Gizmodo

Texas is one of several states suffering through a record-breaking heat wave that’s pushing electric grids to their limits. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, has urged residents to do their part by raising the temperature on their thermostats, but several smart thermostats owners say their devices…Read more...

Facebook announced that it would add information to its community standards about its so-called satire exception when moderating content. The change was made in response to a recent decision by its Oversight Board that required it to reinstate a comment with an adaption of the “two buttons” meme commenting on Turkey’s…Read more...

The facial recognition program used by 22 U.S. states to reduce unemployment fraud has been failing to correctly identify recipients, causing dozens of people to be denied benefits or have their applications put on hold, Motherboard reports.

Temuera Morrison (Aquaman) is cast in the role of Boba Fett and had a recurring role on Disney+ show The Mandalorian. Since then, the first season of Mandalorian spin-off, The Book of Boba Fett has wrapped production.

With the release of Apple’s AirTags, we’ve all seen just how powerful and useful the company’s Find My network can be to find misplaced items around our homes or lost items out in the world. Google apparently also took notice and appears to be cooking up its own version of the network for Android devices.Read more...

The record heat wave searing the West Coast has drained one of California’s largest reservoirs so much that its hydroelectric power plant may be forced to shut down for the first time this summer, officials told CNN this week. This would be the first time the plant has shut off since it opened more than five decades…Read more...

Jean Smart is an acting pioneer with a career spanning over 40 years. She’s an experienced dramatic and comedy actress but seldom explored the sci-fi and superhero genres.

Legendary director James Cameron has hopped on board the Masterclass train and is finally teaching his principles and techniques for directorial success.

Creators from the African continent will put their artistic vision on display in the new ten-part film series Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire.

HBO Max has confirmed that one of its interns was behind the strange email mistakenly sent out to subscribers on Thursday evening, prompting an outpouring of support on Twitter as users came out to share their own horror stories of workplace screw-ups in solidarity.

Let it be known that one should never assume that they are incapable of losing their fantasy football league. It’s an even worse idea to create a penalty meant to make others suffer because you never know if that person could be you. Journalist Lee Sanderlin learned this the hard way after spending 15 hours in “waffle…Read more...

Though The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has come and gone, the show is back in the news again following yet another perplexing interview. This time actor Anthony Mackie, who shared some thoughts about fans who were disappointed to learn that Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes don’t see it for one another, romantically.

At long last, the YouTube app on iOS is getting picture-in-picture support, allowing users to continue watching videos in a small pop-up window while scrolling on their iPhones and iPads.Read more...

Welcome back to Toy Aisle, io9's regular round up of all things good and plastic. This week, another Into the Spider-Verse Spidey swings into action, Hasbro now deems ‘90s kids old enough to be retro-targeted with Star Wars packaging, and... how do you feel about building a Lego shoe? Check it out!

Finding a new podcast you actually like is easier said than done. It’s a task that requires time, effort, and a good chunk of your attention. Spotify wants to make this tedious process easier and is betting that podcast discovery technology developed by a startup will help its users find and get hooked on new shows.Read more...

In just a few more weeks, Godzilla Singular Point is finally hitting Netflix, and that means we’re getting a brand new version of one of our favorite super robot pals, Jet Jaguar. To celebrate, we’re looking back at his origin story in Godzilla vs. Megalon, and finding a movie that is, for better or worse, the…Read more...

Falcon and The Winter Soldier might be in the rear-view mirror for Marvel and Disney as the company turns its eyes to Loki, but the discourse around the show returned to the forefront of fandom last night in the wake of a new interview with Captain America himself, Anthony Mackie. But the furor around Mackie’s answers…Read more...

You know the phrase “Stuck between a rock and a hard place?” Well, that was the latest episode of Star Wars: The Bad Batch. Except this time there were several rocks, several hard places, and in the middle? Clone Force 99, aka, The Bad Batch.Read more...

