Gizmodo

As long as devices with smudge-magnet screens have existed, so have styluses to interact with them. But even the Apple Pencil is an ugly white plastic stick that’s more about function than form. Accessory maker Adonit has brought the aesthetics of a fine writing instrument like a Montblanc pen to a stylus, its new …Read more...

Welcome back to Gaming Shelf, io9's column all about board games and tabletop roleplaying games. This week, everything changes when the fire nation rolls for initiative, Magic: The Gathering celebrates Black History Month, and Games Workshop figures out another way to ease you into the worlds of Warhammer.

It can be difficult to distinguish a flesh-and-blood human’s face from one generated by artificial intelligence. (Telltale signs are misshapen eyes under spectacles, non-dermatological blemishes on the skin, and hair that looks as if it’s been thatched atop the head, though your experience may differ). But what about…Read more...

An analysis of coelacanth DNA suggests its genome has experienced some significant changes in recent evolutionary history, potentially dispelling the popular image of these iconic fish as being “living fossils.”

This week, group of economists released an analysis that attempts to answer how much the average American drives their electric vehicle. While it shows people drove electric cars fewer miles than gas-powered ones, the results might not reflect the rapidly changing electric vehicle landscape.Read more...

GameStop’s stock has fallen back to something like a reasonable price and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy claims he lost about $700,000, but the future of meme stocks is not yet written. And at least one New York-based quantitative fund seems to think there’s still a glimmer of gold to be found in the brain trust…Read more...

As we continue to transition from LTE to 5G, Qualcomm just announced the world’s first 5G modem capable of reaching data speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second.Read more...

Have you heard? The old Myspace is back. Sort of.

Few 1-year-olds are as intrepid explorers as NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter. The space probe is already 138 million miles from Earth and is about to take baby’s first trip behind the Sun.Read more...

If you’re using a different password for all the sites and apps you’re signed up for (and you really should), there are only so many combinations of letters and numbers you can hold in your head at once. The good news is there are plenty of tools out there to remember your passwords and secure them for you, and we’ve…Read more...

If you’ve ever wished your Echo device was a control panel, well, good news: Amazon’s Lab126 hardware division is purportedly designing a wall-mounted Echo that can control your smart home and media, as well as host video chats.Read more...

As Apple prepares to launch its anti-tracking update for iOS, Facebook and other companies that have built their business on invading users’ privacy are nervous about the future. But there’s always a new vulnerability waiting to be discovered. For instance, researchers now claim that a website’s favicon can be used to…Read more...

Alexander Freed’s Alphabet Squadron trilogy has given us a window into the complex political landscape left behind after Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, through the lens of damaged fighter pilot veterans of the galactic civil war. Now things are coming to a head in its last chapter, and the Imperial Remnant is making a…Read more...

We can’t go to bars or restaurants, but for a romantic night out during the pandemic, consider laying out a picnic blanket in a park to count the stars. As an added bonus, your little date could help see if covid-19 lockdowns have impacted light pollution.Read more...

Scientists assembled by the World Health Organization to investigate the origins of the covid-19 pandemic have announced their early findings. They concluded that the first known cases traced to a seafood market in Wuhan, China in December 2019 likely don’t represent the original source of the outbreak. At the same…Read more...

While Google typically waits until much later in the spring to officially show off new updates and features, some leaked screenshots may have just given us an early look at changes coming to Android 12.Read more...

... Huh.

Usually, a city government handles things like traffic and mass transit, public works like roads and sewers, and emergency services. In the first trailer for the dark romantic comedy Happily—which we’re appropriately happy to debut on io9—apparently, the city also makes sure that couples aren’t too much in love.

Instead of gasoline and diesel, it might one day be possible to just unload a cartridge of gray, goopy paste into the fuel tank of your e-scooter, motorcycle, or even potentially your car. At least, that’s what researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Technology and Advanced Materials (IFAM) are…Read more...

Last week, the House voted to strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments in large part because of what the new Georgia congresswoman posted on social media.

Mars is about to receive its next visitor from Earth—the Mars Hope probe. It has the makings of a historic day, as the United Arab Emirates seeks to become just the fifth country to reach the Red Planet. You can watch the action live right here.

Donald Trump is a real jack of all noxious trades. It turns out that as he was rolling back environmental policies and overseeing an endless stream of noxious climate misinformation as president, one of our dear former leader’s hotels has also been ignoring clean water protections. A multi-faceted pollution king!

What was the internet like in the 1970s? It was an incredibly small community of university researchers, government employees, military contractors, and more than a few spies. But those people all built and tinkered with the earliest technologies to create something that would transform the lives of everyone reading…Read more...

Peter Dinklage has signed up for the next animated adventure from Wolfwalkers’ Will Collins. Kevin Smith reacts to the soundtrack for Masters of the Universe: Revelations. Plus, Riverdale continues to Riverdale all over the place in a new glimpse at its timeskip episode. Spoilers now!

Quip would like to upgrade your mouthwash experience. But do you need to?

