Gizmodo

A severe drought gripping parts of the western United States has caused Lake Mead’s water supply to dip to historically low levels this week, threatening a vital source of drinking water in a region that has been plagued by near continual drought conditions for decades.Read more...

The minute I saw Apple’s mockup of a FaceTime call taking place on an Android browser at its WWDC keynote, I texted my best friend. “Apple announced FaceTime for Android users,” I wrote her. “You can make a Zoom-like meeting link, and then I can join you from my phone.” I typed out three consecutive sobbing emojis to…Read more...

Samsung just overhauled the user interface for its SmartThings smart home app, which includes a redesigned home screen and reorganization of menu items.

Want to trade out delving dungeons for magic class, wizarding sports, and intra-faction rivalries by snotty schoolkids made all the more snottier by the fact they have the power to throw a fireball at you? Well, good news: Dungeons & Dragons is packing its school bag and popping over to the world of Magic: The…Read more...

It’s unfortunate that delicious watermelons are not currently among those species known to be native to Mars. Thankfully, neither are cops. So a story the New York Times published on Tuesday stating that, contrary to expectations, police had found watermelons on the Red Planet was sort of a mixed bag even if the story…Read more...

Sweeping legislation that would start to unleash about $250 billion in federal funding encourage U.S. technological competition with China is set to easily clear the Senate as early as Tuesday, Reuters reports. Here’s what’s in it.

Almost every big-budget movie uses copious amounts of VFX, and it’s always quite satisfying to see what those movies looked like before the VFX was added—and how much effort it took the CG animators and artists to create the finished product. However, this VFX showcase video from Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead is…Read more...

Locke & Key’s first season actually debuted last February—but considering all that happened in 2020, it might as well have been 10 years ago. Fortunately, there’s finally some news on when we’ll get more from the Netflix series, adapted from the IDW graphic novels by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodríguez.Read more...

The evolution of the phone as a do-everything device edged forward this week with Apple’s announcement of iOS 15. And while some of the new features seem handy, the real-world implications could create a world of hurt.Read more...

DC’s just dropped a surprise first look at Krypto’s appearance in League of Superpets, its new animated movie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Superman’s beloved canine pal. But that’s not the only news: Krypto’s bringing some big stars with him to round out the team of, well, super pets.

On Tuesday, a federal judge sentenced Steven Brandenburg, the Wisconsin pharmacist whom police say deliberately sabotaged hundreds of covid-19 vaccine doses last December, to three years in federal prison, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. Brandenburg had earlier admitted to tampering with the vaccines over…Read more...

A megadrought has stricken the Southwest, taking a massive toll on ecosystems, drinking water, farms, and more in seven states. One of those states, Nevada, is taking a permanent step to protect dwindling water resources by cracking down on the scourge of useless lawns.Read more...

ProtonMail, the popular encrypted email service, has significantly updated its look and feel for the first time since the company’s public beta launch 7 years ago. It’s also rolled out some new features that are worth checking out.Read more...

Like many of us, filmmaker Bryan Fuller is a huge fan of author Stephen King. Unlike many of us though, he going to turn that passion into actual content. He’s going to make a new movie based on the King novel Christine.Read more...

Seven months after Apple revealed its homegrown M1 processor, we’re finally starting to see its true potential as more third-party apps arrive with native support. Now Adobe has updated a batch of longtime staples that, at least according to Adobe, show impressive performance improvements thanks to Apple silicon.Read more...

Screaming into the void may be a thing of the past. A team of researchers said this week that they’ve developed a system that would allow rescuers to fly drones over disaster areas and identify the sounds of people trapped who are screaming for help.Read more...

In Netflix’s new live-action adaptation of Jeff Lemire’s DC Comics series Sweet Tooth, the sudden appearance of half-human/half-animal hybrids during a pandemic prompts many “regular” humans to begin hunting and murdering the hybrids out of fear and, quite literally, open speciesism. Timed with Sweet Tooth’s premiere,…Read more...

The debate over the origins of covid-19 is reaching a fever pitch. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal published an article describing a report circulated within the U.S. government last year, which found that a virus research lab in Wuhan, China plausibly could have been the source of the pandemic. At the same time,…Read more...

I mean... you can’t do Cowboy Bebop without wanting to jam, right?

Well, here we go again. A bounty of Saharan dust has made its way out to sea and is currently moving through the central Atlantic Ocean. If it continues its westerly trek, it could interrupt a possible tropical storm forming off the coast of Nicaragua.

Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman comic series has mighty large shoes to fill in terms of translating its signature surreality to the small screen. In a new behind-the-scenes video, Gaiman and some of the show’s cast explain how this new telling of The Sandman is both meant to speak to fans of…Read more...

An email newsletter provider with dozens of customers on Capitol Hill has suffered a ransomware attack, the U.S. House of Representatives’ chief administrative officer confirmed Tuesday.Read more...

Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page is having an extremely normal one, read: Mark’s latest gladiatorial displays to the mighty riff of Audioslave. As you can see, he is capable of firing bow and arrow and throwing a javelin—or a spear of some sort. Also, yesterday he dropped whatever still-intact public pretense might…Read more...

In 2017, when many Bluetooth earbuds still had wires, Sony introduced its truly wireless WF-1000X, which somehow also managed to squeeze noise cancellation into a tiny pair of buds. Today it’s a standard feature on premium wireless earbuds, but despite all the competition, the new WF-1000XM4s prove that no one knows…Read more...

Loki has become one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s most beloved characters, and the God of Mischief’s arc from cackling villain to sacrificial anti-hero has endeared him to viewers over a decade of movies. His new self-titled television series on Disney+ is less interested in continuing this arc specifically,…Read more...

