Gizmodo

With the support of the European Space Agency, German aerospace company MT Aerospace has developed a unique design for a small-scale rocket fuel tank made of a carbon-fiber reinforced plastic. The tank can hold liquid hydrogen and oxygen without leaking and without the use of a metal liner.

Queen Elizabeth has endorsed reducing plastic pollution at Buckingham Palace, but it turns out the monarchy may not be taking a climate-friendly turn just yet. On Wednesday, the Guardian published a scathing report detailing how the Queen spent months quietly lobbying Scottish ministers to exempt her private land from…Read more...

Just a day after Intel announced big plans to help the company regain its authority in chip production, Taiwan has now given the greenlight to TSMC to begin construction on the company’s most sophisticated chip plant yet.Read more...

Star Wars’ High Republic era is meant to be defined by the apex of institutions that we have, for most of Star Wars’ recent storytelling (cinematic or otherwise), seen in great decline. The Skywalker Saga laid the frayed Republic low twice, and the Jedi Order was all but stamped out, with only the hints of its return…Read more...

A former eBay security manager has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after helping to orchestrate a batshit insane plot to terrorize a Massachusetts couple who occasionally criticized the company in their newsletter.

Although Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings saga makes many tweaks in bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s world to the big screen, it is by and large a faithful adaptation. But pressure from the studio in one weird way would’ve taken it down a very different path: a bit of halfling havoc.

DNA analysis confirms that an eel-like creature pulled from a Florida canal two years ago is a caecilian, otherwise known as the “penis snake.” The same canal has since yielded several other specimens, leading to concerns that the non-native amphibian has taken root in the United States.

Astrophysicists have detected light coming from the far side of a black hole, using telescopes to see physics predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity but not yet directly observed. The new findings affirmed ideas about how black holes warp light.

We’ve been enamored with Once and Future’s modern twist on Arthurian fantasy ever since it kicked off and gave us a sweeping tale of magic, terror, and shitty nationalists being thwarted by grandmas with machine guns. But now the series is heading into a new chapter that’s more mystical and dangerous than ever, and…Read more...

Though a lot of movie theaters are back to full function, the safer option for entertainment remains streaming, and fans who choose to stay home and take advantage are constantly rewarded with tons of new content. At the start of each month, most streamers—Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Disney+, and HBO Max—do a little…Read more...

I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend in how people are talking about covid-19. As vaccines have become widely available in the U.S., people are treating the unvaccinated with scorn and anger. Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey even went so far as to say “It’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks” for the new…Read more...

Julian Assange’s long, contentious relationship with Ecuador is officially over: According to Associated Press, the nation has chosen to revoke his citizenship effective immediately.

Though Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and Anansi Boys novels feature some key bits of crossover, Amazon’s upcoming Anansi Boys series is set to reintroduce the world to the trickster god Mr. Nancy. It will also be wholly independent of the character’s depiction in Starz’s American Gods adaptation. Beloved as Orlando…Read more...

Joe Biden might want to consider re-backpedaling after backpedaling his accusation that social media companies [Facebook] are “killing people” by spreading vaccine conspiracies and bunk. A new study suggests that Facebook’s news consumers are inordinately unwilling to get the covid-19 vaccine.

Public research labs in France are temporarily halting their work into prions, after at least two employees are believed to have contracted a rare but universally fatal prion brain disease. One woman has since died, almost certainly after having been exposed during a lab accident in 2010, while the second is…Read more...

One of the web’s most controversial cybersecurity projects is being brought back to life next week. PunkSpider—essentially a tool that crawls the internet to create a searchable database of hackable sites across the web—is being resurfaced at next week’s Defcon cybersecurity conference, WIRED reports. This is the…Read more...

Now that Black Widow has landed after what’s felt like a zillion years of delays, Marvel has turned its eye back the next movie in its vast plans, Shang-Chi, with a brief new teaser—one that sets the stage for the titular superhero to confront his past and his father in a battle for their family’s legacy.

The West’s megadrought has produced no shortage of terrible stories. Drought conditions have enveloped 90% of the region, leading to record low water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest reservoirs in the U.S., as well as countless other smaller water systems throughout the region.Read more...

Of all the portable music players Apple has released over the past 20 years, the original iPod shuffle remains my favorite. It wasn’t my first iPod, and 16 years after its debut I’ve owned countless iterations of the iPhone, but I loved the shuffle for its basic design and functionality, not in spite of them.Read more...

Ancient rocks from northwestern Canada have been found to contain structures consistent with sea sponges. At 890 million years old, they could be the oldest known animal fossils on Earth.

For almost three decades, animated Arthur Read and his fellow anthropomorphic animals have been encouraging young viewers to cultivate a deep love of reading books—not to mention inspiring memes that resonate with multiple generations of people who grew up watching PBS’s Arthur series. Though the show will always be a…Read more...

In a first, Oregon State University says its bipedal robot Cassie managed to go from the couch to a 5K in 53 minutes. It’s an impressive feat of machine learning and robotics engineering, but as far as 5Ks go, I wouldn’t worry about having to outrun killer humanoid robots just yet.Read more...

Earlier this spring, Google announced the development of a new safety section coming to the Play Store next year, and today Google is now following up with more details on the kind of information apps will be required to provide including new mandatory privacy policies.Read more...

Star Wars. Indiana Jones. RoboCop. Jurassic Park. These films and franchises will live forever, and they attained those heights with a little help from Phil Tippett—one of the most legendary visual effects artists in Hollywood history. He’s especially known for his work with stop-motion animation and now, he’s…Read more...

Linda Blair says she’s not been asked to return yet for the new Exorcist trilogy. Hear a snippet from The Green Knight’s soundtrack. Plus, what’s to come when Supergirl and Stargirl return. Spoilers, away!