The girl of steel is upon us—but before she flies off to cinematic adventures on her own, she’ll be suiting up in Andy Muschietti’s multiversal shenanigans in The Flash, and we’ve got a tiny new glimpse of her costume.

It’s still hard to believe—after so many lengthy delays between previous seasons—that season five of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty is almost upon us. While we count down the moments until the Emmy-winning series returns on June 20, we thought we’d also look back on season four, highlighting 14 of our favorite and most…Read more...

Watching Synthetic Messenger is a somewhat dissociative experience. It operates in a Zoom call with 100 participants, all of whom are bots. Observers can watch these bots—which are strangely anthropomorphized with images of disembodied hands and voices that say “scroll” and “click” repeatedly—methodically scroll…Read more...

Star Wars: The Clone Wars may have focused on the Jedi but the time was equally as stressful for senators—especially a senator who was secretly married to one of those Jedi. That’s Padmé Amidala’s situation in the upcoming book Star Wars: Queen’s Hope by E.K. Johnston. Johnston’s third Padmé book is coming November…Read more...

Since at least the 1990s, federal officials have publicly worried that encrypted communications give aid to terrorists and criminals. More often than not they have, to some degree, been right.Read more...

I have a confession to make: I am a horrible recycler. Even though my job is to think about and chronicle the fate of our polluted planet, I still often can’t be asked to rinse out my plastic containers or find a recycling can on the street when I’m done with my Coke. My even darker confession: With how broken our…Read more...

Like many of you, I spent most of the pandemic buying way too much shit. Dumb shit. Dumb shit that I was positive would maybe! hopefully! make the lockdown I was living through feel like anything other than a personal hell with no end in sight. I can’t say those impulse buys ended up fitting the bill, except for one:…Read more...

The Toxic Avenger expands its cast once more. Get ready for a new look at Snake Eyes next week with new teasers. Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji’s gorgeous post-apocalyptic film The Deer King is coming to the states. Plus, get ready for Van Helsing’s last hurrah. To me, my spoilers!

It’s hot. It’s toxic. It spins backwards and is covered in volcanoes. And we’re headed there soon. Three Venus missions, recently announced by NASA and the European Space Agency, are going to reveal more than we’ve ever known about the scorcher of a planet, a place that many scientists describe as Earth’s evil twin.

In the last 16 months, masks have become a part of our daily lives. So, of course, companies have tried to “innovate” on them by adding smart features. Razer’s Project Hazel, for instance, looks like a prop straight out of Cyberpunk 2077 with its RGB lights, replaceable N95 masks, and voice amplification features.…Read more...

Dozens of women are suing PornHub’s parent company, MindGeek, for allegedly running a “classic criminal enterprise” that knowingly profits from videos depicting rape, child sexual abuse, revenge porn, and other nonconsensual sex acts, according to a joint lawsuit filed on Thursday.Read more...

São Paulo pickpockets are increasingly stealing people’s smartphones not to pawn off the device, but rather to gain access to their bank account.Read more...

The right-to-repair movement has made it to Congress. On Thursday, Congressman Joseph Morelle of New York filed legislation that would make it easier for consumers to fix their broken gadgets without having to fork over even more money to the original manufacturers.Read more...

If you’ve read Gizmodo dot com in the past month, you know about Tamagotchi. You know that there are different variants available to collect worldwide, and you know that there’s a thriving community of fans that keep Tamagotchi alive even decades later. Tamagotchi is so popular that Bandai has sold more than 83…Read more...

As Elton John once cautioned, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids,” but it appears the characters in Settlers—a new sci-fi film from first-time feature director and writer Wyatt Rockefeller—must’ve missed that lyric. The movie’s first trailer has arrived, and it offers all kinds of reasons why the Red…Read more...

Megan Fox has made a ton of movies over her career but here she’s best known for her iconic turn in Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body—the horror-comedy, also starring Amanda Seyfriend, in which Fox’s titular character is demonically possessed. In the trailer for Till Death, she may not be in any immediate danger of…Read more...

