control over their privacy on the app.Read more...

The Perseverance rover may have hit its first major hiccup on Mars, as last week’s attempt at sampling Martian rock turned up a perplexing amount of nothing. Yesterday, mission team members at NASA reported that the rover’s systems functioned perfectly—the problem instead lies with the composition of the Martian…Read more...

After a 13-year legal battle, Shell agreed on Wednesday to pay $111 million (45.9 billion naira) to a Nigerian community for damages caused by its crude oil spill more than five decades ago.Read more...

The Canadian video hosting platform Rumble, which has become a conservative and far-right stronghold, has thrown a Hail Mary pass: it’s now recruiting more diverse (read: less alt-right) personalities to join the site and “challenge the status quo” in their own fashion. Most prominently, they’ve enlisted former…Read more...

In director Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, there is something ancient, powerful, and unimaginably dangerous living deep in the Tsitsikamma forest of South Africa. While all of the movie’s characters have a certain degree of reverence for nature when you first meet them, none of…Read more...

A demographic study shows that the Ayta Magbukun—a Philippine ethnic group—has the highest known level of Denisovan ancestry in the world. The finding shows that the history of archaic and modern humans living on the islands of southeast Asia during the Pleistocene is more complex than we imagined.

When Charlie Jane Anders was still here at io9—she co-founded the site with Annalee Newitz back in 2008—she wrote several popular posts offering advice and inspiration to both aspiring and veteran authors of sci-fi and fantasy. Those posts gained even more value after she herself became a best-selling fiction author,…Read more...

The last time we checked in with JT from the YouTube channel Built IRL they had successfully created a working version of Batman’s grappling gun. But the Dark Knight wasn’t the only superhero they wanted to emulate, and this time they’ve managed to recreate Spider-Man’s web slingers. They’re not quite a perfect…Read more...

Now that Samsung’s Galaxy 4 watches are here, you can bet we’ll start seeing some long-overdue updates to third-party Wear OS apps—and Spotify is kicking things off. The popular music streaming app has announced that it’s rolling out the ability to stream and download offline music and podcasts to Wear OS smartwatches.Read more...

In a response to an outcry from marginalized streamers who say they’ve become the targets of harassment and hate speech on the platform, live streaming giant Twitch said Wednesday that it was rolling out new protections for its most vulnerable users, effective immediately.Read more...

News about Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender show stalled for some time after co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko announced they were jumping ship for Nickelodeon’s new Avatar Studios, which is also working on even more stories about elemental benders. For a time, it seemed as if the…Read more...

The global chip crunch is already affecting multiple sectors including PCs, consoles, and the automotive industry, and now it’s wreaking havoc on AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home plans after the company announced a slowdown in fiber installations affecting around 500,000 homes.Read more...

David Bruckner teases his Hellraiser movie. Tom Hardy’s already looking forward to a third Venom. Get a look at Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series. Plus, what’s to come on Stargirl, and a snifter of new Shang-Chi footage. To me, my spoilers!

Microsoft Flight Simulator has finally come to the Xbox, and if you’ve already taken to the skies you’ve probably realized two things: the Xbox controller isn’t the best tool for flying, and there are no affordable wireless flight sticks available for the console. Instead of tearing up their pilot’s license, Akaki…Read more...

If you’re looking for a compact filming device that you can take just about anywhere, GoPro action cameras are still a go-to—they’re a lot easier to mount to a helmet or a surfboard than a smartphone, after all. Whether you’re just getting started with your GoPro or you’ve used it extensively, these tips should help…Read more...

Joby Aviation made its debut Wednesday as a publicly trade company on the New York Stock Exchange surging over 25% after opening at a price of $10.62. Joby is currently promising air taxi service for the public by 2024, an ambitious plan for its electric vertical-take-off and landing vehicles, known as eVTOL.

A nurse in Germany has been accused of giving at least 8,600 people saline solution when she was supposed to be administering the covid-19 vaccine, according to a report from the Guardian. The nurse reportedly posted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on social media around the same time she was working for the Red…Read more...

Data gathered during the years NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spent zipping around asteroid Bennu has allowed scientists to update the risk posed by this potentially hazardous near-Earth object.

Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, has launched a three-day “cyber symposium” aimed at providing incontrovertible evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump by an evil cabal of hackers and politicos.Read more...

In the horror film Candyman, the killer appears when you say his name five times. In real life, though he’s not a villain, you will definitely be seeing the upcoming film’s star, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, many more times than that. In a fascinating new profile in the Hollywood Reporter, the busy Abdul-Mateen details what…Read more...

In the latest chapter to the ongoing reckoning over Apple and Google’s tight-gripped app store practices, two senators introduced a bipartisan bill on Wednesday that seeks to loosen the stranglehold these companies have over the major app ecosystems.

The jury’s still out on whether the world wants or needs a live-action version of Craig McCracken’s beloved Cartoon Network series The Powerpuff Girls—especially one that casts the li’l superheroes as resentful twentysomethings. But when and if the CW pilot for Powerpuff makes it to the airwaves, it’ll be without one…Read more...

Apple has Siri, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has its Assistant. Even Samsung has Bixby, which for whatever reason it’s still very much committed to. It doesn’t seem that far off, then, that Sonos, the company behind a popular line of connected premium speakers and other home entertainment accessories, would create a…Read more...

The National Security Agency’s internal watchdog confirmed Tuesday an investigation into the conspiratorial claims of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who in June alleged a “whistleblower” had come forth to disclose a plot by the Biden administration to sabotage his career—purportedly by leaking materials obtained via an…Read more...

A randomized clinical trial in Canada has found that three doses of the Moderna vaccine are effective at boosting organ transplant recipients’ immune response to the coronavirus, suggesting they would be better protected from illness and infection. The finding could result in the expedited approval of third jabs for…Read more...

An Italian weather station in Syracuse, Sicily recorded an air temperature of nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday. If certified by the World Meteorological Association, the temperature reading could be the highest in recorded European history.

Rudy Giuliani, waxwork dredged from Madame Tussaud’s overheated closet of disgraced celebrities, has joined Cameo. The venue is a decided step up from the right-wing misinformation outlets where he’s struggled to make sense of his own nonsensical conspiracy theories on the fly.

The United States Senate on Tuesday approved the weak $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package after negotiating for weeks. It will now head to the House of Representatives for final approval. Tucked into the end of the bill are provisions on cryptocurrencies that became a major sticking point in the waning hours…Read more...