Gizmodo

Facebook has royally screwed up its response to political misinformation, conspiracy theories, and organized manipulation campaigns in the U.S.—where it’s based. Outside the West, the company has long been a sort of absentee landlord that ignores the spread of propaganda, state-backed armies of trolls, and incitement…Read more...

We already know that Werner Herzog enjoys documentaries on adventurous and unusual topics—he’s directed several of them, including Grizzly Man and Into the Inferno. His newest project in that realm is a family affair (his son, Rudolph, will direct) that thematically ties into his other recent works focused on outer…Read more...

Only in a Funko Pop article can you write about Dune, Up, Star Wars, and Pizza Rat and it all makes perfect sense.Read more...

While I think we can all agree that every app on our phone is probably an invasive little shit, I’d argue that weather apps deserve their own little corner in hell. We’ve seen weather apps sign folks up for services without their say-so, sneakily get location data from users who deliberately turned that function off,…Read more...

Well, beyond, like, y’know. The Reign of Terror. But it seems like Netflix’s new French-language alt-history series has something supernatural going on in the heart of France’s most tumultuous period.

Late last month, Fitbit threw a Hail Mary—and pulled it off—when the wearables company unveiled its fall lineup. At the center of was a new Sense smartwatch, which among other snazzy features has the ability to take electrocardiogram readings to monitor for atrial fibrillation—pending clearance from the U.S. Food and…Read more...

PepsiCo will bring into production a drink to help people ease stress and sleep better during These Uncertain Times, the company announced today. They’ve decided to name this “enhanced water beverage” Driftwell.

While Apple gears up to announce of bunch of new stuff tomorrow, Google has a launch event of its own scheduled for the end of September.Read more...

In a major announcement, a team of scientists is claiming to have detected trace amounts of phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. It’s a bizarre and potentially monumental finding, as living organisms are the only known source of this stinky, toxic gas.

As the race to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus that causes covid-19 continues, a crucial question is on the horizon: Should a successful vaccine be made mandatory for children entering school? In a new paper out Monday, a group of experts argue that it’s still too early to answer the question definitively, but…Read more...

Netflix’s Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous opens on a kid running for his life. He watches his guide get eaten by velociraptors before he himself is swallowed by a T-Rex. It turns out it was just a VR video game, but that kind of represents the whole series: Children being “safely” traumatized.Read more...

Sometimes it’s the small sprinkles of strangeness that stand out the most. If you had told me several years ago that 2020 would bring daily disasters of incomprehensible consequence, I probably would have believed you, because we’ve been trending in that direction for a while now. The idea of an esports organization…Read more...

California isn’t equipped to handle the emerging hotter, drier climate. That includes its electric grid.Read more...

Anyone who has watched The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Netflix’s Da 5 Bloods, or HBO’s current hit Lovecraft Country can tell Jonathan Majors is a star. Now, Majors might set off to the stars, as the villain in an upcoming Marvel Studios movie.Read more...

There’s a good chance that Apple will drop its next-gen Series 6 smartwatch during the company’s Tuesday event. We already know a lot of what’s coming to the Apple Watch with this fall’s watchOS 7 software upgrade, but a few things are still a mystery. The most whispered about rumor is that while there may not be a…Read more...

For a lot of folks, records (in the year of our dark lord 2020) are one of those things you either “get” or just don’t. While its resurgence has spawned its fair share of hate-fueled rants asking why we’re falling for the greatest scam ever played on us at the hands of the music industry, there’s seemingly (no…Read more...

Samsung 1TB T5 Portable SSD | $160 | B&H PhotoRead more...

By framing H.P. Lovecraft’s own white supremacist beliefs as the ultimate horror plaguing its heroes, Lovecraft Country’s given itself a way of focusing on scares that are more cerebral and emotional than the vicious, tentacled monsters the author popularized in his stories. But with “Strange Case,” the show spends…Read more...

There have been some pretty freaky things happening in the Arctic this year, with historic levels of ice melt, absurdly high temperatures, and wildfires in an area that’s meant to be the definition of cold. New research by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) shows that we shouldn’t just…Read more...

After weeks of rumors, Nvidia announced last night that it was ready to plop down $40 billion to acquire Arm Limited, better known as that company that designs Arm architecture behind CPUs in practically every gadget you use on a day-to-day basis.Read more...

One of the internet’s largest hub of Qanon conspiracy theorists, QMap, abruptly went dark this week after a fact-checking group uncovered the identity of the developer behind it, Bloomberg reported Friday.

The international game of chicken between China and the Trump administration over TikTok is starting to feel like an episode of “The Bachelor” at this point, with suitors like Microsoft, Twitter, and Walmart competing for the app’s U.S. assets in the face of a possible ban. Apparently, though, China would rather…Read more...

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon conspiracy theorist endorsed by Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for Congress in Georgia’s 14th district, was already more than heavily favored to win. Now it’s a virtual guarantee that she’ll walk into Congress next year with the dropout of her Democratic opponent in the race.

Reader, if I may, can I bend your ear for a moment?

Amazon Japan will pay around 1,400 suppliers a collective 2 billion yen, or about $18.85 million, for pushing the costs of discounts onto suppliers, the Japan Times reported yesterday. If you’re excited that Amazon had to cough up a couple million, so is Amazon, which arguably got off very easy.

