Gizmodo

In Cixin’s Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, the first in his Remembrance of Earth’s Past series of novels, the truth about the existence of sentient life beyond Earth looms large in the minds of a number of different characters who all have varying takes on what to do about the aliens.Read more...

After the last year, in which Pokémon Cards became scarce and severely overpriced amid the pandemic-era renewed interest in collectibles, the Pokémon Company’s responded to and bounced back from the shortage with a production increase that’s made it much easier to find new sets in stores.Read more...

Dogecoin co-creator Jackson Palmer isn’t on social media much. After nuking his YouTube channel and turning his Twitter account private back in mid-2019, the software engineer hadn’t made a peep on the platforms at all; not even when prices for his meme-y crypto reached record highs earlier this year. That blackout…Read more...

After the FCC held a big spectrum auction earlier this year in which AT&T spent $23 billion to build out its 5G network, the carrier says it will begin deploying 40MHz of its new 80MHz spectrum holdings later this year, as soon as its new C-band is officially available.

A new investigation from Motherboard shows that the anonymous marketing IDs assigned to smartphone users are not nearly as anonymous as they seem.Read more...

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, the Meltman of fascism, is not only a global health threat thanks to his administration’s disastrous handling of the novel coronavirus pandemic, but has run into a few health issues of his own.

On Tuesday, CNN reported that “extreme heat” from California’s searing temperatures could kill “nearly all juvenile chinook salmon” in the Sacramento River. But the potential grim fate of the salmon isn’t just due to climate change—human meddling in California’s rivers is also to blame.Read more...

An astronaut whose people have long since abandoned Earth returns to a home she’s never known, determined to find a solution to their fertility issues. What she finds is that the devastated planet they left behind might be humanity’s only hope—but ensuring their survival will come at a cost.Read more...

An expert committee says heritable genome editing of humans is still too risky and that the World Health Organization should take on a leading role when it comes to regulating this emerging biotechnology.

We’ve learned the hard way that certain toxic mixtures trigger such foreseeable harm that they should never have made it past the drawing board. Medical advice and Lysol. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Facebook. Cops and surveillance toys. In that vein, today we learn what happens when LEGO bricks merge with Glocks:…Read more...

Amazon is in every part of our lives. Many of us use its Echo speakers and its Ring security cameras. It’s our online shopping destination for stocking on household essentials we need, like, yesterday. In many ways, Amazon can be considered a utility for families. But considering the mass of products that Amazon makes…Read more...

Maybe the greatest pilot in Star Wars history just got her own origin story and we were ecstatic to speak with the actress behind the character. On this past week’s episode of Disney+ and Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch, the action took place on Ryloth— homeworld of the Twi’leks—and at the center of it all? One…Read more...

Twitter announced on Wednesday that it is killing its Fleets feature, which I honestly forgot existed. The news will matter to the minuscule gaggle of insufferable Twitter superusers who posted Fleets and literally no one else.

The team behind Space Jam: A New Legacy has pulled off the impossible. They’ve taken two of the most dynamic and entertaining things on the entire planet and made them boring. One of those is LeBron James, an iconic, generational basketball champion, and the other is the Looney Tunes, a timeless, hilarious, adaptable,…Read more...

Estimating calorie counts is an imperfect science, especially when it comes to tracking how many you’ve burned during a given activity. Wrist-based fitness trackers and smartwatches’ estimates for calorie burn can be off by as much as 40-80%. However, engineers from Stanford claim they’ve created an inexpensive,…Read more...

At the end of Titans’ second season, the team ended up splitting ways after losing one of their own, and it wasn’t clear if and how the heroes might come back into one another’s orbit. But when word first broke that the show’s third season would tackle Batman: A Death in the Family by introducing the Red Hood, it…Read more...

Getting dogs to share food with you may not be all that easy, new research suggests. In a series of experiments, scientists found that dogs didn’t reciprocate the act of giving food to helpful humans. Though the results may be due to how the experiment was conducted, it could also suggest food-giving just isn’t one of…Read more...

A team of researchers in South Africa put a bit of rock under a microscope and found the remains of 3.42-billion-year-old life. Those fossils—the squiggly, microscopic remains of organisms that subsisted on methane—broaden the scope of what habitats were suitable for life on Earth during the Archean Eon.Read more...

Facebook gutted its data analytics tool, CrowdTangle, by reassigning dozens of its staff and sidelining its CEO after its data showed that incendiary screeds and misleading content from right-wing pages regularly outperform traditional news outlets on the News Feed, according to the New York Times.

New research finds that not all Americans are equally bear the burden of extreme heat. Poorer communities are at disproportionate risk of searing temperatures, according to a study published in Earth’s Future, the American Geophysical Union’s interdisciplinary journal, on Tuesday.

The development of Android 12 appears to be progressing like clockwork, because just over a month after Google released its second Android 12 beta, Google is releasing the third beta for its next big mobile OS update.

Back in 2016, Facebook began tinkering with plans to launch an internet satellite project that was meant to be a part of Mark Zuckerberg’s oft-repeated plans to “connect the world.” Five years later, it looks like the company’s backed down—with Amazon taking its place.Read more...

Loki’s finale is here, and it’s time for questions to be answered. Will Sylvie and Loki get what they want? What’s hiding out at the end of time? How do you wrap up six episodes of television that feel dramatically satisfying in spite of the larger animus of the cinematic universe around them? The answers, it turns…Read more...

Stretches of beaches in Los Angeles are closed after 17 million gallons of untreated sewage spilled into the ocean following a mechanical failure at a water treatment plant Sunday.Read more...

