Gizmodo

No dragons included, but, given that Game of Thrones’ first spinoff is about all things Targaryen, they’re not going to be far off.

A group of archaeologists has found the oldest deliberate burial of a modern human ever discovered in Africa, dating back 78,300 years ago. The discovery sheds new light on the early origins of this ancient practice.

Lucasfilm Animation’s Star Wars: The Bad Batch is here, and Clone Force 99's big new adventure on Disney+ opened with a bang. But as the new series began in the final moments of the Star Wars prequel’s darkest hour, the show made some touching connections to the stories that came before it—an important connection Bad…Read more...

If we keep on the path we’re on, Antarctica might be really, truly toast. A new study shows that the continent might hit a tipping point within this century if we don’t keep warming in check, and we might be in for dozens of feat of sea level rise as a result.Read more...

Netflix’s new “Play Something” feature, which randomly serves up a show from the streaming service’s vast catalog, can be a risky way to get hooked on a new series. To ensure you don’t end up a couch hermit, Brian Yung’s Can I Binge website lets you calculate how long a show will take to finish, so you can plan…Read more...

The Toxic Avenger remake recruits another star. Robert Kirkman teases some directions the next few seasons of Invincible could go in. The Flash recruits a familiar face for its 150th episode. Plus, get new looks at Spiral, The Suicide Squad, The Green Knight, and more. Spoilers go!

America may have to wait another six months to find out whether Facebook has the capacity to make a good decision.Read more...

Your Kindle e-reader isn’t the kind of gadget you upgrade all that often, and you might have one that’s been serving you well for years. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you know everything that Amazon’s e-reader can do. Here are some of the lesser-known features and settings you can play around with on your Kindle,…Read more...

The U.S. military is tracking an enormous piece of Chinese space debris which is expected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime around May 8, according to a press release from U.S. Space Command. But as the Pentagon points out, no one knows quite where it will land yet.Read more...

India’s G7 delegation is self-isolating in London on Wednesday after two members tested positive for covid-19, according to the British government and a new report from Reuters. The positive cases are likely to spark the obvious question: Why wasn’t this meeting a Zoom call?Read more...

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is having a banner year, and apparently things just keep getting better: On Tuesday, the company announced that it has received upwards of 500,000 orders for its satellite internet service, Starlink.Read more...

Currently in its seventh season—with an eighth on the way—the CW’s The Flash shows no signs of, uh, slowing down. But the Arrowverse series will soon have to contend with the departure of two actors who’ve been a part of the show since its 2014 debut: Carlos Valdes and Tom Cavanagh.Read more...

A public service announcement for anyone who, like me, is using a years-old Dell computer as their primary machine: Dell has released a security patch for a security vulnerability affecting close to 400 different computer models manufactured between 2009 and right now. That’s, uh, a lot of laptops.

After threatening for months to disrupt social media with a bespoke platform that would allow him to bypass community guidelines (and the embarrassingly long list of platforms he’s been banned from), our big patriotic boy has finally made good on his promise. Folks, the wait is over — the future is now, and it’s a…Read more...

In the early 1990s, a British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar argued that humans can’t handle more than 150 stable relationships based on the size of the human brain’s neocortex and observations of other primate groups socializing. Now, a team of researchers in Sweden say that number is bunk.

Earlier this year, Spotify was granted a patent for speech-recognition tech that could potentially recommend music based on your “emotional state, gender, age, or accent.” Now, a coalition of more than 180 artists and human rights organizations has written Spotify a letter asking the company to publicly commit to…Read more...

These days everyone has a podcast, so why not a couple of hobbits talking about life in Middle-earth? That’s exactly what’s happening with The Friendship Onion, which will feature actors Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd talking all things pop culture—and in particular, the franchise that brought them together, The Lord…Read more...

Authorities appear to have uncovered a vast, nefarious conspiracy to electronically rig an American election in favor of an illegitimate victor. Neither Deep State supercomputers nor Russian intelligence agencies are alleged to have been involved in this one, however.Read more...

The military UFO plot has, somehow, thickened yet again: The Inspector General of the Department of Defense is itself investigating the Pentagon’s program to investigate reports of unidentified aerial phenomena.Read more...

Star Wars fans celebrate May the Fourth in many ways. Some rewatch the movies. Some get in costume and play with lightsabers. And 77 of them spent $4,800 on a set of the little holochess monsters seen in A New Hope for about five seconds.

A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by... targeting…Read more...

Google I/O 2021 is just a couple of weeks away, but in the run-up to its annual developer conference, Google may have just accidentally confirmed the existence of the Pixel Buds A on Twitter.

5G conspiracies are nothing new. They’ve been tirelessly debunked several times and yet a 2021 survey found that roughly 24% of people believe that at least one 5G conspiracy is true. C’mon, really?Read more...

As part of DC’s new Infinite Frontier relaunch—meant to build on the foundation laid by its Death Metal and Future State titles—the comic publisher’s set to put out a new miniseries. It kicked off with the massive Infinite Frontier #0 featuring a bevy of creative talent ahead of writer Joshua Williamson and artist…Read more...

At the end of April, the Twitter account for Eversource, the biggest utility in New England, posted an upbeat video on the utility’s clean energy goals full of rich stock footage of windmills and solar panels and set to a rousing gospel-style song.Read more...

It’s always a sad day in Androidland when a popular smartphone officially reaches its end of life. Samsung will no longer push software updates to its Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ smartphones.