Death is one of the few things that unites everyone. Whether we fear it for ourselves or for our loved ones, odds are you think about death every day. That’s why it’s such a powerful tool in storytelling. The death, or potential death, of a character can instantly put everyone on the same emotional level. It’s…Read more...

By Thursday evening, more than 10 percent of Oregon’s 4.2 million residents were under an evacuation order, according to state estimates. Uncontained wildfires fueled by sustained global heating and extreme winds have burnt enormous swaths of land to a crisp, leaving the state’s air quality on par with some of the…Read more...

Earlier today, Apple posted an update to its guidelines for the App Store including new language regarding game streaming that makes it appear as if game streaming services are technically allowed. However, in practice that doesn’t seem to be true.Read more...

For a platform that likes to keep reminding us over and over and over again that it prizes our individual privacy, Facebook’s done a pretty piss-poor job of actually following through. Over the past few months, we’ve seen the company purposefully prevent any of us from opting out of this sort of data-mining machine,…Read more...

Three executives from the mining company that detonated a 46,000-year-old Indigenous Australian heritage site to expand an iron ore mine—and later insisted that it did nothing wrong—are leaving the company.

New research, in which empirical data failed to jibe with theoretical calculations, shows just how much physicists still have to learn about dark matter.

Lovecraft Country’s veteran hero, Atticus Freeman, barely has time to become re-acclimated to his surroundings after a tour in the Korean War before he’s thrust on a quest into the magical wilds of New England, where his father has been captured by a cult of white supremacists.Read more...

A group of scientists is questioning the only available study so far supporting a controversial vaccine candidate for the coronavirus that causes covid-19, which is being developed by the Russian government. The group is claiming to have found “potential data inconsistencies” that make some of the findings highly…Read more...

Multi-factor authentication is one of the easiest ways to protect your accounts from unauthorized access or bad actors, but the security feature was noticeably missing on some devices in one of the most popular videoconferencing apps on the planet—and that’s a big problem.Read more...

The climate crisis is making already dangerous weather worse. That means it’s more important than ever to listen to evacuation orders and get out of harm’s way whether its catastrophic fires or souped up hurricanes. But new findings suggest that when politicians and media personalities deny that fact, the effects can…Read more...

We may never understand why Donald Trump has decided to force the sale of TikTok’s US assets. More troublingly, his remarks on the matter, and its seemingly arbitrary deadline, indicate he may fully grasp the concepts of cause and effect, or of linear time.Read more...

Ellen Lord, the top official at the Pentagon in charge of acquiring new technology, appeared on a virtual panel Thursday to discuss the threat posed to the U.S. by small drones made by Chinese companies like DJI. And while it might seem self-evident to many people within the national security establishment that a…Read more...

Wonder Woman 1984 won’t be flying into theaters anytime soon. Warner Bros. has announced that the latest DC superhero flick has been delayed again, this time set to come out in late December.Read more...

After Sen. Ed Markey won his primary in Massachusetts earlier this month, he had a message: “The age of incrementalism is over.”Read more...

The moment I laid my eyes on a leaked render of the Oppo Watch, I muttered, “Oh god. Not another Apple Watch clone.”Read more...

Researchers have spotted physical abnormalities associated with a lack of genetic diversity in cougars living in the Santa Monica Mountains of southern California, including kinked tails and, in one male, only one descended testicle.Read more...

When Samsung released the original Galaxy Fold last year, other companies were fast to follow suit. Motorola followed up quickly with its rebooted Razr, while Microsoft took a little longer to show off its folding Duo phone. Now, it seems Apple might be tinkering with making a foldable iPhone.Read more...

When Denis Villeneuve was asked to direct an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, he had two requirements. One was that he wanted to divide the book into two movies—the other was that he wanted it to be as real as possible.

What does Jon Hamm’s penis have to do with internet freedom and the future of memes? Quite a lot, believe it or not, following a new court ruling in New York.

“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” - Donald Trump, November 6, 2012.Read more...

If you own a Vizio SmartCast TV, you’ll now be able to access Apple TV+ and Apple TV channels. You may even be able to snag a couple of months of Apple’s streaming service for free—which is probably about what users are willing to pay for it right now anyway.Read more...

It’s not exactly a secret that Donald Trump’s race-baiting, fascistic administration has turned a blind eye to violence committed by extreme far-righters. Trump said there were “very fine people” among the ranks of the neo-Nazis behind a deadly march in Charlottesville in 2017, encourages bigoted conspiracy theories…Read more...

The Gorillaz obviously have a penchant for pop culture. The fact that the band’s members primarily like to be seen as animated characters should have tipped that off. In their latest music video, though, things go a step further. Well, maybe more than one step.Read more...

The past 50 years have been a nightmare for wildlife. Globally, the recorded population sizes of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians decreased by an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016, the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) 13th annual Living Planet Report report shows. The widespread decline in species’…Read more...

Ken Walker is a taxidermist so gifted that others in his field speak of his talents with reverence: “Ken has magic in his hands.” But what happens when this master of his craft decides to incorporate his oddball obsession with Bigfoot into his latest project? Documentary Big Fur gives us a front-row seat.Read more...