Gizmodo

Tesla bumped up the price of its “full self-driving” software option to $10,000 on Friday, making good on CEO Elon Musk’s promise last week to implement a roughly $2,000 price hike in the U.S. It follows the launch of a limited beta version of the software, which lets a select number of U.S. customers use Tesla’s…Read more...

A gigantic pool of magma emerged beneath Earth’s surface following the impact event that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs. New research suggests this hellish subterranean chamber hosted a biological ecosystem, a finding that could give clues as to how life emerged during Earth’s tumultuous early days.

It’s heeeereeeee: the 2020 elections are just four days away, which means the next 100-plus hours may be the longest of your life. Given the results of the election are unlikely to emerge on November 3 and the current presidential administration has made clear it intends to claim victory no matter what happens, it…Read more...

Season two of The Mandalorian began with an episode that was everything we expected and more. A few pieces of rumored casting were confirmed, some long-time questions were answered, and episode writer-director Jon Favreau gave fans a story straight from an old-school Hollywood Western with the biggest action set piece…Read more...

Last week—in what might somehow qualify as good news for 2020—bug scientists in Washington State reported discovering and then destroying the first known Asian giant hornet nest in the U.S. These invasive predators pose a serious threat to bees, and researchers are desperate to stop their spread within North America.Read more...

I do not keep up with the Kardashians.Read more...

When Ray Fisher came forward with allegations earlier this year saying Joss Whedon created a toxic, abusive work environment on the set of Justice League, within a month, Warner Bros. launched an internal investigation into the matter. The studio then claimed Fisher refused to cooperate. There’s now another chapter to…Read more...

Somewhere between a dream and nightmare is this scenario for Jan. 20, 2021: Joe Biden becomes president, while the Senate remains in Republican control.Read more...

Apple’s new subscription bundles launch today as Apple One. But how much are you really saving by subscribing to apps you might not even need?Read more...

After barely escaping the horrors of war in South Sudan, Rial (Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku) and Bol (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) Majul have made it all the way to London and into their first home. But their apparent good fortune has a terrifying downside, as Remi Weekes’ chilling His House soon reveals.Read more...

The platypus is nature’s crazy quilt, as this strange creature looks like about a half-dozen different animals all rolled into one. Turns out that platypuses were hiding yet another conspicuous feature: THEY CAN FREAKIN’ GLOW IN THE DARK.

In an era of Jeffrey Toobin and always-on webcams, scammers have launched a new grift that involves claiming that they have access to your naked Zoom videos.Read more...

Released to coincide with the news that the iPhone 12 line would no longer ship with headphones, Apple’s new $50 Beats Flex are the cheapest wireless earbuds the company sells—but they’re not completely wireless, and they’re not that cheap. Skullcandy’s new Jib True wireless earbuds easily best Beats with a truly…Read more...

On my 32nd birthday, my 22-year-old sister mailed me a first-generation Tamagotchi. Too young to have suffered the Tamagotchi herself, she may have sweetly assumed that I was once the kind of focused, enraptured child from the throwback commercial—one with an innate or even competent grasp of faddish handheld…Read more...

Does Chris Christie enjoy humiliation? The evidence is mounting. After spending four years debasing himself by supporting President Trump, the former New Jersey governor landed in the hospital with a covid-19 infection stemming from a White House superspreader event. Now he’s giving back to the people by offering…Read more...

Login credentials belonging to several Martin County, Florida, election officials were inadvertently exposed by what an election security researcher says was an unsecured backup database that had likely been publicly accessible since 2017.Read more...

Aeronautical engineers have built planes that can streak across the sky at over 4,000 miles per hour, but still haven’t come close to designing aircraft that can maneuver with the astounding agility of a bird. Researchers at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne figured, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘emRead more...

Years after revelations regarding Russian interference in 2016 started to come to light, the tiresome odes to “Soviet Russian tradecraft” ought to leave us wondering what’s changed.

Michael Giacchino talks swinging back into action for Spider-Man 3's soundtrack. The Strange Talent of Luther Strode is getting a movie adaptation. Rami Malek teases the villainous complexity of his No Time to Die villain. Plus, a look at the Gremlins animated series, and what’s to come on the Walking Dead spinoffs.…Read more...

The holidays are looking a little less Linus this year for Peanuts fans hoping to catch Charlie Brown specials on network television, as has been tradition for decades.Read more...

One of the obvious giveaways that you’re interacting with a robot is their blank dead-eyed stare. The eyes don’t connect with yours the way they would if they were, you know, human. A research team at Disney is trying to fix that using subtle head motions and eye movements that make the robot seem more lifelike…Read more...

Fox News host Tucker Carlson devoted a segment of his show on Wednesday night to damning documents supposedly proving corruption by Democratic nominee Joe Biden—except they had mysteriously vanished in transit.

If it wasn’t enough that Netflix continues to push the eject button on a number of beloved and by all accounts popular series on its platform, the service is now raising its monthly subscription costs in the U.S.

The tragedy of Exxon continues. On Thursday, the company said it expects to lay off roughly 14,000 workers over the next year. The huge reduction comes even as it pays out shareholders, albeit at a flat level for the first time in nearly four decades.Read more...

Paramount Pictures’ Spell—from director Mark Tonderai—is a film that sets out to exist in a number of emotional spaces while terrifying you with a story about how simultaneously horrific and freeing homecomings can be. While the film doesn’t quite accomplish all of its goals, it does manage—perhaps accidentally—to be…Read more...

