Gizmodo

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Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar appointed an aide with “minimal public health experience” and who had spent the six years prior to joining the agency running a dog breeding business to head its coronavirus response in mid-January, Reuters reported on Wednesday. Sources said decisions made by that…Read more...

Oh. My. Godzilla.

Game developer and writer Mike Bithell made a name for himself with the clever mechanical heartbreak of Thomas Was Alone, the heady sci-fi ideas of Subsurface Circular and its followup Quarantine Circular (also? a surprisingly good John Wick tactics game). But now, while we wait for his next video game, he’s turned…Read more...

Vegas, what the fuck you doing?

Zoom, the video conferencing app that’s seen an utterly staggering spike in usage during the coronavirus pandemic, has been the subject of ongoing reporting over its egregious security failures—which include, among other things, misrepresenting its encryption protocols.Read more...

A big chunk of the wish-fulfillment aspect of most genre media (sci-fi, fantasy, horror) involves inviting you to fantasize about how you would use your own vast superpowers to save the world in a time of crisis. But in moments like the one we’re all living through right now, the idea of having superhuman abilities…Read more...

The Washington Post reports that 25,000 email addresses and passwords, allegedly from the World Health Organization (WHO), National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Gates Foundation, and other large organizations, were stolen by hackers and posted online. It’s unknown where the list came from, or who even created it,…Read more...

Gizmodo is looking at a lot of net art these days, but you’ll have to scan further than Google Arts and Culture to find it, so we asked net artists for help. Today, Anthony Antonellis tells us about his long slog to convince gatekeepers that internet art is more than an unprofitable career path.Read more...

Without plate tectonics, our planet wouldn’t have continents, mountains, and possibly even life itself. New evidence suggests this geological process began at least 3.2 billion years ago, a surprisingly early origin.

The Star Wars galaxy may be taking a break at the box office, but it continues to expand on streaming.

Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist, physicist, and CEO of software company Wolfram Research (behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica) made headlines this week when he launched the Wolfram Physics Project. The blog post announcing the project explains that he and his collaborators claim to have “found a path to to the…Read more...

The healthcare system in the U.S. has buckled under the current coronavirus pandemic, with overloaded hospitals struggling to keep up. But should a second wave of the outbreak occur simultaneously during the coming flu season, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield says, things could get…Read more...

Google announced in late 2010 that for the past year, Californian drivers had been sharing the road with a secret self-driving car project. Many years and one death at the hands of rival Uber later, we can finally see 2009's testing footage.

The CEO of Life Time gyms, Bahram Akradi, was on CNBC today defending his company’s decision to soon reopen its gyms in states that are lifting lockdowns, such as Georgia. It feels like the kind of clip that will be played in future documentaries about how poorly we handled the coronavirus crisis.

In the interim stimulus bill the Senate passed on Tuesday evening, federal lawmakers failed to include any relief for customers struggling with their water bills. As a result, millions of Americans who are being told to stay in their homes and wash their hands as often as possible could face impossible choices, such…Read more...

A little over a year ago, I came up with an idea for story to turn my apartment into an indoor garden. This ended up being a terrible idea, though in my defense it was late January, and I was hoping the addition of greenery could inject some vitality back into those bleak, dreary days, while also serving as a way to…Read more...

The waters surrounding the Antarctic Peninsula are warming rapidly, yet we know very little about how this is impacting some of the region’s most charismatic denizens: the filter-feeding baleen whales that call this icy realm home. But a team of scientists is hoping to change that with the help of their flippered…Read more...

South Florida is dealing with a record-breaking heat wave. It’s only April, but temperatures have been rivaling those more typical of summer.Read more...

Weeks before the first documented U.S. death from covid-19, at least two people in California likely died from the virus. On Tuesday, health officials in Santa Clara, California announced that the deaths of two residents in early and mid-February are now believed to be related to the novel coronavirus.Read more...

If your Facebook feed is teeming with wild Deep State theories, that might be on you, a Facebook study has found. Two researchers from Facebook and one from Harvard tested an algorithm that looks at your friending activity to detect fake accounts, or sybils. The paper shows that an outlying group of people who accept…Read more...

It’s been almost three years since Motorola released anything you could really consider a flagship phone (and that’s including its $1,500 bendy-screen Razr reboot). But now with the new Edge+, Motorola is getting back in the high-end handset game with practically all the features people expect in a premium device, for…Read more...

The relationship between YouTube and its content creators can best be described as symbiotic: Vloggers rely on the platform’s promises of fame and fortune (or at least a decent living). In return. YouTube relies on these content creators, for, well, content—hundreds of hours uploaded every minute, netting the company…Read more...

Reality competition shows are usually about surviving, dating, or singing. Maybe even a combination of all three. But sometimes, reality television has tried to enter the realm of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Sometimes it’s worked, other times it’s failed spectacularly.

It was a warm July day when Frau Troffea began to dance. She walked out of her home, into the narrow streets of Strasbourg, and began her frenzied steps. She danced uninterrupted for nearly a week, her feet swollen and bleeding. By the time she had tired of dancing, 34 of her neighbors had joined her; by the end of…Read more...