Chalk up one more precious thing the pandemic has ruined. On Tuesday, the New York City Department of Education announced that it would no longer allow kids to stay home from school on especially snowy or bad weather days; instead, schools will switch to remote learning.Read more...

If you haven’t watched Sony’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines yet—it’s streaming on Netflix—you should do that immediately. Co-directors and writers Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe tell the story of a family traveling across the country to bring the daughter to college when a robot apocalypse threatens to take over the…Read more...

While Twitter has yet to officially outline plans for its upcoming subscription service, the social media giant continues to prep for its release with the acquisition of Scroll.Read more...

In the depths of the ocean off the northwest Australian coast lie vast, mysterious ecosystems. Until recently, they were completely undocumented by scientists. A team of researchers changed that in mid-April, though, after they boarded an oceanic research vessel known as the R/V Falkor. Equipped with advanced robotic…Read more...

On Monday, New York City’s Eleven Madison Park announced it would no longer serve meat as part of its $315 tasting menu. It quickly met with conservative backlash that’s become de rigeur with anything remotely resembling a pro-climate choice.Read more...

Companies swear up and down that they aren’t using smartphone apps to eavesdrop on our conversations and serve up hyper-focused ads. But this distressing concept app called SayPal, which tips users in Bitcoin every time they mention a brand, demonstrates that it’s probably not going to be very long before that’s…Read more...

Back in ‘94, Nintendo released the Super Game Boy, a cartridge adapter that made Game Boy games playable on a TV through the SNES. Hyperkin’s new Retron Sq does the exact same thing, but as a standalone console that offers modern HDMI connectivity. Its simplicity makes it easy for anyone to use, but it also holds the…Read more...

Apple has rushed out fixes to two major vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS 14.5, last month’s update that implemented its App Tracking Transparency feature. Both bugs could have allowed malicious parties to remotely execute code, possibly leading to the takeover of an affected device. That means you need to update your…Read more...

Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal…Read more...

The ongoing battle between film fans and non-disclosure agreements continues.Read more...

If you can bring yourself to wear a diamond that doesn’t represent a shaved-down bit of the planet’s finite supply, but is chemically identical to the original product and denies warlords funding—then Pandora is your shop. The world’s largest jeweler (in sheer volume of product), known for charm bracelets, has…Read more...

During its third flyby of Venus, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe recorded natural radio emissions from within the Venusian atmosphere. The finding is confirmation that Venus’s upper atmosphere undergoes major changes in accordance with the Sun’s 11-year cycle, providing new insights into this enigmatic—and utterly…Read more...

When Legends of Tomorrow made its incredibly welcome return for season six this Sunday, it revealed a major secret about one of the show’s main characters that somehow fans haven’t bothered to be bothered by. Hell, even the Legends don’t care, and here’s why that’s awesome.Read more...

As fun as it is to watch things go boom in slow motion, high-speed cameras are more useful as educational and research tools, revealing phenomena that are otherwise imperceptible to the naked human eye, like the weird way old plasma TVs would display a single frame of video by flashing various parts of the image in…Read more...

Adobe Flash officially reached end of life at the end of 2020, and now Microsoft is removing Flash from Windows 10 this summer.Read more...

From For All Mankind to Space Sweepers, every day more great sci-fi adventures grace our screens both big and small. All signs point to a sci-fi renaissance filled with reluctant heroes, scrappy misfits, and snarky sentient robots. Of course, I can’t forget one of the most quintessential staples of the genre: the epic…Read more...

Tucker Carlson has used his platform to, among other things, undermine climate science and lie about renewable energy. Yet last week, he put out an impassioned plea to save the Maine woods, claiming that “real environmentalists” should oppose a power line connecting Quebec hydropower to the U.S. Bizarrely, he and the…Read more...

At the heart of Epic Games’ case against Apple is the company’s 30% App Store commission and its iron rule over in-app purchases. We now know, thanks to internal documents unearthed through the Epic’s lawsuit, that Phil Schiller, the top executive in charge of App Store, had floated the idea of cutting its infamous…Read more...

Shotaro Ishinomori is one of the grandfathers of Tokusatsu as we know it—the legend behind Kamen Rider and Super Sentai. Without him, Japanese superheroes would be in a very different space today. But Ishinomori is equally remembered as a mangaka king: and when he combined the two, there were some truly remarkable…Read more...

New research suggests that as the list price of brand name drugs rise, so do out-of-pocket medical costs for these drugs—at least for some patients. This is counter to a common industry claim that patients aren’t affected by list price increases. The study found a link between list prices rising and out-of-pocket…Read more...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wants us to know it’s not the 1980s anymore. On Tuesday, it announced new 30-year averages for temperature and precipitation. Unsurprisingly, the “new normal” is hotter.Read more...

It’s always fun waking up to presents, and on this most Star Wars of holidays, Disney has gifted fans with the first official video of its real-life lightsaber replicas featuring glowing blades that actually extend and retract. But sad news for many of us: it sounds like you won’t be able to buy one for your…Read more...

There’s good news for Stargirl and Kung Fu’s future on the CW. Get a look at the new ghost-ship show from the creators of Dark. The What We Do in the Shadow sets its premiere date. Plus, a psychedelic glimpse of Army of the Dead. Spoilers get!

Samsung’s Galaxy A52 5G has a lot to live up to. Not only is it the successor to last year’s top-selling Android phone, but it’s also the star of Samsung’s new mid-range A-Series (the slightly more premium Galaxy A72 isn’t coming to the U.S). With people holding onto their phones for longer, there’s a good chance a…Read more...