Black biologist Charles Henry Turner was doing groundbreaking research into animal cognition at the turn of the 20th century, yet his ideas never gained traction on account of racism and his seemingly radical viewpoint. Many concepts proposed by Turner are now accepted science, and a group of researchers to say it’s…Read more...

On Tuesday, the FCC announced it will set aside up to $9 billion over the next 10 years to fund 5G wireless broadband expansion across rural America. This is in addition to the $20.4 billion already earmarked for wired broadband expansion in rural America over the same time period, but there’s so set date for an…Read more...

There’s a new Chromecast in town, only it’s not so much a Chromecast as a little Android TV dongle with Chromecast built in... but that’s not right either, because it’s running Google TV rather than Android TV... I know, I know. If you’re wondering exactly what this new software platform is, and how it relates to the…Read more...

As if the rampant underfunding and overcrowding weren’t enough for hospitals to deal with during the current pandemic, apparently they need to grapple with ransomware, too. In an advisory memo released last night, federal officials warned of an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat” to hospitals and healthcare…Read more...

The upcoming presidential election will decide more than just the next American leader; it could also determine the fate of numerous endangered wildlife species that depend on unimpeded access to both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border to survive.Read more...

Truth Seekers, a new series whose co-creators and stars include noted nerds Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead), hits Amazon tomorrow. It would be a welcome arrival any time of year, but since it’s all about the paranormal (and the humans who’re obsessed with it), it’s the perfect binge for Halloween.

Pregnancy tests these days can get surprisingly high tech—and may even be rigged to play Doom. It’s also an unfortunate reality that these high-tech tests aren’t always accessible for the visually impaired. Because most rely on digital screens, blind or partially sighted people often have to ask someone else to read…Read more...

In 1991, the Star Wars universe changed forever. After a few years of quiet, the Expanded Universe exploded in scope and reach, kicking off with a series of novels from Timothy Zahn that brought us the story of what happened after Return of the Jedi. With it came the rise of Grand Admiral Thrawn and 30 years later,…Read more...

Internet service providers will be vying for some of the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund today, including Elon Musks’s SpaceX. Its Starlink satellite network allegedly has speeds of up to 100 Mbps now, so the company seems to be in a better position to convince the FCC it’s worth a piece of that $16 billion in…Read more...

Octopuses, with their eight suction-cup-covered arms, can taste objects simply by touching them. A team of researchers has finally figured out how these cephalopods are capable of pulling off this remarkable trick.

When the scientists who warned the world last year that 1 million species face extinction issue a new warning about the “pandemic era,” we should probably listen.Read more...

You may remember the Rejuvenique Facial Toning Mask from creepy infomercials in 1999 starring Linda Evans. “If you get the idea of what doing eight situps a second would do for your stomach, you have an idea what Rejuvenique would do for your face,” a smarmy salesman tells Evans, in response to why a person would want…Read more...

This week, Star Trek: Discovery reunited the disparate halves of its cast for an emotional chance to take stock of their unprecedented situation. The crew has arrived in the future and is headed to the ancestral home of the Federation—but as we so often learn when we return to our roots, they come to the stark…Read more...

Phones are expensive. Most people upgrade every few generations, and they want a phone that will take great photos, support the latest software, and won’t shit the bed after just a couple years.Read more...

Nvidia’s RTX 3070 officially hits retail stores tomorrow. After the fiasco that was the RTX 3080 release, actual buyers will hopefully be able to get their hands on these cards rather than see them snatched up by bots to scalp on eBay.Read more...

Finally, a rare bit of good news.Read more...

There was a big hearing in the Senate today regarding the future of online speech and the law that allows the web-as-we-know-it to function. Of the three big witnesses at the hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai may have expected to be in the hot seat given that his company was just slapped with an antitrust lawsuit by…Read more...

Folks, I have heard enough of the bad remote discourse. Let’s settle this debate.Read more...

Early data from an ongoing study in the UK is setting off a wave of alarm over the pandemic this week. It found evidence that levels of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 took a sharp plunge in England’s general population during the summer, prompting fears that immunity to covid-19 may start to significantly wane in as little…Read more...

At least seven people were hospitalized after Donald Trump threw a rally at Nebraska’s Eppley Airfield near Omaha in freezing temperatures on Tuesday night. The president promptly jetted off afterward, leaving thousands of attendees in hours-long lines for campaign buses to return them to the parking lot, leading…Read more...

A re-analysis of two fossils found in the 1980s has led to the discovery of an absolutely enormous Antarctic seabird.

As Halloween approaches, it is paramount that we all take a moment to remember—or discover—Tim Curry’s “Halloween Song” from The Worst Witch. Since HBO aired its extremely low-budget, TV movie adaptation of Jill Murphy’s children’s books in 1986, it has remained one of the most wonderful, terrible, bizarre videos of…Read more...

Change is hard. I get that. Judging by the dismay on Twitter over the Gmail logo change, few people are happy with the multi-colored M. Some have blamed the email logo change for missing important missives. Others complain it’s now visually indistinguishable from Google’s other app logos. To everyone in the throes of…Read more...

The internet is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. While some people have access to high-speed fiber-optic cable running to their house or phones ready to connect to 5G, there are also swaths of broadband deserts where people can’t access internet at reliable speeds.Read more...

New research detected an intriguing change in the average body temperature of the Tsimane people, an indigenous foraging and farming group in the Bolivian Amazon that has recently started to interact more with industrialized communities. Over 16 years, the Tsimane have experienced a slight but rapid drop in body…Read more...