Amazon would like you to believe that knowing your body fat percentage via its Halo Band fitness tracker’s body scan feature will make you a healthier person. So much so that it’s released a validation study in partnership with Pennington Biomedical Research Center that asserts the feature is comparable to dual-energy…Read more...

Sony says it has a “major” software update coming for the PS5 later this year, so to help test out the new software before it gets officially released, you can now sign up for a today PS5 software beta program.Read more...

The Handmaid’s Tale season four was much improved. It dismantled the God Complex that June/Offred (Elisabeth Moss) had spent most of season three building around herself, while finally acknowledging how much June’s trauma has damaged her. But even if things were better this time around, some of the Hulu series was…Read more...

A team of physicists say they’ve managed to nearly freeze the motion of atoms across four suspended mirrors. It’s a mind-twisting feat that strains the very definitions of seemingly simple words like “object” and “temperature.” So buckle up.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is pursuing a federal ban against the use of controversial cellphone-tracking gear without the express permission of a judge.

William Braddock may have set some kind of Florida record: In the state’s crowded pack of Republican bozos running for Congress, he’s the only one in recent memory (and possibly ever) to allegedly threaten a political opponent with murder by a heavily armed Russian-Ukrainian mafia death squad.

In William Crain’s 1972 Blaxploitation cult classic Blacula, an 18th century Nigerian prince is unwittingly transformed into a vampire by the Dracula after unsuccessfully petitioning the legendary ghoul for help in destroying the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The original Blacula’s premise was distinct and novel when…Read more...

Coming into Bioware’s recent release of its beloved sci-fi saga Mass Effect in Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, I knew that I wanted to re-experience the video games’ journey in a way I had tried and failed to as a young teenager: to cast my Commander Shepard as a proud, gay man. Doing so was a reward in and of itself,…Read more...

Snapchat has rolled out a new filter that turns users into Disney/Pixar characters, and Twitter has diverted resources into exploring its transformative potential. The movie Heat, fictional serial killer Michael Myers, and sad Ben Affleck all demonstrate that in most cases enlarged Disney eyeballs soften the edges.…Read more...

A critically important computer aboard Hubble has glitched out, causing the space telescope to enter into safe mode. An operations team is now scrambling to resolve the issue.

There’s a “vigilante” malware campaign stalking the digital streets, with an apparent grudge against pirating websites and their patrons.Read more...

The cast list for the upcoming apocalyptic comedy How It Ends is almost unfathomable. Fred Armisen, Glenn Howerton, Whitney Cummings, Charlie Day, Halen Hunt, Nick Kroll, Lamorne Morris, Pauly Shore, Bradley Whitford, Colin Hanks, and Olivia Wilde are just a few of the people who appear. However, that’s kind of all…Read more...

If you’re the sort of person who regularly scans the latest science-related headlines, you’ve probably come across the coffee shuffle at some point: Articles reporting on the latest study to show coffee may do something good for you, followed by articles reporting on studies showing that coffee is actually the devil’s…Read more...

Barbara Gordon. Batgirl. Oracle. No matter what name she’s using, she’s one of the most famous DC Comics characters of all time. While she’s made a few live-action appearances, her latest will come in the form of HBO Max’s Titans and now we have our first look at her.

The EU data protection laws that passed back in 2018 have done a world of good when it comes to reigning in the shitty data-ming tactics of companies like Facebook and Google. At the same time, they’ve also transformed the web into a place where almost every site bombards visitors with requests to drop cookies into…Read more...

In each of Marvel’s films that Loki’s appeared in, the Asgardian trickster god’s gotten into all sorts of chaotic mischief using his intellect and an array of ill-defined mystical powers that allow him to conjure illusions. Though Loki’s copies have typically been convincing enough to give him enough time to run away…Read more...