Gizmodo

Supernova. Max Rails. Crocoubot. Million Ants. These are names everyone knows... assuming they’ve watched the Rick and Morty episode “Vindicators 3: The Return of Worldender” and have a decent memory. Now the Rickiverse’s premiere superhero team is returning for their own web series, which is pretty impressive given…Read more...

Alt hed: HBO MAX’s New $10 Tier Wants You to Pay to Watch AdsRead more...

An experiment in which 36 people were fitted with a robotic third thumb has demonstrated the brain’s uncanny ability to adapt and leverage an entirely new body part, and in ways the researchers are still trying to understand.

Welcome back to Gaming Shelf, io9's column all about board games and tabletop roleplaying games. This time, Games Workshop unleashes new editions and new models at the first online Warhammer Fest, Wizards of the Coast teases its new D&D-themed card set, and a Warcraft legend takes to Kickstarter for a new tabletop…Read more...

Tim Burton, who’s set to make his TV directorial debut with Wednesday—a live-action comedy about creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky teen Wednesday Addams—has cast the goth icon. She’ll be played by Jenna Ortega, who’s only 18 but already has an extensive resume of both live-action and voice-over roles.Read more...

Research is beginning to make clear that certain groups of people won’t enjoy the same level of highly effective protection provided by covid-19 vaccines as everyone else. Studies are finding that people who are immunocompromised are less likely to develop immunity against the coronavirus after vaccination.Read more...

In a world where a raccoon and a tree are two of the most powerful characters, why not an animated clock? Her name is Miss Minutes and after sneaking a peek on a new poster, she makes her debut in the latest footage from Marvel’s Loki.Read more...

The cryptocurrency market has taken a major dive, as it does. Now a band of traders has decided to form the people’s coin, appropriately named StopElon, to Stop Elon Musk from wielding intractable control over the market with his tweets. Much like China. And Mark Cuban. And volatile economies. And major financial…Read more...

Plastic producers have tried to make us think that individuals can solve pollution by improving our recycling and shopping habits. A new study makes it clear why that’s their tactic. Just 20 companies are responsible for more than half of the world’s trashed single-use plastic.Read more...

Do you like looking at pictures of old, powerful white men who are technically not allowed to drive by themselves anymore sitting behind the wheels of big, fancy trucks and cars? You’re in luck. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden got the chance to test drive Ford’s new electric truck, the F-150 Lightning, ahead of its…Read more...

Today at its 5G Summit, Qualcomm announced the new Snapdragon 778G 5G chip to help bolster its portfolio of mobile processors for the second half of 2021.Read more...

Gaseous nickel was shedding from interstellar comet 2I/Borisov when it briefly visited our solar system two years ago, according to a new study. Sounds like weird behavior for a comet, but as related research shows, the spewing of atomic metals might actually be a regular thing that comets do, whether they’re local or…Read more...

Superman’s animated adventures have a special place in many people’s hearts, and even though the modern Man of Steel’s been having quite the live-action moment on the big and small screens, Warner Bros.’ next plan for its most iconic hero is decidedly two-dimensional. Not to be outdone by the Batman: Caped Crusader…Read more...

The creator of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series and architect of the DC Animated Universe has returned. Bruce Timm, along with J.J. Abrams and The Batman’s Matt Reeves, will executive produce a brand-new animated series for HBO Max and Cartoon Network simply titled Batman: Caped Crusader.Read more...

For people who grew up loving R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps books, the author’s Fear Street series was an excellent way of transitioning to darker, more terrifying stories about teenagers dealing with rather Goosebumps-like, but markedly more dangerous situations in the fictional town of Shadyside.Read more...

After a week of proceedings, the criminal trial for attorney Steven Donziger—who won a multibillion-dollar case against Chevron over pollution in the Amazon rainforest—wrapped up on Monday. In his estimation, the trial was a “charade.” And yet he was relatively pleased with the outcome.Read more...

On Sunday, China became the second country to successfully land a mission on Mars. The Zhurong rover, now comfortably sitting just above the dusty plain of Utopia Planitia, has sent back its first images of the Martian landscape.

More news from Canada, nation of paradoxes, which printed the wrong leaf on its currency and where a mayor’s approval rating can rise after a world-famous crack scandal. This week’s mystery from the north: Justin Trudeau has been photographed masquerading as a Macbook user. Why, Canada?

Godzilla: Singular Point is full steam ahead. The Conjuring team dives into the ‘80s for totally radical possessions. Plus Steven Moffat’s The Time Traveler’s Wife adaptation gets a first look and The Flash is having more Speed Force drama. Spoilers coming at you fast!

The new 12.9-inch M1 iPad Pro is an incredible device. It’s powerful. It’s fast. It’s future-proof. Its screen is ridiculous, and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s also overkill—for now.Read more...

Have you ever wanted to guard nuclear weapons as they crisscross the United States? Well, the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration has a job opening for precisely that. And it’s a great reminder that U.S. roads carry some pretty interesting cargo, even if it’s all kept very hush-hush.

India recorded 4,529 new deaths from covid-19 on Wednesday, a grim new world record in a country that’s reeling from uncontrolled spread of the disease. India also reported 267,334 new coronavirus infections for the day.

Horror movies are scary, but things get downright terrifying when objects in real life seem to have horrifying powers. Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a 14,000 square foot mansion filled with actual artifacts, all of which have their own creepy stories attached. Whether you choose to believe them…Read more...

Google I/O is back, baby, and that means a metric crap-ton of updates for the Google ecosystem. Although it was virtual, the annual developers’ conference did not fail to be a spectacle that featured opera-singing digital blobs, a bizarre cameo from Michael Peña, and AI bots pretending to be Pluto.

