Gizmodo

It was definitely strange not being able to hold, type on, or touch the brand new laptop screens at CES as we would have in pre-covid times. There’s only so much you can tell about a product you only see or read about online, so that tangibility is an absolute necessity to figuring out what a laptop is all about.…Read more...

Last year was a watershed moment for sex tech. For the first time in CES’s decades-long history, the category wasn’t banished to the dark corners of the showroom floor. This was after a contentious 2019, when the Consumer Tech Association (CTA) revoked an award from Lora DiCarlo’s Osé sex toy for being “immoral,…Read more...

A species of Ecuadorian glass frog combines high-frequency croaking and a striking visual display to attract mates, in what is a fascinating adaptation to a noisy environment.Read more...

Apple has been slowly building its empire of subscription services for everything from news and fitness to TV and cloud storage. But Apple has dragged its feet on podcasts, which is strange considering the company popularized the creation and distribution of podcasts about [checks notes] 16 years ago. Apple is…Read more...

A plan meant to speed up the delivery of covid-19 vaccines to the American public is already facing trouble. On Friday, Oregon governor Kate Brown tweeted that the state won’t be getting additional vaccine shipments as expected next week, because the federal government had shipped out its remaining reserves earlier…Read more...

Location data gleaned from thousands of videos posted on the social network Parler and extracted in the days before Amazon restricted access to app this week, reveal its users included police officers around the U.S. and service members stationed on bases at home and abroad.Read more...

Last year, Snapchat announced what sounded like a real-life Scrumdiddlyumptious bar scheme to lure TikTok users with promises of riches beyond their wildest dreams. The company announced that, in order to promote its TikTok clone Spotlight, it would pay out $1 million total to creators, every day. The company provided…Read more...

In the wake of last week’s right-wing riot at the Capitol, some businesses are turning away from the politicians that incited it. The president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a lobbying group that represents 14,000 companies in the manufacturing sector, issued a statement calling the incident…Read more...

Pat Gelsinger was just named as Intel’s new CEO earlier this week, and apparently is off to a bold start following a recent employee meeting where Gelsinger told employees that Intel needs to deliver better PC products than anything made by that “lifestyle company in Cupertino.” Ouch.Read more...

The weirdest CES ever staged is now over. But no one will be striking booths in Las Vegas or hustling out of $1,000 a night hotel rooms today with all the cool gadgets they’ve shown off all week. That’s because there wasn’t that much new tech shown off. Much of CES was a rehash of the preceding weeks—and even…Read more...

By now we’ve all seen the astonishing results of covering an object in black paint that absorbs over 99% of light—it loses all shape, form, and depth. But what happens when you mix those super-black paints with highly-reflective color-shifting sparkles and then paint a car? The result is like staring into the deepest…Read more...

SpaceX’s attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers.

It’s been less than six months since Samsung released its last pair of wireless earbuds. But now there’s the Galaxy Buds Pro. By switching over to a more traditional design, keeping built-in ANC, and slapping on a price tag of $200, Samsung has finally created a worthy and more affordable competitor to Apple’s $250…Read more...

A big TV no longer needs an even bigger home entertainment center to support it thanks to hidden wall mounts, but you still have to deal with wires. You can either route them through the wall so they’re out of sight or cross your fingers that this completely wireless TV technology demonstrated at CES 2021 is legit.Read more...

A camera trap set up to catch cougars prowling Yellowstone National Park has captured an even rarer creature. The park released footage this week showing a wolverine tearing through the forest, marking the first on-camera sighting since the camera traps were deployed in 2014.Read more...

If you’ve been missing MagSafe, good news—rumor has it that Apple’s magnetic power adaptor is set to make a return to two upgraded MacBook Pros later this year.Read more...

If you believed the rumors, AMD and Nvidia were supposed to deliver a bunch of show-stopping CES announcements. Rumors that Nvidia was going to announce a RTX 3080 Ti or a RTX 3070 Super. Rumors that AMD was going to launch its RX 6700 by the end of this month. Even Intel was quiet about the status of its discrete Xe…Read more...

The first of WandaVision’s many secrets is one that the new Disney+ series actually reveals to you in the premiere episode’s first moments. You watch as Wanda Maximoff (aka Scarlet Witch) and her longtime beau, Vision, beeline straight from the altar to their new suburban home in the city of Westview. The Visions’…Read more...

At least 22 individuals and groups, most with extremist pro-Trump sympathies, received roughly $520,000 in bitcoin a month before the violent siege on the U.S. Capitol that sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, according to a new report from Yahoo News. And while there’s no evidence that the Dec. 8…Read more...

When President Barack Obama left office on January 20, 2017, all followers of the official @POTUS and @WhiteHouse accounts were transferred to newly elected President Donald Trump. But that’s not happening this year when Joe Biden takes the oath of office on Jan. 20. Instead, Biden will have to start from scratch,…Read more...

After being pushed to do so by new legislation, the New York City Police Department has publicized a full inventory of the myriad spying instruments it uses to surveil the public.Read more...

Parler, the social network for conservatives with more guns than friends, isn’t doing so hot in its quest for a federal court injunction forcing Amazon to restore its web hosting services, Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

It’s too goddamn hard to cancel your Amazon Prime account, a group of consumer advocacy organizations have told the Federal Trade Commission in a complaint letter.

Well, well, well. Look who else is jumping on the “hybrid” release bandwagon.

Usually, when people think of wearables, their mind conjures an image of a smartwatch. Fair! But at CES, wearables are a much, much broader category. They include everything from “hearables” and smart rings, to futuristic proof of concept devices that may never actually see the light of day.

