Gizmodo

Using brain implants, scientists have triggered the perception of shapes in the visual field of monkeys. Sounds spooky, but the technology could enable artificial eyesight in people with severe visual impairments.

Spring is traditionally the time to purge your life of unwanted and unused junk. But 2020 has been a spectacularly disastrous year, so better to start 2021 off with a clean slate rather than wait until the seasons change. There’s a lot of bad-vibes and general nastiness from 2020 that we can do without, and I bet some…Read more...

Kept you waiting, huh?

Tax fraud has been a persistent security issue for years and it’s not letting up. In 2020, the Internal Revenue Service identified $2.3 billion in fraudulent schemes, and the agency’s prioritization of processing returns quickly can make it difficult to catch bad actors in the process. This week, the IRS announced the…Read more...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has an internal emergency to manage. Nearly a third of its employees said they’ve experienced sexual and/or racial harassment at work, a survey released Wednesday shows.

Alcohol has many well-known negative effects on our health, but a new paper this week highlights what are likely the most harmful periods during a lifetime to have alcohol in your system, at least when it comes to our brains.Read more...

With the idea of going to a good ‘ole movie theater seeming like a bigger and bigger pipe dream every day, I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about how to upgrade my TV and movie-watching experience. Right now, watching TV is one of the few reliable methods of stress relief a lot of people have, so any way to…Read more...

Before it started making all of its laptops out of aluminum, Apple offered MacBooks with a matte black finish that, so far, has been challenging to reproduce on its all metal computers. But a new patent suggests Apple has come up with a way to give its latest MacBooks a matte black finish using a clever technique that…Read more...

The Net, starring a post-Speed Sandra Bullock, was made in 1995, so it’s a given the technology it depicts will look outdated 25 years later. But some of the broader ideas the film pokes into—amid many, many, many scenes of Bullock’s character being chased around by bad guys—are actually surprisingly insightful.Read more...

The Fitbit Sense is the company’s most ambitious smartwatch in a long while—in large part because the device was the first Fitbit with FDA-cleared ECGs. However, it appears the company is now contacting some Fitbit Sense owners for replacements, citing an unspecified “hardware issue” that may impact its ECG feature.Read more...

Scream 5 promises bucket loads of blood. Rosewell shores up its cast for the next season. The walking dead will continue to be feared as Fear the Walking Dead picks up a seventh season. Plus, a tiny few new details from Superman & Lois, and a new Star Trek: Discovery clip teases just what’s going wrong with Phillipa…Read more...

In 2021, Google Hangouts is fading away and Google Chat is taking its place. So if you’re a seasoned Hangouts user—after all, the service has been around for seven years at this point—what do you need to do to prepare? What’s going to happen to your years of chat logs? And what will replace the Hangouts box in your…Read more...

HP Pavilion Desktop Computer | $350 | StaplesRead more...

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent expert on infectious diseases, is warning Americans not to travel over the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays. Fauci’s warning comes as new data reveals Americans didn’t heed his pleas to stay home this Thanksgiving, with just a 5% reduction in vehicle traffic on U.S. roads…Read more...

I’m sure we’re all itching to welcome in the new year after the ungodly slog of 2020—how is it possible that March feels like just yesterday and 17 lifetimes ago at the same time?—but we still need to celebrate responsibly. The number of daily new covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths just hit an all-time high…Read more...

Earlier this year, Razer, a brand synonymous with gaming accessories, proved its hardware isn’t just for gamers when it introduced its Opus wireless headphones that offered a Sony-like experience for just $200. As a follow-up, the company is updating its Hammerhead True Wireless earbuds with a new Pro version that…Read more...

Disney and Vodafone have teamed up to launch Neo, a smartwatch for kids that features some iconic Disney characters, like Minnie Mouse, Elsa, and Buzz Lightyear. But the watch’s biggest headliner is none other than Grogu. You know, The Child? Baby Yoda! Grogu’s appearance on the watch basically makes it a fancier…Read more...

Following an announcement by Warner Bros. that its 2021 slate of movies will all debut on HBO Max at the same time they open theatrically, AMC claims WarnerMedia is attempting to boost the success of its streaming service at the expense of beleaguered theater chains.Read more...

Letters produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and obtained by the New York Times show that the U.S. government has interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act as giving it the power to monitor who visits certain websites and when, with minimal oversight.

A young racist foursome, apparently threatened by our lord and savior Zotar, tore down the California monolith and replaced it with a wooden cross last night. As Motherboard first reported, CultureWarCriminal broadcast the triumph on the gamer streaming platform DLive. They tore it down just hours after its discovery…Read more...

Verizon customers who normally use the company’s online chat system to sort out issues with their service might want to stop for the time being. A glitch is leaking personal information—addresses, phone numbers, and sometimes accounts numbers—in other customers’ chat windows.

Happy birthday, SMS! Today marks the 28th birthday of the SMS aka the Short Message Service, the way GSM phones used to send text messages to each other.Read more...

