Gizmodo

Like many Americans, I’m processing some unfamiliar emotions today, but I believe that I’m genuinely thrilled about the new White House website. The site allows visitors to toggle font sizes. It includes an Easter Egg in the HTML with a job posting for coders. And, perhaps most thrillingly, it supports dark mode.

The recent hotfire test of NASA’s next-gen megarocket was supposed to go for eight minutes, but it lasted just 67 seconds. The space agency has an explanation for the premature shutdown, saying everything’s swell, but a second test remains a distinct possibility.Read more...

K’Nex has been around for less than 30 years but has already become the building toy of choice for elaborate creations that are impossible to build with Lego. Tyler Bower just demonstrated the potential with a 7.5-foot-tall functional pinball machine that even keeps score.Read more...

Nothing on the hills seems to be alive, so the rocky terrain of Mars will be filled with the sounds of solitude when the NASA’s Perseverance rover lands in Jezero Crater next month. One of the rover’s many tasks will be listening to the Martian environment with microphones—the first effort at acoustic data collection…Read more...

President Joe Biden took office on Wednesday, saying he would get right to work on “tackling the crises we face,” including the climate crisis.

The Department of Homeland Security is being slammed with a new lawsuit after spending just over a year failing to respond to repeated attempts at investigating its long-term data hoovering practices.Read more...

Mere days before Donald Trump’s helicopter shrank into the skies, we got a promising early indication that telecom companies’ hog-wild joyride under Trump’s FCC is coming to an end. Last week, Charter Communications, the company behind Spectrum, withdrew its petition to impose data caps: basically its attempt to…Read more...

When exposed to catnip or silver vine, cats engage in some fairly predictable behaviors, such as licking and chewing the leaves, rubbing their heads and faces against the plants, and rolling on the ground. Cats get a real kick out of these plants, but surprising new research points to a more practical purpose than…Read more...

Put those next-generation controllers to good use on your streaming device.Read more...

I’ve got my eyes on the biggest news of the day. That’s right: the fate of Pablo Escobar’s hippos.Read more...

After years of repeated rumors and rumblings, the future of LG’s smartphone division has come under speculation again as LG CEO Kwon Bong-Seok reportedly sent a message to staff on Wednesday suggesting that there could be major changes coming soon.Read more...

Drug overdose deaths caused by methamphetamine use in the U.S. have increased sharply over the past decade, according to a new government report released Wednesday. Since 2011, the report found, annual rates of methamphetamine overdose deaths have risen across every demographic group in America and are especially high…Read more...

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In different ways, some of Marvel’s superheroes like Captain America and the Punisher, and Lucasfilm’s infamous Galactic Empire, have all been in the news as of late for reasons that have little to do with the stories we’re used to seeing them in. Instead, they’ve become part of the odd and often irresponsible way…Read more...

Unless you grew up in a time after cameraphones arrived, there’s a very good chance your first digital camera was a weird Game Boy accessory. The Game Boy Camera was definitely my first digital snapper, and while its technical capabilities were extremely limited, it still managed to excel at other things, like making…Read more...

Early on into our prep for all the television our readers might like to watch in 2021, we realized there was a lot. Like, a lot a lot. That’s not even accounting for the fact that io9 typically only covers sci-fi, fantasy, and horror creations. So we broke up our recommendations into three parts; yesterday was focused…Read more...

Velcro is great when you need to open stuff fast or with ease, but Velcro is not so great when you’re trying to discreetly open your shoulder bag to grab your headphones. Researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands have come up with a new design for Velcro, inspired by mushrooms, that doesn’t shred…Read more...

The Eufy RoboVac G30 Hybrid vacuum/mop is, prima facie, a clear upgrade over the Roomba 650 that raptly held my attention when I bought it five years ago. But while the Eufy might do a lot more for a great price, you don’t really want a vacuum that just does more. You want one that also does it all really well.…Read more...

Another Guardian of the Galaxy is confirmed for Thor: Love and Thunder. She-Hulk’s cast expands. There’s good news for more Snowpiercer. Plus, what’s to come on The Expanse, and get a new look at Netflix’s Winx Club reboot. Spoilers now!

Donald Trump’s presidency is taking its last shallow, ragged breaths, with President-elect Joe Biden set to take office today—the best efforts of Trump’s incompetent campaign legal team and the disastrously failed insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6 in vain. What’s a Trump supporter to do?

The latest WhatsApp privacy kerfuffle once again has us wondering whether it’s a good idea to be giving so much of our data to a company with Facebook’s track record.

Anker Nebula Mars II Pro Portable Projector | $460 | Amazon

Casio’s line of Baby-G watches are great. Know how to make the timepieces even better? Add Pikachu, that’s how.

President Donald Trump issued a full pardon for former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski early Wednesday, one of 143 people who received pardons and commutations during Trump’s last 12 hours in office.

Joe Biden will become the 46th President of the United States at noon on Wednesday, finally bringing the Trump era to a close. And if you’re looking for an easy way to watch the inauguration streaming live on YouTube, Facebook, and more, we’ve got you covered.

