Gizmodo

Cyber Ninjas, the questionably ninja-like company that failed to prove Donald Trump’s bullshit claims that he lost the state of Arizona during the 2020 elections thanks to voter fraud in Maricopa County, may have consigned itself to the dustbin of history for now. But before you forget about it entirely, the county’s…Read more...

When Star Trek: Prodigy went on hiatus late last year, it left off by blasting our newly united kid crewmates aboard the Protostar quite literally, with a technological reveal that left our heads spinning with all sorts of questions. Apparently not quite done with spinning our heads, the show’s return has already…Read more...

CES 2022 was expected to be the technology industry’s first big hurrah post-pandemic, and while the Omicron variant made some of the largest companies and most of the press (including Gizmodo) back out of in-person attendance, there was still a lot to see.Read more...

In the grand tradition of many a subscription-based food service before it, Taco Bell has announced a new way for customers to “live más:” by purchasing a pass that’s good for one taco per day for 30 days.Read more...

A snowstorm currently picking up steam over the U.S. South is now set to impact the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. The worst of it will thankfully miss areas hit hard earlier this week by a storm that shut down a huge swath of I-95 and trapped motorists for more than 24 hours.

A new year means new things—so many new things, across comics, TV, books, games, and films—to look forward to. But even with so many things promising us they’ll actually release this year (we’ve been burned by the past two years, to no one’s surprise), here’s a few of the things that the io9 staff is looking forward…Read more...

As protests erupted across the massive Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan on Wednesday, the government resorted to extreme measures, enforcing a wide-scale internet blackout lasting at least eight hours, blocking news and social media access in the former Soviet state. Eventually, scenes of chaos and burnt vehicles…Read more...

Imagine a future scenario in which a dangerous new virus is detected in chimpanzees. To prevent this virus from spreading to humans, biologists decide to deliberately infect scores of wild chimps with a transmissible vaccine—an infectious, lab-grown virus that immunizes, rather than harms, its host. The chimps, now…Read more...

We know for a fact that Roland Emmerich’s latest sci-fi disaster movie will be loud and dumb, as per the director’s oeuvre. But will it be fun? This newest Moonfall trailer suggests that maybe—just maybe—it might be, and if so, it’s all going to be because of John Bradley.

When a dog hears a language different from its owners’ native tongue, its brain activity is noticeably different compared to when it hears a familiar language. Those are the findings of a new study that scanned canine noggins using MRI, and they’re yet another indication that dogs are adept at recognizing the nuances…Read more...

Tom Holland is already playing one of the most famous characters in all of pop culture, but at one point he tried, and failed, to play another. In an new interview, Holland admitted that he once pitched the people who control the rights to James Bond on an origin story with him in the lead.Read more...

A year ago today, Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were fleeing for their lives as a violent mob swarmed the halls of the U.S. Capitol. With their personal safety at risk, the two most powerful Republicans on Capitol Hill at last stood up to Donald Trump. In a heated phone call, McCarthy, the House minority leader,…Read more...

The European Space Agency has released a video of the Webb Space Telescope separating from the rocket that launched it from Earth. The video may be the last view we’ll have of the $10 billion telescope, which is currently heading for a destination 1 million miles away.

In the year since the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, plenty of people have done what they could to try to prevent a disaster like this from happening again. Fences were erected, security personnel braced for more violence, tech companies made... more algorithms meant to predict where mass riots could happen.…Read more...

For most people living in the U.S., last summer felt unbearably hot in a new way—and new statistics on last year’s heat waves back that up. According to federal data analyzed by the Washington Post this week, 80% of Americans live in a county that had at least one day of “abnormally high” temperatures in 2021.Read more...

Later this year, it’ll have been a decade since Arrow hit The CW, establishing the first elements of a whole DC universe on the small screen that would change the face of superheroic TV as we know it. Now its transformation might reach an altogether different end, as the broadcast network that played home to Arrow, …Read more...

