Gizmodo

Author Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles, Heartless) is soon returning to the realm of fairy-tale retelling—her next book, the Rumpelstiltskin-inspired Gilded, arrives in November. Today, io9 has an exclusive look at the gorgeous cover, as well as some insights from the author about her latest fantasy creation.Read more...

Despite the amount of history that sits atop its soil, plenty of stories remain buried below Colonial Williamsburg. One of those stories is that of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, an early Black church that stood until the 1950s on the historic site, on which excavations began last fall. Now, archaeologists…Read more...

If even the tiniest bit of turbulence during a flight has you reaching for the barf bag, then you’ll never want to climb aboard this Russian contraption that uses flapping wings to take flight. But it demonstrates that Mother Nature’s designs can be supersized to one day revolutionize air travel.Read more...

Wizards of the Coast’s venerable card game series has had some peculiar crossovers over the years. But things are only going to get weirder and more wonderful with an expansion of its latest crossover into a true Magic multiverse that would make even the most seasoned planeswalker’s head spin: Lord of the Rings and …Read more...

The arms race between the coronavirus and humanity continues to pick up steam. This week, Moderna announced that its modified vaccine meant to target a worrying variant first found in South Africa is now ready for testing. Pfizer/BioNTech is also set to test out their own contingency plan for new variants soon.Read more...

According to the best available climate science, the U.S. needs to completely zero out its carbon pollution by 2050 to secure a livable future. A new analysis from the nonprofit Energy Innovation lays out a plan to get there, which also would just happen to add a cool $1 trillion dollars to the national economy.Read more...

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement. It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, an organization dedicated to parity in…Read more...

Live Captions is one of the most useful features on Android phones, allowing your mobile device to automatically transcribe any audio it’s currently playing. And now it seems Google is bringing Live Captions to Chrome, with the feature already available as a hidden option in the browser.

The hardest part about house hunting in a city is figuring out whether your realtor is telling you the truth about how quiet a prospective neighborhood is. It would be nice if, say, there was a website that could tell you exactly which areas are noisy. Which is exactly what the Japanese website DQN Today does.Read more...

As a journalist and content writer, I often have to go on Zoom calls every day with clients and interview sources who request to use this platform. I am also hard-of-hearing, which makes following what people say on calls tiring, due to listening fatigue.

The least enjoyable part of a friendly Nerf battle isn’t getting hit, it’s constantly having to stop to reload your blaster. The inconvenience improved with Nerf’s Rival line, which debuted in 2015, but for 2021 the company is introducing a new Hyper line of blasters that fire smaller foam balls so you’ll be spending…Read more...

In the first teaser trailer for Zack Snyder’s upcoming Army of the Dead, little’s explained about how whatever contagion that’s caused a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas first made it out into the public, other than that it isn’t long before most of the city’s population is turned into a legion of the undead. Scott Ward (…Read more...

I know, I know, it’s hard to be excited about new graphics cards when there’s a chip shortage and scalpers and crypto miners are snatching up all the stock before regular ol’ consumers can buy ‘em. I know. Waiting sucks, especially when new GPUs keep cropping up. But while that money is burning a hole in your pocket,…Read more...

Smartphones have come a long way toward becoming the best cameras we carry. A long journey through megapixels, multiple lenses, optical zoom, image stabilization, and various other upgrades has gotten us to today’s handsets, but today, much of the work in capturing a great photo is happening on the software side.

Facebook finally banned the military in Myanmar, known as Tatmadaw, from the social media platform several weeks after the military staged a coup that toppled the democratically elected government. The ban on the country’s military includes Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

GameStop, little diva that she is, is in the spotlight once more after shares of the company skyrocketed more than 100% on Wednesday.Read more...

Paramount+, the new streaming service replacing CBS All Access, will launch as both an ad-supported and ad-free product.

In the early hours of Christmas Day in 2020, an RV in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, began broadcasting the sounds of gunfire and warnings for anyone in earshot to immediately evacuate. After about 15 minutes, it exploded, killing the perpetrator, wounding at least eight others, and damaging hundreds of buildings.

The graphics card availability situation may look a pretty bleak right now, but that’s not stopping AMD from forging ahead with its plans. The company announced on Twitter today that it’s launching a new graphics card in its Radeon RX 6000-series line next week.

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team of anthropologists have looked at the 4.4 million-year-old fossilized hand of one specimen (affectionately dubbed…Read more...

Adapting Superman is always a daunting task. He’s the ultimate beacon of hope, to some that perfection makes him either too simplistic to be interesting or in desperate need of a flaw. Superman & Lois, the CW’s latest foray into the DC universe, straddles a line between the two that feels quite unlike anything it’s…Read more...

The Red Planet’s two tiny moons—Phobos and Deimos—could have formed after an ancient collision, according to new research. It’s an intriguing possibility, but not everyone is convinced by the evidence.

Attention, haters: you have officially been put on notice by Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg.

LG will make its webOS software available to other companies.

As we lean into a few more months of WFH life, none of us are looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops out there. The road warriors hunting for something slightly lighter than a cinder block are stuck inside, and couch surfing is now usually done on the phone, not on some wafer-thin slab of plastic and silicon.…Read more...