Scientists are attributing the 2018 Kilauea eruption, which destroyed hundreds of homes on Hawaii’s Big Island, to a surprising source: intense and sustained rainfall.Read more...

I wonder sometimes how strange it must be to own a company, create a product packed with features that people have long asked for, then try to launch it in the midst of a global meltdown. Polar just launched a $430 GPS watch that seems like it will be perfect for outdoor athletes—except everyone is stuck indoors for…Read more...

In 2005, then-NASA administrator Michael Griffin shocked the aerospace community when he openly criticized the Space Shuttle program, describing it to USA Today as a “mistake,” “just barely possible,” and “not the right path” for the United States.

The Venom sequel has a new title and a new release date. A Ghostbusters ornament, of all things, teases an intriguing new bit of bustin’ kit. Millie Bobbie Brown’s Sherlock Holmes adventure is now heading to Netflix. Plus, what’s to come on Legends of Tomorrow, and Donald meets Daisy in a new DuckTales clip. Spoilers…Read more...

After making its way through the developer and beta versions of the browser, a significant new feature has just arrived in the stable version of Google Chrome that most of us are using: Tab Groups. It might just change the way you browse the web forever.Read more...

Palantir, the surveillance firm founded by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, has landed a contract with the feds to build a database tracking the spread of the novel coronavirus around the country, according to the Daily Beast.

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The state of Missouri filed a lawsuit against China in U.S. federal court on Tuesday, claiming the Chinese government caused the global coronavirus pandemic. The lawsuit is unlikely to succeed and is most likely a political stunt by Missouri’s Republican Attorney General to distract from the U.S. federal government’s…Read more...

Facebook caved to Vietnamese government demands for increased censorship of “anti-state” posts after state-owned telecoms suppressed local traffic, two sources at the firm told Reuters on Tuesday.

The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives plans to break with 200 years of precedent this week by allowing members of Congress to vote by designated proxy during the coronavirus pandemic. The voting by proxy plan would negate cybersecurity risks posed by a true remote voting system and only allows for narrow,…Read more...

Ahead of the premiere of Sailor Moon Eternal, a cinematic retelling of the Dream arc in which the Senshi face off against the Dead Moon Circus, Toei and Crunchyroll are inviting everyone to re-experience the episodic adventures that build up to the film’s celestial confrontation.Read more...

Following its initial mandate that employees continue showing up to work amid a deadly health crisis, Charter Communications—the ISP giant that operates under the name Spectrum—is under investigation by the New York attorney general’s office over its treatment of employees during the coronavirus pandemic.Read more...

Oil had itself a day on Monday. Prices went negative as oil producers looked to pay people to take oil off their hands owing to an ongoing overproduction crisis.Read more...

This is the way and may continue to be the way for a while longer.Read more...

“I try to not identify that I’m a healthcare provider out in public now,” Chrissy, a registered nurse anesthetist, told me a few weeks ago on a phone call. (Gizmodo verified her identity and agreed to use her first name only so as not to reveal the hospital where she works.) I’d reached out to Chrissy to ask her about…Read more...

Employees of Charter Communications, which sells internet service under the name Spectrum, have tested positive for covid-19 in several states, according to emails obtained by Gizmodo. The confirmed cases follow a dispute between labor and management last month over a no-work-from-home policy that was later…Read more...

Scientists are debating a key aspect of the coronavirus that causes covid-19: whether the virus lingers in the air for long enough and in a great enough quantity for airborne transmission to be a common source of infection. It seems like a simple enough question, but it’s actually posing quite a challenge to…Read more...

The Razer Blade Stealth was already one of the best small-but-mighty laptops on the market, and now it’s getting more powerful. Razer’s refresh adds faster CPU and GPU options along with a fix for one of the Blade Stealth’s biggest flaws.

During a time when we’re stuck inside and looking for things to occupy ourselves with, may I humbly suggest the crossword puzzle?Read more...

Gizmodo is looking at a lot of net art these days, but you’ll have to scan further than Google Arts and Culture to find it, so we asked net artists for help. Today, critic Paddy Johnson tells us about how a chance meeting with Cory Arcangel changed her life.Read more...

After originally trying to sneak podcast suggestions in with your song recommendations, Spotify has come up with a better way to suggest shows tailored to your tastes: curated podcast playlists.Read more...

Contact tracing is a critical tool for containing a disease outbreak. For COVID-19, it’s also a key part of plans like the World Health Organization’s guidelines for easing distancing restrictions. So what is contact tracing and how does it work?Read more...

At this point in the global pandemic, most people probably have a rough idea of what is or isn’t considered an essential service. Still, there are differences depending on where you live and today, Singapore’s government released a tightened list of essential services for the country. For the most part, it all makes…Read more...

Yeah, that seems about right.Read more...

And he’s very familiar with the franchise, as it turns out: It’s Francis Lawrence, whose filmography also includes The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 and Part 2.