Anker Soundcore Bluetooth Speaker | $22 | Amazon

Fire 7 Tablet | $40 | Amazon

CNN is dropping its paywall on live video so that anyone with an internet connection can watch the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump this week in the U.S. Senate. Make that the second impeachment trial, if we want to be precise.

CD Projekt Red is the latest game company to be hit by a cyber attack. The company released a statement on Twitter this morning saying an “unidentified actor” has hacked some of its systems, and included a a screenshot of the ransom note. Accessed data includes source code for some of the studio’s games, alongside…Read more...

The U.S. Department of Justice has dropped its Trump-era lawsuit against California enacting its own net neutrality rules.

Authorities in Oldsmar, Fla., are investigating after someone hijacked the computer system at the city’s water treatment facility and tried to drive up the water’s sodium hydroxide content to poisonous levels. The targeted plant is the primary source of drinking water for the city’s businesses and its 15,000…Read more...

The family of a 20-year old man who took his own life over the summer after he misread his investment balance on Robinhood on Monday filed a lawsuit against the brokerage app.Read more...

A new update to Raspberry Pi OS, previously known as Raspbian, has put open-source fans on edge. Why? The new OS is pinging Microsoft servers every time the user updates their apps or the OS itself.Read more...

Fitbit already gives you the ability to monitor your heart health, stress, and blood oxygen levels on some of its watches. Now the company is eyeing blood glucose-monitoring with a new feature in the Fitbit app.Read more...

At long last, Amazon has a unionization vote on its hands, the first and only since 2014. Today, 5,800 Alabama warehouse workers have been sent mail-in ballots and can begin voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). If they vote in favor, RWDSU will be the first union to gain…Read more...

Thanks to companies like Boston Dynamics, we now have robots that can climb stairs, run parkour, and even perform backflips. But dragging robots out of the uncanny valley and making automatons indistinguishable from humans is going to be an infinitely more challenging feat if Cleo, a robot engineered with human-like …Read more...

An observatory in northern Chile has captured a stunning view of Messier 83, also known as the Spiral of the Southern Pinwheel.

Shocker! The massive joint federal-state-local surveillance apparatus that supposedly keeps the nation safe from terrorism shrugged and gave up before the Jan 6. riots at the Capitol, which killed five people and sparked a national crisis.

OnePlus phone cameras simply can’t compare to what you get on Apple and Samsung phones, but according to a new leak, help might be on the way. The company is reportedly partnering with Hasselblad on the upcoming OnePlus 9 Pro.

My ex was the first person to tell me about Q. This was near the end of 2016, and we were in the beginning stages of our relationship. I took it as us having the same, passive interest in conspiracy theories. The kind of interest where you go, “LOL sounds like a Dan Brown novel!” I laughed it off, but he dug deeper…Read more...

A popular app has been removed from Google Play after it was discovered to have delivered trojanized malware onto millions of users’ phones via an update.Read more...

For years, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories found a welcome home on Facebook. The social network saw the issue as being about free speech and the anti-vaxxer groups it hosted as being about as dangerous as flat-Earthers. But now that getting accurate vaccine information to the public is a matter of existential…Read more...

If you follow the updates on various social platforms for long enough, you start to notice a particular pattern: a product designed for socializing mutating into an attention trap geared towards shopping. We’ve seen it with Instagram. We’ve seen it with Pinterest and Snapchat. So it was only a matter of time before…Read more...

When Google launched its cloud gaming service, Stadia, back in November 2019, we were impressed by the concept but the execution was lacking. Close to a year and a half after its debut, Stadia has slowly gained the features Google boasted about initially, bringing it closer to the service it has the potential to be.…Read more...

A new study out Monday is the latest to suggest that climate change is already making people’s lives worse, this time for those allergic to pollen. The findings indicate show pollen season in North America has gotten measurably longer and that pollen has become more plentiful over the past three decades, due in part…Read more...

The Aurora 7 laptop seems lifted straight from the imagination of a Hollywood prop builder working on a bad hacker flick. But with seven foldout screens, there’s little chance anyone could actually use this beast on their laps. It’s a mobile transforming workstation for those who need more screen real estate than they…Read more...

Apple’s giving users another good reason to take its latest public beta for a test drive.

The overwhelming economic consensus is that coal is out, renewables are in. Yet one company, associated with the Navajo Nation, doesn’t seem to have gotten the message—and may be weighing the tribe down with more coal baggage as the rest of the country moves on.Read more...

Clubhouse, the voice-only chat app that everyone will not stop talking about, appears to be muzzled in China. This morning, journalist and internet freedom advocate Michael Anti tweeted that Clubhouse is “now blocked in most cities in China.” The Chinese censorship watchdog group and workaround builder Greatfire.org …Read more...

Folks with tiny hands have been clamoring for a smaller smartphone for years, and in 2020, Apple finally delivered with the iPhone 12 Mini. Except it looks like Apple might stop manufacturing its littlest phone due to less-than-stellar sales.Read more...