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to soon grant an emergency use authorization (EUA) to Johnson & Johnson’s covid-19 vaccine, possibly as early as this weekend. That decision would make it the third such vaccine to become available to Americans. So it’s as good a time as any to go through the similarities…Read more...

It’s a tough time to run a print magazine. It’s an even tougher time to run a print magazine about the film industry. And after more than 40 years of definitive coverage of the special effects industry, Cinefex has shut down.Read more...

YouTube is attempting to bridge the gap between its dedicated Kids app and regular YouTube for parents with tweens and teens.Read more...

There was plenty to like about how Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island and Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters spent ample time playing to the visual majesties of their respective kaiju. But both movies suffered dearly whenever their focuses turned toward the human characters, whose relatively…Read more...

In India, agriculture employs more than 50% of the country. It’s also in crisis due to climate change and groundwater loss. A new study shows how these two factors are putting the country’s farmers at risk.Read more...

Microsoft is officially getting into the website-building biz. On Wednesday, the company’s digital marketing wing rolled out a shiny new suite of tools which promise to give businesses a quick and easy way to set up their own landing pages. And unlike some of the other site builders on the market—like, say,…Read more...

HP is already one of the biggest computer makers in the world, complete with its own line of Omen gaming systems. But today HP’s gaming empire is about to get bigger with the acquisition of HyperX.Read more...

A newly compiled 3D map has revealed more than 1 million binary star pairs located within 3,000 light years of Earth, highlighting the ubiquity of these celestial objects.

It all started with some tweets.Read more...

Rep. Deb Haaland just finished a historic confirmation hearing to run the Department of Interior. If her nomination is pushed through committee, she will in all likelihood be confirmed as the first Indigenous person to ever serve on a presidential cabinet.Read more...

By now, hopefully you’re aware that HBO Max has a killer back catalog of films. While a lot of subscribers are going to enjoy all the big Warner Bros. movies in 2021 (like Mortal Kombat!) on the streaming service, there’s plenty more to watch in the meantime.Read more...

Texas has a utility market unlike any other in the U.S., and in the wake of last week’s grid failure there that left millions of people in the dark, it’s come under scrutiny. Ninety percent of Texas’ electricity is generated on its own grid, and that grid is very lightly regulated.Read more...

Virtual reality has come a long way, but tripping over your couch while mid-game is still one of the more annoying things about the format. But, good news for Oculus Quest owners. A new experimental update will now let you mark your actual couch as an object in your virtual space.Read more...

New government-funded research this week should offer some comfort to people who have survived covid-19. It suggests they have a low risk of reinfection from the coronavirus, at least around three months later.Read more...

Before Dave Filoni’s Clone Wars cartoon unknowingly kicked off a huge part of the new Star Wars prequel-era canon, our best look at the lives of the clone army came from 2005's Republic Commando, a semi-tactical first-person shooter now hailed as one of the best Star Wars video games ever made. Happily, the game is…Read more...

So far, it’s been much ado about nothing as One Plus co-founder Carl Pei’s new company has yet to release a single product. But today, Nothing is making a splash by announcing a founding partnership with Teenage Engineering that will put the Swedish design group in charge of Nothing’s future product design.

Samsung and Apple have been making cellular smartwatches for years. But this isn’t about them. This is about how Fossil, the biggest Wear OS wearables maker, has finally, finally released its first cellular smartwatch.Read more...

Right now, Texas is in the balmy mid-50s. Yet just a week ago, it was colder than Alaska, and we all know what happened next. Much of the state’s energy capacity got knocked offline, leaving millions of people without power, heat, and water for days.

Android finally has its own version of Apple’s AirDrop. It’s called Nearby Share, and it makes it easy to quickly send files to another Android device.

WD 18TB External Hard Drive | $330 | Best BuyRead more...

Officials at the U.S. Postal Service held a press conference on Tuesday to announce the agency has awarded a $482 million contract to Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense for a new fleet of vehicles scheduled to be rolled out in 2023. But the design of the new vehicles has been polarizing to say the least, with some social…Read more...

Fry’s Electronics, a longtime computer retail chain headquartered on the west coast, will close its doors for good, according to a new report from TV station KRON 4 in San Francisco. The report seems to confirms rumors from Twitter that started appearing late Tuesday claiming Fry’s would be closed permanently.Read more...

Apparently not content with having penetrated the networks of such piddling federal agencies as the U.S. State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and that agency that maintains our nuclear stockpile, the hackers of the “SolarWinds” affair also went after NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration,…Read more...

A federal judge in California ruled on Tuesday that a first-in-the-nation net neutrality law passed in the state in 2018 can now be enforced, signaling a huge victory for proponents of a more egalitarian internet and paving the way for other states to begin introducing open internet rules of their own.Read more...

Mozilla beefed up Firefox’s already impressive arsenal of privacy-preserving tech on Tuesday with the addition of a new tool in its flagship browser: Total Cookie Protection. As the name suggests, the feature promises to put the lid on any creepy cookies or third-party tracking tech that might want to track your…Read more...