Researchers were able to identify 74 species of animals by looking for DNA in air samples collected at two zoos. The experiment shows that free-floating DNA could be used to track wild animals, including endangered or invasive species, without needing to observe them directly.Read more...

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” by Maria Dong. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on our website. Enjoy!

The Chucky cast discusses their hopes for season two of the Syfy show. More Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness promo art shows off its four key heroes. Plus Star Trek: Prodigy’s kid crew heads to the holodeck, and more. To me, my spoilers!

First revealed way back in 2018 when the world was only slightly less out of control, the TinyNES was a miniaturized clone of the original Nintendo Entertainment System that, like the original, could play authentic NES carts, while taking up much less space in your entertainment center. Three years later, you can …Read more...

The world’s cutest submersible is about the visit the world’s most dangerous glacier. An international team of researchers set off from Chile on a 65-day voyage to Antarctica. There, they’ll deploy Boaty McBoatface and a host of other instruments to explore what’s going on underneath Thwaites Glacier, one of the…Read more...

France has taken a unique step to remind people cars suck. In December, the country passed a law requiring the creators of car commercials to encourage viewers to try not driving a car—at least, whenever it’s possible.Read more...

Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S., is cutting paid sick leave for workers who get covid-19 from two weeks of leave to one week, according to a new report from Reuters that cites an internal memo sent out on Tuesday. The change was inspired by the CDC’s updated guidelines that suggest Americans isolate…Read more...

I admit it: I use Razer’s mechanical gaming keyboards and its smart lights to create a bit of an ~aesthetic~ in my office. And people like me are the reason why Razer launched a smart home app for its Chroma RGB lighting ecosystem.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Hayao Miyazaki movie. I was in college and this new animated film called Princess Mononoke was coming to theaters. The trailers looked cool and I’d tangentially heard of the filmmaker’s other films like My Neighbor Totoro—but growing up in a small town, films like that weren’t…Read more...

Some gamers still use wired headsets instead of the countless wireless options on the market because they don’t want to deal with charging, but now they don’t have to. HyperX at CES 2022 unveiled a new Cloud Alpha Wireless that supposedly boasts 300 hours of battery life.

On Wednesday, a Twitter user going by the name Homo Digitalis published a two-and-a-half-minute clip with the caption, “This is how Walmart envisions Shopping in the #Metaverse.” And that vision, I gotta say, is looking pretty bleak.Read more...

Alien director Ridley Scott may have slammed the idea, but we’re very interested in what Legion and Fargo TV show creator Noah Hawley is going to do with the Alien franchise. (Certainly more than any additional Alien movies Scott makes.) And while we’re not going to see new Xenomorph shenanigans on our TV sets for…Read more...

Astronomers looking over data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) recently came across something weird: an object called TIC 400799224 has been fluctuating in brightness, like a star being routinely eclipsed. Their analysis of the observations suggests that TIC 400799224 is actually two stars, one of…Read more...

The full trailer for Apple TV+’s reboot of Fraggle Rock is here and as you watch it, you’ll believe it’s 1985 all over again. All the same characters, costumes, and more are back, with a look that feels as if nothing has changed down at the Rock in 30 years, except a few more lights and some new Fraggle additions.Read more...

Popcorn Time, the popular video piracy app, is officially dead—again. Developers behind the once immensely popular torrenting platform announced Tuesday that it had been retired due to a downturn in public interest. A visit to the project’s website reveals what appears to be an illustration of a dead popcorn box,…Read more...

New research details the devastating impact of an extreme weather event on a colony of Magellanic penguins living along Argentina’s east coast.

In these frigid, fraught days of early 2022, a singular bright spot has emerged: Wordle. The simple online game, in which you have six chances to guess a 5-letter word, has exploded in popularity in recent months, helped along this week by a sparkly story in the New York Times.

The 2022 Sundance Film Festival was set to be the big comeback after a fully virtual event in 2021. With vaccines and boosters now in full effect, the festival was meant to be both Hollywood’s return to Park City, Utah, and an evolution of its virtual component. Even with the rise of the covid-19 omicron variant over…Read more...