A coalition of 40 different states—spearheaded by New York Attorney General Letitia James—have plans to file an antitrust suit against Facebook in the coming week, sources told Reuters on Wednesday.Read more...

An incoming object spotted by astronomers this past August has been confirmed as the upper stage of a Centaur rocket, which NASA launched in 1966 during an ill-fated mission to the Moon. It’s a neat achievement, but the confirmation took some doing.

The MikMe Pocket is something you don’t know you need until you try it. Created by a hardware startup in Vienna, Austria, this pocket-sized audio record is the second product in the MikMe line and, arguably, and it makes it easy to record meetings, vocals, and video soundtracks with a box the size of a pack of…Read more...

Step aside, Hawkguy. Hawkeye is here!

Products designed with temporary adhesives that don’t hold forever—such as sticky notes, painter’s tape, and bandages—still require some level of force to be removed, meaning there’s always the risk of damaging paint on a wall or painfully losing some body hair. But what if glue simply vanished into thin air when it…Read more...

Hackers “assumed to be state agents” have been waging a phishing campaign against pharmaceutical firms and other institutions involved in the forthcoming distribution of a vaccine against the novel coronavirus, IBM announced on Thursday.

Google Authenticator users on iOS are finally getting a useful security update that their comrades on Android got months ago.Read more...

The transition to 100% clean electricity will take a lot of things—organizing, political will, courage. But fundamentally, if we can get all of that together, it will practically require two components. One is deploying a shitload of renewable energy, and the other is shutting down all of the existing fossil…Read more...

While products that promise to protect you from radiation are far from new, now so-called Faraday router cages that claim to block harmful electromagnetic field radiation (and also 5G signal) are proliferating on Amazon.

The ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic has radically changed the movie industry as we know it, and its ramifications are going to continue into the foreseeable future. Warner Bros., attempting to deal with that uncertain future, has just announced a shocking, unprecedented step.

Video of the recent collapse at the Arecibo Observatory, taken from two different perspectives, show the dramatic moment when a main cable failed, causing the 900-ton instrument platform to fall onto the large radio dish below.

Google is pushing out a handful of last-minute Android updates before the end of the year, including a huge update to its delightful Emoji Kitchen feature in Gboard.Read more...

Everything about the $300 Wristcam for Apple Watch sounds ridiculous on its face. There’s the price, which is more than the entry-level Apple Watch SE. There’s the fact that it requires a separate inductive charger, though it can charge at the same time as your Apple Watch. There’s the product itself, which is a…Read more...

Three former U.S. presidents will likely be taking a vaccine for covid-19 on camera as soon as it’s available to them. In interviews with media outlets this week, Barack Obama and spokespeople for George W. Bush and Bill Clinton stated that they’ve volunteered to become part of an awareness campaign to encourage…Read more...

The Second Age of Middle-Earth has received a bit of a population boost, but the One Bezos to Rule Them All isn’t saying just what a ton of new arrivals in the Lord of the Rings streaming Amazon series are actually going to be doing.

If it pleases the court, I submit evidence that on December 2nd, while giving testimony at a Michigan House Oversight Committee hearing, Rudolph William Louis Giuliani farted multiple times.

Apple Watch SE (44mm) | $280 | AmazonRead more...

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft may be billions of miles away and over 40 years old, but they’re still making significant discoveries, as new research reveals.

Scream producer William Sherak says the fifth movie is going to weird lengths to keep its ending under wraps. After Wonder Woman 1984, Warner Bros. is considering more streaming debuts for its future films. Plus, get a look at Nancy Drew’s second season, and No Time to Die might take even longer to come out than it…Read more...

Feeling a little claustrophobic in your own kitchen lately? I certainly was.

Fitbit’s Versa line of smartwatches has always been a winner: They’re less hideous than the Ionic and the Blaze (which we’re still trying to forget), less expensive than most of the competition, and decently full-featured. The Fitbit Versa 3 continues that steady, dependable, and affordable tradition, though the…Read more...

LG UltraFine 32" 4K Monitor | $497 | BuyDig

The National Labor Relations Board filed a surprise complaint on Wednesday accusing Google of illegally surveilling and firing two workers who had tried to form a union at the tech giant. What’s so surprising? The Trump administration isn’t exactly known as a defender of labor rights.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (PS5) | $60 | Walmart

Australia’s Senate has scrapped a plan that would have banned cash transactions on all purchases over $10,000. The cash ban proposal was set in motion back in 2017 after a government report suggested the idea as a way to crack down on organized crime and tax cheats. Businesses faced heavy fines and up to two years in…Read more...

Google announced in a Wednesday email that it plans to shut down its 3D-object creation and library platform, Poly, next year, making it the latest of the company’s AR/VR projects to fall into obsolescence.Read more...

After Microsoft rolled out its Windows 10 version 20H2 and Windows 10 version 2004 updates, some users reported having issues with their PCs crashing—specifically when plugging in an external Thunderbolt NVMe SSD. An incompatibility issue between those types of SSDs and the latest Windows versions was the culprit,…Read more...