Gizmodo

Bill Gates, the cofounder of Microsoft who left the company’s board in 2020, wrote an end-of-the-year note on Thursday filled with reflections on the pandemic and the year 2021. But Gates also included some predictions for the future, and they could give some indication of where tech companies are looking for the next…Read more...

Julian Assange can be extradited to the U.S. based on a new UK court ruling early Friday, according to multiple reports from news outlets in London. A lower court ruled back in January that Assange couldn’t be extradited to the U.S. because he’d likely face torture in the American prison system and was in danger of …Read more...

We’ve seen the helmet. We know who from Halo lore is showing up, and what new faces will join them. Now it’s time to get our first proper look as the Master Chief warthogs his way to his very own streaming series.

A German court has ruled that a man who fell down a staircase while walking from his bedroom to his home office injured himself at work and is therefore covered under his company’s workplace accident insurance policy.Read more...

Sonic the Hedgehog 2's first trailer, otherwise known as the sick little treat tucked into this year’s Video Game Awards, is finally here—and it is, to put it mildly, a trip.Read more...

The Sundance Film Festival has a long tradition of debuting movies that make an impact—including genre hits like Saw, The Blair Witch Project, Donnie Darko, 28 Days Later, The Descent, and Primer. So each year, we keep an eye on what’s playing, hoping to find the next big breakout. With the 2022 program recently…Read more...

In the years since the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed how easily Facebook’s political ads could be weaponized by bad actors abroad, the social network has made some major overhauls that, in a perfect world, would keep a scandal like that from happening again. It rolled out an ever-growing library of the ads…Read more...

In another effort to win subscribers in the streaming wars, NBCUniversal announced on Thursday that it will make movies from Universal Pictures, Focus Features, Illumination, and DreamWorks Animation available on Peacock as early as 45 days after their release in theaters.Read more...

Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop ended on something of an interesting cliffhanger with its first season, but from the sounds of things, the recently released show’s luck has run out.Read more...

A cheap $300 TCL TV is one of the best tech purchases I’ve made in recent years. I had just moved to Brooklyn as a cash-strapped 20-something out of college and needed a TV that just got the job done. The TCL with Roku built in was the ideal solution, and since then, I’ve been recommending it to folks on a similar…Read more...

Two men are three weeks into an expedition to Antartica’s Pole of Inaccessibility, an isolated spot that is 560 miles from the South Pole. The pair are working in collaboration with NASA and the European Space Agency as they record the psychological and physiological effects of the journey, data that the space…Read more...

For all the talk we’ve heard from tech giants in recent weeks about the future in which we all work and play in something called the metaverse, few people have actually been able to experience this grand vision for themselves. Well, now you can: Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has opened its Horizon…Read more...

Desperate to reinvent the wheel as it weathers a Senate investigation and cedes more and more of its young user base to platforms like TikTok, Instagram will once again give users the option to browse “a version” of its chronological feed after years of utilizing an algorithmically-generated one.Read more...

For years, Karate Kid fans looked down on The Karate Kid Part III. That changes this month when The Karate Kid Part III looms large over Cobra Kai. The upcoming fourth season of the hit Netflix show debuts December 31, and the return of Cobra Kai co-founder and Part III villain Terry Silver (Thomas Ian Griffin) is…Read more...

Foldable phones promise to one day supplant our standard slab-shaped devices, and now another smartphone giant is throwing its hat in the ring with a product set to rival the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3.

Traveling the globe remains a challenge as we quickly approach our third year of living with the Covid-19 pandemic. To help stave off cabin fever, Alex Shakespeare built themselves a fake window that simulates a live view from different cities around the world, but how it’s controlled might be the best part.Read more...

Role-playing games can be hard, but life is harder. It’s a lesson that the already anxious Maggie learns when she enters middle school in Veronica Agarwal and Lee Durfey-Lavoie’s upcoming graphic novel Just Roll With It. Maggie navigates life by rolling a 20-sided die whenever she gets nervous, and she gets nervous a…Read more...

