Gizmodo

Evidence of incest and inbreeding has been uncovered at an elite prehistoric Irish burial site, in a new paper that reads like a Game of Thrones subplot.Read more...

In the last year, some big banks have committed to protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska through withholding their investments from the Arctic as a whole. Seems like Alaska’s elected officials are pretty pissed about it. In fact, they’ve formally made a whole stink about the new environmental…Read more...

Apple’s butterfly keyboard will go down as one of the biggest tech blunders of recent years, but there’s another egregious sin the company has committed against its MacBooks that hasn’t been properly addressed yet: the elimination of the built-in SD card slot. There are lots of workarounds for the loss, but…Read more...

Last week, Amazon made a terse announcement that it would institute a “one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology,” known as Rekognition, in response to the wave of global protests against police brutality spurred by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At least one…Read more...

There are now more reasons than ever to hide faces and protect the privacy of people and bystanders in photos and videos being shared to social media. But some approaches are more effective than others, as researchers from Duke University have demonstrated with a new tool that can perfectly reveal faces that have been…Read more...

The Red Planet has a touch of green, according to atmospheric observations performed by the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. It’s the first time this effect has been documented on a planet other than Earth.

After releasing a line of new outdoor lights earlier this year, Philips Hue has returned with some new lights better suited for indoor use including an updated Lightstrip Plus and Hue Bloom lamp, along with a new 1600 lumen bulb which is now the brightest smart light out of Hue’s entire portfolio.Read more...

Oil giants are coming to terms with their impending doom. That’s especially true these days for BP, the London-based multinational fossil fuel corporation most notorious for causing the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. The company announced Monday it’s writing down up to $17.5 billion on its assets in the second…Read more...

The daring adventures of our loveably traumatized pilot heroes in Alphabet Squadron are continuing this month with the release of Shadow Fall, the second in Alexander Freed’s planned trilogy of tales giving us starfighter action in the early days of the New Republic. But our latest look inside the novel offers a…Read more...

A widely used and cheap steroid treatment appears to be the first to show a definitive lifesaving benefit for people with severe covid-19. In a large clinical trial funded by the UK government and others, the drug dexamethasone was found to reduce the odds of death in patients who needed a ventilator to breathe by a…Read more...

Last September, after debuting several years prior, Boston Dynamics’ impressively agile robotic dog Spot was made available to a select number of companies as an experiment to see how the robot would perform outside of the company’s R&D labs. A year later, Spot is now officially available for sale, although not…Read more...

New Zealand has identified two new cases of coronavirus after going 24 days without a single active case, according to an announcement by New Zealand health officials on Tuesday. The two cases have been identified as two women from the UK who were granted exemptions to travel within New Zealand to attend a funeral…Read more...

Approximately 40,000 years ago, back in March when time still had meaning, Lego and Nintendo made nerds weep with joy when the companies announced their first collaboration: a high-tech Super Mario that lets you build real-life video game levels for out of Lego bricks. A real-life Mario Maker, if you will. Since then,…Read more...

Top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration violated the agency’s scientific integrity rules when they debased themselves to back up Donald Trump’s incorrect assertion that Hurricane Dorian could strike Alabama last year, an internal investigation has shown. Regardless, everyone involved…Read more...

Watching a hockey mask-wearing killer murder dozens of campers in the Friday the 13th franchise may not scream: “We need his point of view!” But it turns out horror icon Stephen King’s “best novel idea” he never penned was the story of, you guessed it, the indescribably immortal Jason Voorhees.

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a flexible smartphone that would rival some of the experimental devices we’ve seen from Samsung and Motorola—though presumably more refined, one would hope. But today in Apple rumors that make you go “...what the fuck?” the foldable iPhone might have two displays separated…Read more...

T-Mobile customers across the U.S. are reporting that they cannot send or receive phone calls, and sometimes text messages. According to TechCrunch, the outage starting around 9-10 a.m. PT (12-1 p.m. ET) this morning, and at the time of this writing, is still the No. 1 trending topic in the U.S. on Twitter.Read more...

We know that the cops surveil us at protests, which is why you generally should be cautious about posting crowd photos and get a burner. Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Democratic voter registration groups have jumped on the BLM surveillance bandwagon, collaborating with the tech firms in order to identify…Read more...

Donald Trump’s ridiculous and likely unenforceable executive order demanding the Federal Communications Commission begin punishing internet companies insufficiently subservient to conservatives is drawing skepticism from his own side.

Roughly 42,922 pounds of ground beef products that were shipped to stores across the United States are being recalled over concerns that the meat may have been contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.Read more...

Continue to give Tessa Thompson a sword, Hollywood. It’s the only way.

Even by the Arctic’s increasing erratic standards, it’s been a weird spring and summer in Siberia. The region of the world that’s considered a bastion of frigid temperatures and frozen landscapes is buckling under the intense pressure of the climate crisis.

Microsoft has had one heck of a time fixing bugs in its last couple of Windows 10 versions. Many users, myself included, stuck with version 1809 longer than we anticipated because of all the bugs in version 1903 when it rolled out last year. One bug prevented users from upgrading to version 1903 if they had a USB…Read more...

Both the newspaper Tulsa World and a local health official have urged Donald Trump to cancel his cursed Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is sure to be a memorable stop in his Superspreading Across America tour. The president has effectively announced, under the Trump 2020 banner, that he’s done with covid-19,…Read more...