The seasonal flu is back, and it’s occasionally teaming up with everyone’s least favorite coronavirus. On Wednesday, testing site officials in Los Angeles reported the city’s first apparent case of the newly coined “flurona”: a co-infection of influenza and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The unlucky infected person, a teenage…Read more...

It’s not all fun and games, fighting vampires. Sometimes you just have to put your head in the game, before someone loses theirs entirely.Read more...

The founder of Utah-based property management software company Entrata, Dave Bateman, has resigned from the company’s board after sending an anti-Semitic mass email warning that coronavirus vaccines were a plot to “euthanize the American people,” adding “I believe the Jews were behind this.”Read more...

A wildfire that wrought a path of destruction through communities outside of Boulder, Colorado, before New Years’ may have started on the property of a fundamentalist Christian sect, authorities said this week. The group has a long history in the Boulder area and runs several businesses—and has some disturbing…Read more...

Chicago Public School teachers attempting to teach students remotely on Wednesday discovered they’d been locked out of their digital classrooms, an apparent effort by city officials to prevent a return to remote education amid recent spikes in covid-19 cases among students and teachers.

CES took one step closer to replacing auto shows this year with not only new car introductions, but glimpses of conceptual automotive technologies that might one day be commonplace. Looking into its own crystal ball, BMW sees a future in which cars are equipped with monstrous 31-inch 8K screens that turn vehicles into…Read more...

Choosing a car color isn’t just about personal preference; there are other, more practical factors that come into play. Dirt stands out on a light-colored car, while a vehicle painted a darker shade can become extremely hot inside as it absorbs sunlight on a warm summer day. BMW imagines a future where no one has to…Read more...

A Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau Star Wars show isn’t a Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau Star Wars show without some deep cut Easter eggs. Episode two of The Book of Boba Fett, “The Tribes of Tatooine” (recapped here), was no exception, and while there were several really fun callbacks, our favorite is probably not the one…Read more...

The sprays and cloths designed to keep eyeglasses fog-free may come with more than people bargained for, new research suggests. A small study found that these products can carry high levels of per- and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), a class of “forever chemicals” that are suspected of having subtle but…Read more...

At this point, it’s a bit of an open secret that Google likely pays Apple billions of dollars each year to remain the default search engine that crops up on people’s iPhones and Mac computers. Now, a new class-action suit is alleging that the tech titans’ dealings go even farther than that. An antitrust case against…Read more...

First there was Sadako and the VHS tape that killed you if you watched it in The Ring. Then there was the 2013 found-footage horror anthology V/H/S, which was followed by three sequels. Now, Netflix is premiering Archive 81, in which a series of video cassettes are going to drive a man insane... and he may be the…Read more...

When we were shopping around for our family car last year, one of the first things I put down on my list of must-haves was Android Auto support. Google’s in-car platform has become essential for my drive, even if I’m heading down the street to run a quick errand. At CES 2022, Google revealed more features coming to…Read more...

Every CES, Razer reveals some far-out concept (like this year’s Project Sophia) that grabs the headlines and excites its fanbase, but never materializes into a real product. That changed when Razer’s Project Hazel, an RGB-illuminated smart face mask, gained enough fanfare to force Razer into actually selling the thing.

The best part of CES is walking over to the Razer booth to see what outlandish concept the gaming hardware brand is showcasing.

If you’re deep into Google’s platforms—and I mean, you’ve got an Android phone, a Chromebook, and a Google TV set up in the living room—Google’s CES 2022 announcements might sound like a payoff to you for sticking with the ecosystem. The company revealed details for some of its most anticipated features, including a…Read more...

The Ultraman franchise wouldn’t really be what it is without a big team-up between myriad Ultra warriors. The first season of Netflix and Production IG’s adaptation of the Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi Ultraman manga already gave us a trio of rival Ultramen to deal with, but now the party’s getting quite a…Read more...