Gizmodo

When the idea behind ClipDrop first appeared a few months ago, it seemed like magic: You could point the app at any object and then clip it out its background, creating a standalone image of anything from a plant to a coffee mug. It’s basically like copy and paste, but for anything. The app is now available in beta…Read more...

Last Friday, Xbox Brazil video host Isadora Basile announced that Microsoft had severed ties with her. In a tweet, she said she’d been regularly harassed by members of the local Xbox community since being hired in early September, and that that mistreatment was part of the decision to end her contract.Read more...

Jony Ive is a mythic figure in gadget design. He’s the mastermind behind the aesthetic of Apple’s most iconic products, and is internet famous for his Gwyneth Paltrow-esque descriptive phrasing. He’s also got pretty good taste in shoes. Last year, he consciously uncoupled from Apple, and now, Ive is apparently…Read more...

A Dutch security researcher is claiming that he was able to gain access to President Trump’s Twitter account last week. Allegedly, the only vulnerability he discovered was Trump’s total lack of concern for security. The researcher says that all he had to do was guess that the password was “MAGA2020!”Read more...

The petrochemical industry produces more than 88 million tons of polyethylene, making it the most common plastic in the world. Scientists have found a new way to upcycle it, according to a study published in Science on Thursday. It could help deal with the growing plastic pollution crisis.Read more...

Everyone has a Weird Al memory—whether it was hearing a song of his while you were growing up, watching a video on MTV, or just a general knowledge of his persona, Weird Al Yankovic is undoubtedly an icon. But if you start comparing memories, one man has more than anyone...besides maybe Al himself. It’s Jon Schwartz,…Read more...

New research from Japan suggests that a rare brain-destroying disease caused by rogue prion proteins may be becoming more common—likely due to an aging population.Read more...

The novel coronavirus pandemic has reshaped the entertainment industry as we know it, with 2020 seeing countless movies and TV shows delayed. It can be hard to keep track of them all, so we’ve created this list of movie release changes (and delays) due to covid-19.Read more...

No one:

Most TVs these days can be improved with a soundbar—even a budget bar. But a soundbar that also doubles as a premium streaming device will check multiple boxes for people looking for both, particularly if their older sticks or boxes are no longer getting software updates that support newer streaming services. If this…Read more...

Right now it’s not a stretch to say that a lot of mainstream phones end up sporting very similar glass brick designs, but with Huawei’s new flagship phones—the Mate 40 and Mate 40 Pro—the company ditched the familiar camera bump for a head-turning “Space Ring.”

There’s a lot we don’t really know about Facebook. Why is the company always beefing with Apple? Is CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually unsettlingly thicc, or are we just catching him at weird angles? And in the latest stumper thrown in our direction, we also have to ask: What’s the deal with that cryptic blank blog post…Read more...

The Skyline franchise is delivering on the promise other sci-fi franchises have not. Aliens invaded Earth and we won. But now, humans are heading to the alien planet to end things once and for all.

Images captured by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx show the spacecraft’s sample head touching the surface of asteroid Bennu, which then became enveloped in a cloudy burst of dust and rock. The team now has to figure out how much surface material was collected, if any, but these images are being taken as a very positive sign.

On a sunny September afternoon in Portland, volunteers pour into a Zoom conference room. They’ve come for a weekly update from Oregon’s Yes on Measure 109 campaign—a measure which would create the world’s first market for psilocybin-assisted therapy. The pandemic prevents them from knocking on doors to reach voters.…Read more...

Five environmental and human rights groups in Oregon are suing the Department of Homeland Security for its use of tear gas at recent anti-police brutality protests in Portland, saying the agency created “potentially grave health and environmental hazards.”Read more...

“BIG victory that didn’t look possible even 24 hrs ago,” Senator Josh Hawley tweeted on Thursday morning. The senator was celebrating the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee just voted to drag Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for a hearing on why they hate conservatives so much.Read more...

Drake’s deception! I’m seeing two Drakes!

Popping a random chili into your mouth is the culinary equivalent of playing Russian roulette. Some are mild and packed with flavor, while others will make you feel like you’ve just bitten into the surface of the sun. Without knowing where a chili is from it’s hard to know how hot it is, so researchers from Thailand …Read more...

President Donald Trump’s environmental rollbackapalooza has been well-documented, as has the Environmental Protection Agency’s transformation into the Environmental Pollution Agency (please clap). But a new report chronicles what that means on the ground, including the local impacts in districts and states of…Read more...

Scream 5 could be doing something very interesting with its classic Ghostface iconography. Star Trek: Picard might go back to back to produce its next two seasons. Elizabeth Olsen says WandaVision will tackle mental health and trauma. Plus, new set pictures from The Witcher’s second season. Spoilers now!

A former boss of mine, someone who worked at a legacy cable TV channel that starts with F and ends with “-ox News,” first told me about Quibi last February.Read more...

If Steam on Windows is your gaming platform of choice then you’d be forgiven for wanting to dive straight into the action and start playing whatever games are in your library. But the Steam client has a few under-the-radar features and settings that are worth diving into, so you can make sure your gaming setup is as…Read more...

If last week’s Discovery premiere was about Michael Burnham learning to share the hope on her shoulders with the people around her, season three’s sophomore episode is much the same for the crew of the Discovery itself. But there’s an inherent difference that plays a huge part in “Far From Home”—the crew already has…Read more...

Last week, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) rejected electronics maker Foxconn’s tax subsidy application for failing to not only hire the number of employees it promised, but to build a Gen 10.5 LCD factory. The company had instead built a Gen 6 facility to manufacture phone screens instead of a…Read more...