The young protagonists of Netflix’s Fear Street Part One: 1994 and Fear Street Part Two: 1978 have run for their lives as different ghouls from Shadyside have tried to kill them, they’ve brushed up against different parts of the dark, mystical truth about their supposedly cursed town. Everyone living there grows up…Read more...

It isn’t just the bacteria in our gut that play an important role in keeping us healthy—yeasts and other fungi that live there are also key parts of the equation. But how exactly all these microbes interact with our bodies isn’t well understood. In new research involving mice, researchers found that a healthy immune…Read more...

Razer’s laptop lineup now offers six different systems across various sizes and configs, but its largest and most powerful laptop was past due for a refresh. So today, Razer is updating its 17-inch gaming machine with a bunch of powerful new components—and a slightly tweaked name.Read more...

If you’re one of the thousands of gamers plagued by Joy-Con drift—an issue where the analog sticks on the Nintendo Switch’s controllers register movements even when they’re not being touched—and are frustrated that Nintendo still hasn’t come up with a permanent solution, the fix could be as simple as a tiny…Read more...

On a hot, humid Maryland afternoon in August 2017, Deborah Landau nervously scanned a clearing for signs of life. Clad in tick-proof clothing from head to toe—uncomfortable in this weather but necessary as Landau had twice before contracted Lyme disease—she had been waiting almost a year for this moment.Read more...

One of the most sickening sounds I have ever heard was the crunch when my just-purchased Mamiya 7 fell out of my passenger seat and onto the pavement outside the post office in Arroyo Seco, New Mexico. The blocky camera managed to neatly pirouette like Simone Biles off the seat, but unlike the GOAT of gymnastics, it…Read more...

Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy Watches have been leaked and leaked again—and that’s not counting the several rumors swirling around the devices in recent months. Now, we have another leak that confirms what we’ve heard and seen thus far in the form of an accidental Amazon Canada listing for the Galaxy Watch 4.Read more...

This week’s Loki season finale on Disney+ was full of twists and turns, and a very conspicuous apple. But the biggest surprise of all may have been saved for the very end.Read more...

It’s been a long road, getting from there to here, but Star Trek: Discovery’s third season climaxed with a promotion that’s long been expected—Michael Burnham’s finally in the Captain’s chair. But what does it mean to have taken this long journey for the woman behind the character? Sonequa Martin-Green reveals all in…Read more...

Although the Sega Game Gear seemed perpetually starved for fresh batteries, even the Game Boy had a strong appetite for Duracells and Energizers. Modern portables like the Switch simply need an overnight charge, but to ensure he can continue playing Tetris in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Ian Charnas created a …Read more...

On Saturday, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, tweeted that she’d be appearing on CNN to talk to Fareed Zakaria about the record-breaking heat wave gripping the West. The next day, she announced her segment had been cut. “Bumped, due to billionaire going to space,” she wrote.Read more...

Ahead of its planned IPO in the U.S., Cellebrite faces fresh flames after its phone-cracking tools were yet again used to violate the privacy of journalists.

Get a look at what’s to come on The Flash and Superman & Lois. It’s vampire mania as Jamie Foxx teases his new movie Day Shift’s practical effects, and Code Entertainment sets its sights on... a vampire working with the CIA? Plus, more Escape Room: Tournament of Champions footage. To me, my spoilers!

Sick to death of the misinformation that has been running rampant on its platform for years now, Facebook announced on Tuesday that it plans to roll out new measures aimed at curbing the spread of fake news by allowing group administrators to appoint designated “experts” in their spaces.Read more...

Norwegian Cruise Lines filed what the company calls a “last resort” lawsuit against the state of Florida on Tuesday over an anti-vaccine law praised by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis that bans businesses from requiring customers to be vaccinated. Companies face fines of $5,000 per violation for asking about…Read more...

The artificial intelligence revolution is poised to be more “profound” than the invention of electricity, the internet, and even fire, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who made the comments to BBC media editor Amol Rajan in a podcast interview that first went live on Sunday.Read more...

Cuba’s government has restricted access to social media in the country amid raging protests over economic turmoil stemming from the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.Read more...

From Westview to boldly going, director Matt Shakman—who’s had a hell of a great day already; did you see how many Emmy nominations WandaVision, which he directed all nine episodes of, racked up?—has just been announced as the director of Paramount’s as-yet-untitled new Star Trek film for producer J.J. Abrams. The…Read more...

Writer-director Dash Shaw’s Cryptozoo—featuring animation direction by Jane Samborski—explores the limits of personal responsibility and the importance of stepping back to consider the big picture from time to time, especially one’s own ever-shifting place within it. io9 got to view the film early at Sundance, but now…Read more...

IMAX and Gofobo have announced a special fan screening, promising a first-come, first-served “full house” event. It’s for the world premiere of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune—not the movie, mind you, but its newest trailer. Guess the pandemic’s over now?

Manatees, the gentle giants of the seas, are perishing in unprecedented numbers.Read more...

While much of the fuss around Disney’s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Studios (née Fox) was about which Marvel characters might finally make their debuts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, here’s something else people should have expected to see more immediately from the acquisition: somewhat cringe-worthy chunks of…Read more...

After causing international mayhem, a notorious cybercrime group appears to have disappeared.Read more...

Sorry, iPhone users. Your wallets are about to take a huge hit.Read more...

Thousands of 3-inch fish splashed down into about 200 high-altitude lakes in Utah over the past week, as the state’s wildlife department restocked its water bodies by plane. The work is done by plane because the lakes are inaccessible by ground transit, especially when carrying so many fish in hundreds of pounds of…Read more...

Unlike many other platforms, Reddit’s earned a reputation for embracing the countless weird and wacky bots its users have created to run wild on the platform. And while some of these bots have gone to that great Github in the sky, reports that two beloved video-downloader bots were getting the axe this week apparently…Read more...