As a climate reporter, I live and breathe bad news. I frequently wake up and immediately Google things like “flood deaths” or “wildfire damage.” But this week, something good happened. A24, the company behind films like Uncut Gems and Moonlight, won the rights to adapt Octavia Butler’s science fiction novel Parable of…Read more...

A whistleblower who leaked top secret information about America’s drone warfare program has been sentenced to 45 months in federal prison.Read more...

That’s obviously a bold claim to make about American Horror Story, a series known for marketing each new season as creepily and, often, cryptically as possible. (That campaign for AHS: Cult involving holes—so many holes—must’ve awakened countless latent cases of trypophobia.) But with this new teaser for Double FeatureRead more...

This year’s refreshed iPad Pros have powerful new processors that separate them from the predecessors, but they also have an underrated new video-calling feature that frees you from your desk.Read more...

Masters of the Universe: Revelation received critical acclaim ahead of its launch on Netflix late last week, but the animated continuation of Eternia’s finest has been faced with review-bombing and anger on social media thanks to a bad-faith interpretation of what the show’s doing that showrunner Kevin Smith has…Read more...

As part of a slew of ongoing efforts to make Instagram less of a cesspool of awful content for awful people, the company announced a slew of new changes for accounts belonging to the teen and tweenage set meant to keep them safer on the platform.Read more...

The Republican goons in the Arizona Senate backing the farce of a “recount” of the 2020 election results is pressing local election officials for access to even more data, the Associated Press reports. Yet they might not be able to back up their threats, and some key figures behind the audit appear to be getting cold…Read more...

The sole copy of the Wu-Tang album previously owned by convicted edgelord Martin Shkreli has moved on to a better place, hopefully. The Department of Justice announced today that the federal government has sold the album to an unknown buyer for an unknown price. In 2018, RZA said that he wanted to be that buyer.

Buying a new graphics card is already hard enough, but for folks living in a handful of states, ordering pre-built systems from some PC makers just got a lot more difficult due to newly implemented energy regulations.Read more...

Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden has a new blog on Substack and, naturally, he has some opinions about the recent NSO Group controversy: namely, that people who bankroll companies like it should see jail time.Read more...

Well, apparently this is Hot Dome Summer.Read more...

Author Xiran Jay Zhao makes their debut with Iron Widow, the tale of a teenage girl who overcomes a patriarchal society—one that also involves giant robots fighting mecha aliens—to avenge her sister’s death and eventually become China’s first female emperor. io9 has an exclusive look at the first chapter, which also…Read more...

A new project seeks to uncover evidence of aliens, not by gazing upon distant star systems but by finding traces of their technologies inside our solar system—and even on Earth.

Finally, a story about deepfakes that’s free from the moral squishiness and consent issues that plague the people creating them. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for Lucasfilm confirmed that the company had hired a popular deepfake creator as a “senior facial capture artist” under the company’s computer graphics subsidiary,…Read more...

The scientists who developed one of the first widely available vaccines against covid-19 are now setting their sights on a long-time microscopic foe: the plague. This week, researchers at the University of Oxford in the UK announced the start of a Phase I clinical trial testing out a potential vaccine for the plague.…Read more...

Kevin Smith’s sequel to the classic He-Man and the Masters of the Universe ‘80s cartoon is an excellent (and frequently shocking) show, and Bear McCreary is part of the reason why. The composer, who’s scored The Walking Dead, Battlestar Galactica, and so much more, was a massive MotU fan long, long before he worked on…Read more...

Eighty-six large forest fires are burning across 12 states. Among the trees they’re torching are ones being used as carbon credits, showing the danger of relying on forests to offset emissions elsewhere.Read more...

I was chatting with a friend the other day whose parents have refused to get the covid-19 vaccine. No amount of news articles, cajoling, carrots, or sticks could convince them otherwise.

DC’s big push into the serialized podcast format is kicking off, of course, with Batman—and it’s bringing some big talent along for the ride. But its excellent casting for the Dark Knight himself now has us slightly sad that it’s not for another medium.

The first time I went to Disneyland, I was 32 years old. Jungle Cruise is a ride that many theme park lovers encourage first-timers to visit, so I waited in line for 45 minutes and was extremely underwhelmed. Thank goodness the new movie, starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Édgar Ramírez, Jack Whitehall, Jesse…Read more...

A year ago, Sony introduced the ZV-1: a digital camera with video-focused features and a streamlined interface for aspiring YouTube stars to easily churn out professional-looking videos. Today the company announced a follow-up, the Alpha ZV-E10, which still makes shooting video easy, but allows more experienced…Read more...

Though the first trailer for A24's Lamb—from director Valdimar Jóhannsson—at first seems like it’s about to tell you a story about a couple of lamb-herding farmers living quiet lives in the mountains, it quickly takes a dark turn that evokes both Sweet Tooth and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. There’s been something...strange…Read more...

The CDC is set to recommend mask-wearing for people vaccinated against covid-19, at least some of the time, according to reports from the New York Times and CNN. The change in guidance, which will reportedly happen today, is due to growing concerns over the more transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus. At this…Read more...

Dropbox debuted in 2008, and the cloud storage and syncing service has added a slew of features since then. But because the app is usually running in the background of your device, you might not have noticed some of the new tools you can use. Here are a few of our favorites.Read more...

The Tokyo Olympics are shaping up to be the disaster that its many critics have long predicted, and they will nonetheless go on, despite a record surge in covid-19 cases. On Tuesday, the local government reported an all-time one-day high of 2,848 new cases in the city. Amongst infected people, 82 are reported…Read more...