An unfortunate reality of journalism is that, while anyone in the industry for long enough has gotten their share of death threats, some coverage—reporting on white supremacists, taking photos in a war zone, exposing deep-pocketed oil companies—simply tends to be more emotionally, physically, financially dangerous to…Read more...

A greenish-blue fireball streaked across the skies over Australia last night, in an event captured by awe-struck observers on the ground.

Github is preparing to overhaul coding terminology that has long been criticized for being racially insensitive, the company’s chief executive said.Read more...

The end of the road for a potential covid-19 treatment once heralded as a “game changer” by President Trump seems to have arrived. On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration revoked its emergency use authorization of the related drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine for covid-19, after a review of the evidence led…Read more...

Money—what is it? It’s 75 percent cotton and 25 percent linen, according to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing website, whose official URL is moneyfactory.gov. If you’re in America, it’s green. In other countries it can be a different color, maybe even a different shape.Read more...

A few months ago, rumors started making the rounds that Microsoft’s upcoming dual-screen phone—the Surface Duo—might go on sale significantly earlier than Microsoft’s original late 2020 release date. But now, based on new rumors, it appears that one of Microsoft’s main goals for Surface Duo’s early arrival is to beat…Read more...

The fossil fuel industry rightly gets a lot of flack for how it contributes to the climate crisis, but a recent report show that greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy industry can go toe to toe with some major fossil fuel companies. Not only are emissions from dairy high, they’re also on the rise.Read more...

The Solar Orbiter project, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA, has begun a critical new stage of the mission after the probe’s first close encounter with the Sun.

We’re all just going to have to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back from the comfort of our own homes.

It may not be immediately clear why a cyber libel case from the Philippines matters in the U.S., but the guilty verdict for Maria Ressa, the chief executive of an independent news site called Rappler, has serious implications for the free press and free speech worldwide.Read more...

The Lanmodo Night Vision system won’t turn your car into the Batmobile, but it definitely has that halo of techno-magic worthy of a Batman comic. It’s a night vision system in color for your car. It literally turns night into day and is so easy to use that you don’t even have to professionally install it. Which is…Read more...

All wings, report in.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have discovered a rare bone, called the os cordis, in chimpanzees with a common heart condition. The implications of this finding could extend to humans, who share a close genetic relationship to chimps.

Book-loving kids in Christiansburg, Va., are about to get a special delivery to ease the boredom of summer quarantine (and months of being stuck at home). Google will soon start dropping books to kids via its drone delivery service, Wing, according to the Washington Post. Now they can get their hands on a copy of The…Read more...

Addressing climate change will require massive investments in everything from shoring up dams that aren’t ready for future rainstorms to wind farms and workers. It’s a huge shift that will require reorienting the economy and the way the world works.Read more...

Brother Monochrome Laser Printer | $190 | Amazon

On Sunday, there were 453 covid-19 deaths reported in the U.S., according to the Covid Tracking Project—the lowest daily toll recorded since late March. Yet unfortunately, there are signs in several parts of the country that the pandemic is getting worse, including in states that have reopened businesses and public…Read more...

During a trip to Glacier National Park in Montana last year, scientist and amateur photographer Gaurav Agrawal simply wanted to capture a beautiful sunset. Unfortunately, after sharing his pic on Flickr, people discovered that Agrawal’s lovely work was crashing certain Android 10 phones.Read more...

A Canadian man is charged with drug possession, smuggling and violating immigration laws after admitting to using a Bond-style submersible to speed across the Detroit River. Surprisingly, it didn’t go as smoothly as he planned.Read more...

After adding screencasting support with Apple AirPlay last month, short-form streaming service Quibi says users can now cast its bite-sized shows to Chromecast devices as well.Read more...

Even before HBO Max launched, there was understandable confusion at just how Warner Bros. attempt to board the “everyone gets their own streaming platform now!!!” bandwagon would align with its prior attempt at doing that with its DC output in DC Universe. At launch, HBO Max’s offerings were sporadic. And now a month…Read more...

Intel first unveiled a new kind of processor designed for slim PCs like 2-in-1s, foldable tablets, and dual-screen devices a year and a half ago at CES 2019. Now the first devices using the new processor, codenamed “Lakefield,” are on their way.

A major diesel spill from a power plant in Siberia has reached a fragile freshwater lake that leads to the Arctic Ocean, according to regional officials. That could create an ecological catastrophe.Read more...

A large crowd of protesters packed the first and second floors of Seattle City Hall after sundown on Tuesday at the invitation of City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. For more than an hour, the group listened to speeches advocating for the removal of Mayor Jenny Durkan, whom many of those gathered blame for the extreme…Read more...

Less than a week ago, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian made news when he announced he was resigning from the website’s board, urging the company to replace his seat with a Black candidate. Now, it would appear Reddit has honored his request by appointing Michael Seibel, a venture capitalist investor and entrepreneur…Read more...

Oh, the GoBots. That poor, ridiculous, terrible toyline and animated series that somehow managed to be a crappy knock-off of the Transformers, despite the fact that both the toys and the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon came out before Transformers. While I’ve talked about how the action figures sucked before, it’s…Read more...