After spending years promising Congress that the data it collected from third-party sellers wasn’t used to beef up its private-label products, today Amazon decided to roll out a product meant to do exactly that. The Amazon Shopper Panel, as it’s called, promises to pay Amazon customers that offer intel to the…Read more...

In honor of the launch of the original scroll wheel iPod on Oct. 23, 2001, let’s look back on some notable iPod models and what they say about you as an early tech consumer. Every iPod tells a story, and some of the stories they told were pretty darn rough. Rip. Mix. Burn.Read more...

Back in June, Boston Dynamics made more than 150 units of its robotic dog Spot available for sale to outside companies and research facilities. The idea was to see what type of real-world applications those companies and facilities would use it for, and get feedback on the capabilities of Spot itself. While Boston…Read more...

Four beautifully preserved llamas have been discovered at a ritual sacrifice site in Peru. The llamas, still wearing their colorful adornments, serve as the first archaeological evidence linking the ancient Inca to the practice.

It’s only taken about a week for Twitter to become the ultimate symbol of Big Tech (Big T) censoring conservative speech in the minds of Republican politicians. And the GOP outrage has manifested in a telling blunder.Read more...

Monkey Punch’s beloved gentleman thief has been an animated icon for decades, giving us oodles of cinematic and small screen escapades. But Lupin’s latest heist is an epic unlike anything he’s done before, and not just because he’s been stunningly realized in a whole new medium.

The “Empire of Pain” and the family that profited from it scored a sick joke of a settlement with the Department of Justice on Wednesday, evading accountability for their role in the nationwide opioid epidemic.

After several tumultuous months during which each new week brought more bad news for Quibi, it appears the streaming service is throwing in the towel.

Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg spent what felt like the bulk of Apple’s big iPhone announcement evangelizing 5G, the fifth generation of wireless cellular technology. According to the two men, 5G is going to revolutionize how you use your phone with incredible 4 Gbps download speeds and…Read more...

For the past few years, I never felt like I understood Google’s approach to streaming video. It vexed me, I was terribly vexxed. That’s because while Google was happy to provide Android TV to partners like Sony, Hisense, Nvidia, Xiaomi, and others for use in TVs and streaming video boxes, when it came to Google’s…Read more...

A 28-year-old Brazilian resident participating in a covid-19 vaccine trial run by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has died of complications related to the coronavirus, a local media outlet reported Wednesday. Health officials and those leading the study have not confirmed whether the volunteer had received…Read more...

Election officials have reportedly alerted law enforcement to a blast of goonish emails threatening to blackmail voters unless they vote for Donald Trump. According to Vice, which first picked up the story, the subject line read “Vote for Trump or else!” and opened with “We are in possession of all your information.”…Read more...

No one can escape spooky season, not even Star Wars. While there are plenty of frightful things in the galaxy far, far away—the Dark Side and the Sith, the Empire and the First Order, when you watch your idealized Jedi savior just casually swig milk straight from an alien teat—Star Wars has a legacy of turning to …Read more...

According to a CNN report, President Trump is allegedly pressuring the Department of Defense to give Rivada Networks, a company with several well-known Republican investors, what is basically a no-bid contract for extremely valuable mid-band 5G spectrum.Read more...

Whether we’re talking about the Obama administration or the Trump era, the position of law enforcement agencies has been that tech companies need to give authorities a backdoor into encryption. The infosec community agrees that this would just make us all less safe. Along the way, we’ve known that cops use expensive…Read more...

Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, still won’t say if she thinks climate change is real.Read more...

This morning Acer announced its latest lineup of consumer notebooks across its Swift, Spin, and Aspire series. And they all include an Intel 11th-gen processor with Isis Xe Graphics. Some of them we already knew were coming, like the Swift 5 which will be Evo-certified, and the smaller and less expensive Swift 3, but…Read more...

A novel and controversial vaccine trial for covid-19 is officially set to begin in the UK next January. On Tuesday, researchers from the Imperial College London and elsewhere announced that they plan to conduct a human challenge trial that will involve 90 young and healthy adults. These volunteers will be given…Read more...

It’s hard to be a kid obsessed with gadgets when you’re lacking a disposable income, but as a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, one of my earliest attainable electronic obsessions were digital watches. I grew up in a time when companies like Casio and Timex were competing to cram as many features into their timepieces as…Read more...

Way back in the Before Times, during February’s Super Bowl, GMC hinted an electric Hummer was coming. Now, it’s here (for preorder).Read more...

After ripping off features from TikTok, Snapchat, and just about every other popular app, it seems like Facebook is setting its sights on the hyperlocal platform Nextdoor, just days after rumors emerged it was chasing a multi-billion dollar IPO.Read more...

The diabolical ironclad beetle, in addition to having one of the coolest names in the animal kingdom, boasts one of the toughest natural exoskeletons. A team of scientists has finally figured out the secret behind this extra durable armor and how these insects can survive getting run over by a car.

One of the remaining struggles with making virtual reality experiences feel more ‘real’ is the lack of tangible interactions between the user and objects that only exist in VR. To help bridge that gap, Microsoft Research has developed a wearable device with a hammer-like appendage that swings in and out of a VR user’s…Read more...

Rep. Raul Grijalva introduced a House bill yesterday that, if passed, would make oceans a central piece of climate policy. The legislation includes many good and important ideas, including stopping all offshore oil and gas drilling, pouring resources into marine ecosystem restoration, making fisheries more climate…Read more...

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Switch | $300 | Amazon