Even more Spider-Man: No Way Home footages teases its villainous mashup. Joe Madureira’s Battle Chasers’ could be coming to TV. Plus, there’s good news for Invasion, and we’ve got a new look at Snowpiercer’s third season. To me, my spoilers!

As a vacuuming fanatic with a deep-seated hatred of crumbs on my floors, the greatest thing to happen to my daily routine was the convenience of a cordless vacuum—but they’re not perfect. Cordless vacs are often a pain to empty without creating another mess, and if you’re not willing to permanently attach a charging…Read more...

The government of New Zealand is preparing to ban cigarette smoking forever by anyone born after 2008, according to a new report from the news outlet Stuff. The move would eventually make it illegal for anyone in New Zealand to smoke, no matter how old they got, while allowing those who are currently addicted to…Read more...

The U.S. Senate voted late Wednesday to block President Joe Biden’s proposed covid-19 vaccine mandate for private businesses, a move that’s largely seen as symbolic since the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives is unlikely to take up the issue and the White House has the power to veto the legislation even…Read more...

Of all the Star Wars shows coming to Disney+, one remains the most mysterious. It’s set in a time period most fans don’t know and it’s not about a preexisting character, at least we think it isn’t. What we do now is that the show has its star: Amandla Stenberg.Read more...

By now, you’ve likely heard that virtual private networks protect your privacy. You’ve probably also heard that they don’t actually do that. Who to believe?Read more...

Apple doesn’t need to give app developers the ability to add links to external payment options—or not yet, at least.

Hey, would you like to watch another 60-second trailer for the upcoming Star Wars TV series The Book of Boba Fett, even though it contains almost no new footage? Let me answer that for you: yes, you do, because the operative word there is “almost.”

Though The Last of Us follows Joel and Ellie as the pair fight to survive a zombie apocalypse, the story in both the original video game and HBO’s upcoming adaptation introduces a variety of other characters with drastically different motivations and outlooks on the rise of the infected. Small as those supporting…Read more...

The Defense Research Intelligence Agency, the gonzo R&D arm of the Pentagon, has had a hand in inventing everything from GPS and speech translation to the early precursors of the internet. (The agency also tried to develop a mechanical elephant to traverse South Vietnam, but who’s keeping count). Now the agency is…Read more...

Sonos on Wednesday announced a new product sustainability program with a lofty carbon neutrality goal for its entire line by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2040.Read more...

Quetzalcoatlus, with its 40-foot wingspan, is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary animals to have ever lived. The creature was capable of flight, but how it managed to launch itself into the air has remained a mystery—until now.

Florida environmental officials have resorted to feeding West Indian manatees in a last-ditch effort to prevent potentially hundreds of them from starving to death. The reason the gentle ocean mammals are starving in the first place, though, is partly humans’ doing, a result of polluted waterways and climate…Read more...

The idea of it was too enticing. Would I like to review a $700 Mandalorian helmet? As a fan of not just Star Wars or The Mandalorian, but Mandalorians in general, I emphatically said “Yes.” I’d seen all sorts of Star Wars helmets before: toy ones, collectible ones, and Lego ones, but never a wearable one with such a…Read more...

The prime minister of Finland has apologized for missing a text notification instructing her to isolate after a potential coronavirus exposure and instead went clubbing until 4:00 a.m., the BBC reported on Wednesday.Read more...

When Don’t Look Up’s trailer dropped, I was dumbly excited to see it. As a climate person, you don’t get too many movies made for you. Having gotten a sneak peek, I can safely say it met expectations and then some.Read more...

Fieldwork conducted about a decade ago is only now changing researchers’ understanding of large mammal extinctions during the Ice Age. An analysis of DNA locked away in frozen soil samples reveals that charismatic species like woolly mammoths and the wild horses of the Yukon stuck around for longer than previously…Read more...