NASA has given up on the mole—a device that was supposed to dig deep into the Martian surface—after repeated failed efforts to make the system work. It was meant to be a major part of the InSight lander mission, but unfortunately Mars had other ideas.

On November 14, 2014, a telescope spotted a burst of light in a galaxy 570 million light-years away. It was thought to be a supernova, an arrestingly bright explosion that marks a star’s death. This week, astronomers revealed that the burst was not a supernova after all, but rather a black hole having dinner—one of…Read more...

President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House is ending the way it began, with a slapdash effort to make everything a little (or lot) worse than he found it while trying to burn down the planet in the name of conservative grievances.Read more...

The idea of using your phone or smartwatch as a car key has been kicking around for a while, and some vehicles — usually more expensive ones — are already outfitted to let you do it. However, the implementation has been wildly inconsistent across car brands, and sometimes even require certain phone models to work. Up…Read more...

Ring, the Amazon-owned friend to nosy police departments everywhere, has suffered another embarrassing security stumble. The surveillance company’s Neighbors app—which was launched in 2018 as a kind of “neighborhood watch” feature—apparently left users exact geographical data and home address information exposed to…Read more...

From games like Wii Tennis to accessories like the Wii Balance Board, Nintendo has mad it possible to turn its consoles into fitness devices to help gamers get active. But hardware hacker Mike Choi may have just come up with the ultimate way to stay fit with the Switch by turning Mario Kart 8 Deluxe into a full-body workoutRead more...

Former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang commenced his run for New York City mayor yesterday with an ad indicating that he’s familiar with the subway system, pizza, and—ayyy—the Knicks. Yang, who’s never held public office in New York City, or anywhere, is staring down a maelstrom of once-in-a-generation crises:…Read more...

Officials in Australia are worried that a racing pigeon, which recently completed an 8,000-mile trek from the United States, carries potentially dangerous diseases. This unintentional breach of Australia’s quarantine laws could now cost the bird its life.

Intel focused much of its time at this year’s virtual CES on its new desktop and mobile processors, as well as spotlighting the laptops that will feature its new hardware debuting in the next few months. But what didn’t get much attention was Intel’s line of mini PCs, or NUCs, and NUC kits. Intel’s giving those a …Read more...

Soccer is the world’s most popular sport partly because the only piece of equipment you need is a ball. But to maximize the sport’s accessibility, particularly in impoverished communities where a deflated ball can mean game over, Japanese design studio nendo created a non-inflatable soccer ball alternative that…Read more...

You are not experiencing déjà vu. A huge percentage of films from our 2020 movie preview are once again here on our 2021 preview. But the good news is, there’s still a lot of great stuff to look forward to.Read more...

A U.S. government-funded study has provided evidence of a hopeful treatment for people struggling with methamphetamine use. People given a combination therapy of medications were more likely to avoid the drug and report improvements to their life than those given standard support and placebo, the study found. The…Read more...

More portable projectors, please!

One of the biggest issues with smart lights is the way they interact with traditional wall switches, which is exactly what Philips Hue is hoping to fix with its new Wall Switch Module.

Starting today, Google is issuing a pause on all political ads—as well as any ads referencing to the US Capitol siege—until “at least” January 21st, according to an email the company sent to its advertising partners that was obtained by Axios. In it, Google described taking this stance “following the unprecedented…Read more...

Beginning next month, Oculus will roll out multi-user accounts and app sharing, in a move meant to make it easier for multiple people to share a single headset. The feature will first launch on the Quest 2 before rolling out to all Quest devices, and yes, you will have to do this using your Facebook accounts.Read more...

Over a year since announcing the deal and after months of regulatory scrutiny, the Google-Fitbit merger is finally official.Read more...

If you subscribe to the Peloton app or own one of the company’s bikes or treadmills, you know part of the fitness service’s appeal is the variety of class lengths it offers. You can take a 30-minute ride, run, or cardio class, then follow it up with a 20-minute upper body workout, 10-minute core, and a 5-minute…Read more...

CES was very different this year. Show floors in Vegas hotels were swapped for an entirely virtual event and back-to-back Zoom presentations. That can make demoing the technology powering new OLED or 8K TVs a little tough. But from what we did get to see coming out of this year’s CES, there’s plenty to be excited…Read more...

For the past 23 weeks, every Thursday a new episode of Star Trek has appeared on CBS All Access, delivering us Lower Decks’ surprising debut season and the third, strongest chapter of Discovery. A lot happened in nearly half a year of boldly going, but looking back, all I can think about was how refreshing it was to…Read more...

Samsung kicked off 2021, and interrupted CES, with its live-streamed product launch, Galaxy Unpacked. The event featured an overhauled trio of smartphones, a pair of intelligent wireless earbuds, and Samsung’s own “one more thing,” the long-rumored Bluetooth item-tracking Smart Tags (beating Apple to the punch). Let’s…Read more...

Electric eels were already exceptionally weird fish. These eels—actually three different species of giant, South American knifefish—pack as much as an 860-volt punch used to stupefy prey and defend themselves. Long thought to be exclusively solitary predators of slow, murky rivers, new research suggests electric eels…Read more...

Don’t look. Mount Fuji is naked. The iconic volcano is usually known for having a cap of bright white snow from fall through spring, but this year, it’s largely missing.Read more...

Blue Origin is planning to launch an upgraded New Shepard spacecraft today, along with a test dummy named Mannequin Skywalker. You can watch the action live right here.

Every few years, Samsung’s premium Galaxy phones get a major redesign as they enter a new phase of development. The new Galaxy S21, S21+, and S21 Ultra continue that tradition—this year, it feels like Samsung’s flagship phone line just got its biggest overhaul since the Galaxy S8.Read more...