Gizmodo

After weeks of back-and-forth discussions within the Biden administration, the U.S. is now preparing to back the temporary waiving of patent rights over covid-19 vaccines—a policy that advocates say is needed to speed up the production and acquisition of vaccines for developing countries. As part of its support, the…Read more...

After years of delays, Blue Origin says it’s finally ready for a crewed launch of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle. Founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the company is aiming for launch in July, and an auction will be held to choose a member of the crew.Read more...

Playmobil continues to prove that when a company goes the extra mile, a toy line targeted at kids can be coveted by grown-up collectors too.Read more...

A cryptocurrency scam recently pilfered at least $2 million from WallStreetBets enthusiasts, convincing them that they were buying into a new crypto coin connected to the popular memestock, according to a report from Bloomberg News.Read more...

Like the movie industry, the realm of television is still in the process of clawing its way back from covid-related delays. While some new seasons, hiatus returns, and debuts will need a little more time to make it to the airwaves, rest assured there’s still plenty of fresh summer TV on the way.

A new bill that hit the New York state senate on Monday is aiming to put a multi-year pause on crypto mining operations across the state until authorities can fully suss out what that mining is doing to the climate and local environment. Bill 6486 is being spearheaded by state Sen. Kevin Parker, who had previously…Read more...

On Wednesday afternoon, SpaceX will attempt a high altitude test of SN15—the first of the next generation of Starship prototypes. You can watch the launch live right here.

While the notion of a Red Sonja reboot hasn’t always been the most exciting thing, this one big piece of news changes all that. Hannah John-Kamen, who kicked all kinds of ass in Killjoys and Ant-Man and the Wasp, has been cast as the fearsome warrior.Read more...

Pasta boxes are bound by the constraints of their contents; the rigid stalks of spaghetti require different packaging than the wide coils of a good fusilli. Now, a team of researchers has developed flat pastas that turn into familiar shapes when cooked, with the goal of reducing packaging waste.

Updated climate pledges the U.S., China, and a dozen other nations have made in recent weeks will likely put the world on track for 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4 degrees Celsius) of warming by the end of the century, according to a new analysis. This is a modicum of good news, assuming countries actually follow through,…Read more...

Leave it to Loki to screw everything up. The next Disney+ series from Marvel Studios was set to debut on Friday, June 11, following the scheduling pattern set by WandaVision and The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. But it seems that’s not how Loki does things: the show will now debut June 9, which is a Wednesday, and…Read more...

Peloton’s had a rough go in the news cycle lately, and not helping matters is the fact that its leaky API allowed any hacker to obtain any user’s account data—even if that user had set their profile to private.Read more...

Boba Fanns, rejoice! Citizen has hopped aboard the Star Wars spacetrain with a new set of themed Ana-Digi Temp watches. The $350 watches come hot on the heels of the company’s Rebel Pilot and X-Wing watches that launched a few weeks ago and feature beloved characters like C3PO, R2D2, and Darth Vader.Read more...

Back in 2018, researchers from Brigham Young University demonstrated a device called an Optical Trap Display that used lasers to create free-floating holographic images that don’t need a display. That same team is now demonstrating a new technique that allows those holographic images to be animated: goodbye TVs, hello…Read more...

Cats, like people, can be fooled by optical illusions, nifty new research out this week suggests. The study, based on experiments conducted by pet owners at home, found that cats tend to sit inside 2D shapes that only look like squares about as often as they’ll sit inside a real square. The findings might give us a…Read more...

Sony is already the largest seller of full-frame mirrorless cameras, and it seems as it continues to make waves in that market, Sony has finally decided to discontinue its few remaining DSLR cameras.Read more...

Google is revamping its Android tablet interface with what it calls Entertainment Space, which offers quick access to movies, shows, games, and books in the Play Store. Entertainment Space will be available for Walmart’s Onn tablets later this month, with launches slated for existing and new tablets from Lenovo,…Read more...

After a heated back-and-forth with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Peloton has finally decided to issue two separate voluntary recalls of its Tread and Tread+ treadmills.Read more...

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...