Well, that may have been my favorite episode of Hawkeye yet. No, it wasn’t as action-packed as the previous episode, but the relationship between Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) was front and center and that’s what this show is all about. There were some ups, some downs, and an exciting…Read more...

If you were intrigued by the idea of a How to Train Your Dragons series suddenly brought into the modern world, then you might want to clear out your schedule for the rest of the day. The mysteries introduced in this first trailer for Dragons: The Nine Realms abound, and about the only thing we know for certain is the…Read more...

Android tablets and foldable phones are a step closer to receiving some much-needed improvements. Google today released the first beta for Android 12L, a version of Android designed to improve the software experience on large-screen devices.

Scientists have spotted an unusually large exoplanet in orbit around b Centauri, a massive two-star system that is visible to the unaided eye. With a combined weight of roughly 10 Suns, it’s now the heaviest star system known to host a planet.

Rewatching The Matrix Revolutions, the reasons why it’s regarded so poorly are crystal clear. The story is disjointed, characters don’t particularly change, the action scenes feel either completely unnecessary or way too long, and the ending is terrible. Coming after the all-but-perfect original film and flawed but…Read more...

If you’ve made any searches on the Amazon website recently, you might’ve noticed the top results are consistently cluttered with a growing number of ads featuring products from major brands. You also might not ever know they’re there—these so-called “sponsored” listings are virtually indistinguishable from the regular…Read more...

According to Nikkei Asia, Canon is poised to shake up the digital imaging industry next year with a new sensor capable of capturing full-color images at “one-tenth the brightness conventional sensors need.” This could revolutionize autonomous driving and even security systems.Read more...

When it comes to major climate polluters, it’s hard to think of a more striking example than commercial jets burning through gallons of jet fuel as they go screaming down airport runways for takeoff. But those runways—and terminal roofs, parking garages, and open spaces—are increasingly lined with solar panels, making…Read more...

The final season of The Expanse arrives this Friday, so io9 hopped on a video chat with writers Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (who co-author The Expanse books as James S.A. Corey) and showrunner Naren Shankar to talk about the show’s past, present, and (hopefully?) future.

The first glimmers of data on the Omicron variant of the coronavirus are starting to come in, and the verdict is decidedly mixed. Early experiments have found that antibodies from vaccinated people are clearly less able to neutralize Omicron in the lab, if not rendered completely useless. But antibodies generated…Read more...

Roku and Google have signed a multi-year extension deal for both YouTube and YouTube TV on the streaming platform, effectively skirting a December contract deadline that, had it expired, would have seen YouTube removed from Roku’s app store.Read more...

The U.S. government has moved one step closer to turning science fiction into reality. On Wednesday, the federally funded National Academy of Sciences released a new report laying out six avenues to alter the oceans in an attempt to suck more carbon dioxide out of the sky and store it for centuries to come.Read more...

In 2015, a letter containing George R.R. Martin’s original 1993 pitch to his publisher for his A Song of Ice and Fire series leaked on the internet. Well, most of it—there was one paragraph at the end that had been redacted with black marker, followed by the words, “But that’s the second book…” Now, fans have…Read more...

Apple just added an iOS feature that might tell you whether the “genuine iPhone” replacement part you bought on eBay is a scam. Available on iOS 15.2, a new “Parts and Service History” section in the Settings app confirms when a genuine component is found on your iPhone.

When George Pérez announced that he was largely retiring from the comics space back in 2019, the much-acclaimed artist took the time to open up some of the personal reasons behind his decision, understanding that fans were bound to have questions. At the time, Pérez acknowledged how a number of ongoing health…Read more...

With the Switch OLED, Nintendo didn’t just give its handheld console a screen upgrade, it also gave the dock a major facelift with extra ports, better cable routing, and a new white finish. For a while, it was only available bundled with the Switch OLED, but as promised, Nintendo now sells it on its own.Read more...