Law enforcement officials are still banned from using Amazon’s facial recognition technology “until further notice,” the company said on Wednesday, a decision that effectively extends a yearlong moratorium that had been set to expire on June 1.Read more...

Android is used on 3 billion smartphones worldwide, but most of the cameras on Android phones don’t accurately capture people of color. This is why Google announced it’s striving to develop a “more accurate and inclusive camera” for its next batch of smartphones.

Once people born in the early-to-mid ‘80s started having fits on TikTok over literal children telling them their hairstyles were dated, it was only a matter of time before the internet coalesced around the term “geriatric millennial” as part of our larger conversation about the current generation of 25-to-35-year-olds.Read more...

Project Hail Mary, the third book by Andy Weir, finds the author going back to what made him famous in the first place. Weir rose to fame with The Martian, a book (and eventually a movie) about a man stranded on Mars who uses complicated, compelling science to get himself home. While Weir’s second book, Artemis, …Read more...

We’re officially entering the second week in a row of fighting between Israel and Palestine, which means we probably haven’t seen the last of the hundreds of deaths and countless injuries inflicted on Gaza residents thus far. If you’re looking for a way to donate to the victims, then a quick word of advice: maybe…Read more...

There’s lots of talk from the GOP and fossil fuel companies these days about changing their tune and finally getting really serious about climate change. But new research shows that not much has changed in the world of organized climate denial: It’s still massively funded by mostly anonymous donors shielding major…Read more...

New research into the ransomware gang who attacked the Colonial Pipeline shows just how much money they were able to extort during a fairly short crime spree: about $90 million in approximately seven months.Read more...

Charles Grodin, one of the great comedic actors of all time, died this week at the age of 86. When people hear Grodin’s name, the first movie they probably think of is Midnight Run. The 1988 Martin Brest action comedy is a classic of the genre and showcases Grodin’s smug, everyman persona beautifully.Read more...

It’s reasonable to think of nuclear bombs in terms of their destructive capabilities; splitting the atom means obliteration for anything in the blast radius. But, as a team of geologists and physicists recently figured out, it also means creation: specifically, the transfiguration of ordinary crystalline structures…Read more...

Everything you’ve never heard of could kill you. It is statistically unlikely that you will die by space crystal or poltergeist, but how do you know that you won’t? TikTok has every single detail about catastrophes looming beyond the event horizon, threatening to wipe you off the face of the Earth unless you eat some…Read more...

One of the most popular YouTube videos of 2020 was from former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Mark Rober who attempted to build a squirrel-proof obstacle course. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t, so a year later he’s trying again, and this time taking inspiration from movies like Mission Impossible and Ocean’s Eleven…Read more...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates appears to have hopelessly lost control of his efforts to do damage control on his once-budding bromance with fellow billionaire and notorious serial child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

The 1983 vampire movie The Hunger didn’t exactly win over critics when it was first released, but since then it’s become a cult film for its stylish looks, its bisexual lead character, and its influence on goth culture. These are presumably three of the reasons Warner Bros. has decided to reboot the movie, with the…Read more...

As much as video-calling technologies like Facetime and Zoom have helped the world stay connected over the past year, they’ve also demonstrated their severe limitations, as it’s hard to feel emotionally connected to someone through a low-quality video feed. Today, Google revealed a technology that’s not quite ready…Read more...

Well, folks, the rumors that Samsung is abandoning Tizen for Google’s Wear OS smartwatch platform turned out to be true. Sort of. At the Google I/O keynote today, Google revealed it’s partnering with Samsung to create a new unified platform that mashes together Wear OS and Tizen OS.

While Ta-Nehisi Coates’ run on Marvel’s Black Panther solo comic may be coming to an end just as the writer turns his sights to the future of DC’s Superman, the Wakandan King’s story is anything but over.Read more...

Android 12 is the next major update to Google’s ubiquitous mobile OS, and at Google I/O 2021 we got a preview of all the big new features headed our way later this fall including a focused push for increased privacy, revamped notifications, an updated design language, and more.

When we last saw John Diggle (David Ramsey), he had regained his family, and come across a mighty mysterious but also mighty familiar box with some sort of glowing green object inside (cough, Green Lantern ring, cough). We’ve known Diggle would be returning to take a tour of the CW’s other DC shows—except now there…Read more...

If you lose your Chromecast remote, there’s another way to control your TV. Google announced today that it’s it’s bundling a host of remote control features directly into Android. Once the new version of Android 12 rolls out, it should be as easy as dragging and tapping around your phone’s interface to change the…Read more...

Google wants to replace the humble car key and make it easier to pair all of your gadgets together.Read more...

The steady march of time has caused Darwin’s Arch—an iconic rock formation in the Galápagos Islands—to collapse.

Google’s Chrome browser already has the ability to detect when your passwords have been compromised, but now Chrome will be able to fix those vulnerable passwords with a single click.Read more...

Many of the effects of climate change are obvious, like bizarre weather patterns, rising sea levels, and species loss as a result of deforestation and habitat degradation. Some, though, are a little bit weird.

There are a lot of horror movies set at boarding schools—almost always all-girls’ boarding schools—and they tend to follow the same template: a new student realizes something is off about her surroundings. Seance starts down that same path... but it sprinkles in some unexpected elements once it gets going.Read more...

Now that Apple’s begun rolling out its M1 product lineup, it’s now reportedly gearing up for the next wave of computers powered by the chip’s multiple successors. And readers, we’re talking about a lot of computers and chips here.

While Monsters Inc. did have a second movie, the new Disney+ show Monsters at Work is the first full-fledged sequel. That’s because the first follow-up, Monsters University, was a prequel. So now Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman) will finally get to put into practice the revelation they discovered at the…Read more...