Glaciers in the French Alps look like the scene of a massacre. Normally topped with pristine, white snow, they’re increasingly covered with dark, bloody-looking spots dubbed “glacier blood.”

Hey. Have you heard about resistance? Word on the street is that it’s futile, so you might as well go ahead and order this fun Star Trek advent calendar from Hero Collector, which is shaped like the iconic Cube ship of the Borg, but contains 24 fun bits of Trek merch instead of violent assimilation.

Stadia always seemed like a perfect fit for Google’s homegrown smart TV OS, and now, more than 18 months after Stadia’s initial debut, Google is finally adding native support for Stadia to a range of Android TV and Google TV devices on June 23.Read more...

Following yesterday’s WWDC keynote, Apple has begun rolling out Lossless Audio and Dolby Atmos for Apple Music subscribers. So long as you have the latest software (and compatible devices), you should be able to stream certain tracks at CD quality resolution or higher.

Hey, did you know Hasbro makes Star Wars toys for children, too? Of course you did, but if you’re an adult collector it can sometimes be hard to remember that not every kid has the ability to pay $300 for the newest Hot Toys figure. Enter the cool and affordable “Mission Fleet” series, whose new wave io9 is delighted…Read more...

As incredibly elaborate as Lego’s larger sets can be, the builds can often feel more like a part-time job than a fun pastime. It took our own Germain Lussier 34 hours to build Lego’s 7,500-piece Millennium Falcon, but that’s nothing compared to the 8,660 hours needed to assemble this life-size Lamborghini.Read more...

James Gunn’s full steam ahead on Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Get a glimpse of a Cisco-Less Team Flash on The Flash. More Loki clips tease time weirdness and Owen Wilson’s Mobius. Plus, Space Jam: A New Legacy gets the ESPN treatment in the silliest way possible. Spoilers now!

For close to two years, the FBI clandestinely operated an encrypted communications platform called “Anom” that was used almost exclusively by drug traffickers and organized crime, a recently unsealed federal affidavit claims.Read more...

Everyone’s relationship with their parents is complicated. But since I had a kid, I decided I liked the idea of my daughter having an open line to call her grandparents, even if I didn’t necessarily want one for myself. Granted, my daughter is only 16 months, but she knows there’s someone in the box talking to her.…Read more...

Large chunks of the internet were offline starting shortly before 6:00 a.m. ET on Tuesday, including everything from CNN to the British government, in an outage being blamed on Fastly, a content distribution network used by hundreds of high-profile websites. Gizmodo was also down during this morning’s outage.

Elon Musk, the second richest person in the world, paid precisely $0 in federal income tax in 2018, according to an explosive new report from ProPublica. And Musk isn’t the only one.Read more...

Cannabis retailers in Washington state have received local government approval to offer a free joint to anyone who gets vaccinated for covid-19, according to the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board. The offer is only available to people 21 years of age and older and state approval has only been granted through…Read more...

I’ve destroyed my fair share of earbuds over the years. Some were accidentally thrown in the wash. Others tumbled out my ears during a run, skidding across concrete into a puddle of mud. A few just couldn’t stand up to the sweaty rigor of day-in/day-out workouts. So when I say that it would take a lot to destroy the…Read more...

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote is always jam-packed with announcements of new features coming to all of your Apple devices later in the fall, and this year’s event was no exception.Read more...

This teaser for Netflix’s Blood Red Sky starts off like a rather generic action flick: a mom and her young son settle in for a long-haul flight, only to realize to their horror that their plane has been taken over by money-hungry hijackers. What to do? Well... from the looks of things, mom’s got a fang-tastic secret.

Apple today announced expanded support for digital car keys in iOS 15 during its WWDC keynote. Combined with Google’s recent Android announcements at its own developers conference, it’s clear that the big transition to digital car keys will begin in earnest later this fall.Read more...

If someone has to bring the 1960s TV show The Munsters back again, it might as well be a zombie. Rob Zombie, in fact. The rock star turned filmmaker announced on his Instagram today that he’s making a movie based on the cult sitcom about a friendly family of monsters.Read more...

Disastrously failed theater-ticketing startup MoviePass’s corpse has been rotting for years, but its former executives have only now reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly using fraudulent and deceptive tactics to abuse its users.

Well, it’s getting a perfect Bat-Cave playset, to be more precise—courtesy of McFarlane Toys.Read more...

For as many original innovations Apple introduces to its various software platforms, there are just as many “new” features that appear to have been inspired by other tools, apps, and even operating systems, leaving loyal developers to wonder what’s going to happen to their own products now that they’re no longer…Read more...

Cave bears were hulking beasts you wouldn’t want to run into in the dark (even if they were mostly vegetarians). But it seems a human got the better of one of these now-extinct ursids, according to an assessment made by Russian paleontologists last month.Read more...

Federal agents have tracked and seized over half of the $4.4 million ransom paid by Colonial Pipeline to the cybercriminal gang DarkSide following May’s cyberattack, the U.S. Justice Department announced Monday.Read more...

The Walt Disney Company is famously secretive about the creation of many of its most popular rides, but if anyone can get to the bottom of it, it’s the Rock. Dwayne Johnson’s production company, Seven Bucks, is teaming up with Disney for a new documentary series called Behind the Attraction, which hits Disney+ on July…Read more...

The ongoing crackdown on cryptocurrency throughout China took one step further over the weekend, with popular social media site Sina Weibo terminating a number of major crypto accounts.

Google was fined a hefty 220 million euros (or roughly $268 million) on Monday after France’s competition authority found the company abusing its outsized role in the world of digital advertising.Read more...