Gizmodo

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...

A feature previously only available to some subscribers can now be used by all Hulu customers—but there’s a small catch.Read more...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received the distinguished honor of becoming the first federal agency to join Parler on Monday, and the welcome the account is getting from the users of a right-wing social media platform that bills itself as a “free speech” alternative to Twitter is pretty much exactly what…Read more...

The doctors are here to give the Earth its annual checkup, and they say it’s running a fever which is making people sick. They issued their findings showing all the ways climate change is affecting our health in the annual Lancet Countdown, published on Wednesday.Read more...

In a thunderous ruling today, the Department of Transportation (DOT) effectively slammed the door on a free-wheeling era when snakes soared through the troposphere: emotional support animals no longer qualify as service animals. Period. End of the line. No. No, I said.

Conservationists, government officials, and local community members are banding together to pull off a rescue of eight giraffes stranded on a shrinking island in Kenya. In order to save these animals, they created a giraffe-safe barge to get them across to safe land. They made the first successful rescue of a giraffe…Read more...

The Canon R5 is a seriously impressive camera and one of the cheapest mirrorless cameras you can buy that supports full 8K video capture. Unfortunately, those fancy video capabilities come with a serious drawback: major overheating issues. So to address the R5's limitations, YouTuber Matt Perks created a custom…Read more...

One of the best things about Google TV is the way it integrates a wide range of streaming services to better surface content that’s relevant to you. Google is rolling out a new feature this week to make those recommendations even better by allowing you to tweak and share your preferences.Read more...

President-elect Joe Biden hasn’t even assumed office yet, and it’s already time for him to reach across the aisle and say with sincere force, “c’mon man!”Read more...

As a wannabe cinematographer who salivates over gorgeous aerial shots from directors like Denis Villeneuve, drones are just damn fun to film with and fly. But I’ve been on a hunt for the drone for me and my artistic aspirations (and if I can save a few bucks, that would be great too). Drones are either cheap, flimsy,…Read more...

At some point in 2020, Gen-Z internet unanimously agreed to hate Matthew Morrison, the generally “ok” network television actor. On TikTok and Twitter, mostly, a widely proliferating meme proclaims: “Fuck Matthew Morrison!” There is no reason for this. He is not a particularly famous person; his most notable recent…Read more...

May he ride eternal, shiny and chrome. Actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, best known for his villainous roles in the Mad Max series, has passed away at the age of 73. The news was first reported by his friend and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Brian Trenchard-Smith.Read more...

On Tuesday, the blue-and-green sign that will sit atop Climate Pledge Arena rolled out to be placed atop the home of Seattle’s new hockey team. Amazon bought the naming rights to highlight the company’s plan to get to net zero emissions by 2040 and plow $2 billion in venture capital money on its way to getting there.Read more...

Oh, goodness: What a year, right? Twenty-twenty is one of those (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime events that impacted so much of our lives. We saw countless movie delays, comic cons were canceled or moved online, theme parks shut down, and everything had to happen over video. In spite of the challenges, io9 still…Read more...

Discovery is making its soon-to-launch streaming service super cheap or all-out free to millions of users right out of the gate.

Dolby Atmos soundbars have a problem: They struggle to simulate height. Regardless of how many drivers a speaker has or how fancy its room-tuning audio is, you can tell the sound isn’t coming from above you. That kind of sucks when you have a fancy home theater setup but the spaceships on-screen don’t sound like…Read more...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has provided new guidance on how long people exposed to the coronavirus should quarantine away from others. Though the agency still recommends a 14-day quarantine period for people exposed to the coronavirus as the safest way to reduce the risk of further spread, it is…Read more...

Welcome to Ravenloft, boils and ghouls! Where it’s always a dark and stormy night, where monsters are always under your bed, and your blood always curdles in horror—right before a vampire sucks it out. So what the hell is a gold elf from the Forgotten Realms doing here? Short answer: Not having a particularly fun time.

The president has been once again tweeting about the most pressing issue of our times: the fate of his Twitter account and is showing the world that, in the spirit of true leadership, he’s willing to torpedo a nearly $1 trillion military spending bill to defend it.

“Something extremely bogus is going on,” Elon Musk tweeted on Nov. 13. It’s been a busy month, and you could be forgiven if you forgot about the Tesla founder’s confusing tweet in which he said that his rapid antigen test had come back positive and negative. It appeared that Musk may have covid-19, but then we didn’t…Read more...

“The house of 1999 will be virtually maintenance free,” the narrator declares in his 1967 concept film. And while you can probably guess some of the technological advancements in the movie—like computers, fax machines, and even email—there’s one prediction from the short promotional film that didn’t quite pan out. It…Read more...

As feared, the 900-ton instrument platform collapsed yesterday at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, falling onto the gigantic radar dish below. Photos of the scene are revealing the extent of the damage at the famous facility, which is known for contributing to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and …Read more...

I can’t even remember the last time I actually held a CD mixtape, much less played one. But there’s a CD wallet kicking around in storage that’s filled with unassuming silver discs doodled on with short titles and dates, part 1s, part 2s, and “greatest hits.”

SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless Gaming Headset | $240 | Amazon

Now that the transition to Apple Silicon is well underway, it seems like Apple could be gearing up for a rapid shift to mini-LED displays too.Read more...

You think after the Rise of Skywalker stuff and last season’s Marvel-a-go-go Epic that Disney wouldn’t want to put the hottest father/son team-up it’s got in the world’s biggest video game?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The world is on track to blow past the climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement. Despite record fossil fuel-demand drop amid the pandemic, fossil fuel companies are still planning to produce more oil, gas, and coal in the coming decade, and governments are aiding and…Read more...

In what has become a yearly tradition in early December, Qualcomm has announced its next flagship mobile chip designed for use in high-end phones and tablets. This is the chip that will be found in the biggest phones from Android makers, and plenty of tablets too. So here’s a rundown of all the new specs and features…Read more...

There are a handful of gadget-related sounds that fill my heart with dread, but few are more fear-inducing than the repeated tick-tick-tick of a dying hard disk drive. I’ve been hurt by that sound more than a few times in my life. So this year I finally tasked myself with a quest to get rid of all my HDDs and really…Read more...

Dell 24 Monitor | $100 | Dell

Congratulations on getting yourself a brand-new PlayStation 5! After making all of your friends incredibly jealous, it’s time to dive into everything this next-gen console has to offer. Here are 10 tips and tricks for making the most of your PS5.Read more...

Health authorities in the UK have approved a coronavirus vaccine developed by U.S.-based pharma company Pfizer and German-based biotech firm BioNTech, according to a press release from the two companies. The first doses will be given free to some of the most vulnerable Britons and health care workers early next…Read more...

Each December, Apple picks the best App Store games and apps that debuted or rose to popularity in the preceding year. It’s usually a hodge-podge of social apps, wellness services, and addictive games with a few under-the-radar surprises for good measure. But in the year 2020, which forced us all to stay at home in…Read more...

Massachusetts lawmakers voted on Monday to pass a police reform bill that would outlaw the use of facial recognition technology by police departments and other public agencies in the state.Read more...