Roughly a month after being hit with a pretty damning antitrust suit led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Google issued its response on Sunday via a public blog post tackling some of the more “misleading” allegations.Read more...

Back in 2018, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company released a bunch of limited edition flame-throwing devices as a bizarre promotional gimmick for the tunnel-digging startup. Officially dubbed “Not A Flamethrower” on the company’s own website, the devices could not, as CNN pointed out at the time, “spew flames long…Read more...

For anyone hoping a decentralized web is in our immediate future — anyone who has, say, recently observed the measurable ways in which big tech oligarchs play an active role in shaping our democracy, perhaps — there’s good news: On Tuesday, privacy-focused browser Brave released an update that makes it the first to…Read more...

Militia members are tapping at least one revenue stream through Amazon’s charity partnership program, Amazon Smile. As of Tuesday evening, Amazon shoppers can choose to donate 0.5% of their purchase costs to the Indiana chapter of the armed anti-government group Oath Keepers, one member of which was just charged with…Read more...

SolarWinds: it’s the hack that keeps on growing. On Monday, researchers announced the discovery of yet another malware strain used by foreign hackers to infiltrate a wide milieu of American government agencies and companies.Read more...

Asus is no stranger when it comes to putting two displays on a single laptop, but for its next gaming phone, Asus is apparently looking to push some boundaries by putting a small secondary display on the back of the upcoming ROG Phone 5.Read more...

Goodbye to all that, amirite? But how will you say goodbye?Read more...

Netflix has officially amassed 200 million subscribers, but the company isn’t planning to rest on its laurels.Read more...

A chemical produced by the male genitals of this tropical butterfly is so repulsive, scientists refer to it as an “anti-aphrodisiac.”

President-elect Joe Biden has promised to decarbonize the U.S. electricity grid by 2035 and implement a host of other climate policies, which in theory would discourage fossil fuel companies from extracting more oil and gas. But instead, it could just push them to find other uses for their products: Specifically,…Read more...

On January 20, 2020, the first known case of covid-19 in the U.S. was reported—a man in his 30s who had traveled back to Washington State from Wuhan, China, where the first cases of the novel viral disease had been discovered in December 2019. Nearly everyone failed to predict the full scale of the devastation that…Read more...

Another large cybercrime forum appears to be biting the dust.

Surprise! Despite repeated assurances from Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, that the company would stop recommending all “political and social issue groups” in order to slow down misinformation and coordinated political violence, it didn’t really do that.Read more...

Don’t do it. Most people aren’t going to experiment with navigating to root Windows 10 folders, but just in case anyone might be digging around in the software guts of their PC, it’s best to stay away from inputting this file path into your browser: “\\.\globalroot\device\condrv\kernelconnect”. It will not only…Read more...

I can’t figure out who, exactly, Amazon’s Halo Band is designed for. The screen-free band works in the background to track your activity and sleep, and it also has microphones to listen in on your conversations and analyze your tone. There is some appeal to a screen-free wearable that can cut down the distractions in…Read more...

Rebekah Jones, the Florida data scientist turned whistleblower who accused state authorities of manipulating covid-19 data, turned herself in to local police on Sunday night to, as she put it, “protect her family” from ongoing police harassment. Her announcement came just one day after Florida authorities issued an …Read more...

Experts are becoming increasingly worried that at least some variants of the coronavirus will pose an added challenge to limiting the spread of covid-19 through vaccination. Recent data announced over the weekend suggests a variant first found in South Africa can escape detection from antibodies in some people who had…Read more...

IDW’s licensed comics love themselves a good crossover, especially the Transformers, who’ve teamed up with everyone from the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise to the Ghostbusters, and, yes even the beloved magical horsies of Equestria. This time, they’re teaming up with Pinkie Pie and the gang again—on their home turf.

TaoTronics SoundLiberty 80 TWS Earbuds | $58 | Amazon | Clip Coupon

As Donald Trump’s presidential term transitions into an uncertain legacy, the world has also begun to question the repute of his most ride-or-die follower: Mike Lindell, a.k.a. MyPillow guy, whose products look dangerously close to fading from relevance. Lindell has claimed that MyPillow pillows and mattress toppers…Read more...

An exoplanet located 212 light-years away is roughly the same size as Jupiter, but it’s 10 times lighter. The discovery is challenging our conceptions of how gas giants form and grow and the types of planets that can exist.

Back in 2018, Mattel created a real-life version of the video game Rocket League where a pair of remote control cars knocked a ball into each other’s nets in a small arena. It was fun, but lacked one of the best parts of the game: the cars’ ability to jump and rotate in air: a challenging feat that one YouTube hacker…Read more...

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building and uploaded an enormous archive documenting their crimes onto the embattled social media platform Parler. The consequences of that day will likely have ripple effects in the U.S. for years to come. But the digital trail left behind by rioters is…Read more...

Despite the huge number of dinosaur fossils found, from bones to feathers, precious little exists in the fossil record to explain dinosaur defecation, urination, or copulation. Thankfully, all three occasions happened in one place, and researchers have now achieved the first comprehensive look at the preserved…Read more...

Paramount+ is set to replace CBS All Access in less than two months.