Gizmodo

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to block consideration of a House-approved stimulus package on Tuesday that includes $2,000 checks for many Americans—an amount sought after by a rising chorus of Republicans and an outgoing President Trump.

As the company wonders what the future holds for it now that Boston Dynamics is owned by the Hyundai Motor Group, its robots are showing off their impressive capabilities in a year-end video that may also be a ploy to distract humanity from their ultimate goal: total dominance on the dance floor, or the eradication of…Read more...

President Donald Trump’s bitter feud with various household appliances has landed his administration in court.Read more...

While Apple says it has a thorough system of checks to ensure components used in its products are produced in an ethical manner, a new report claims that well known Apple supplier Lens Technology uses forced labor comprised of Uighur Muslim workers in China.Read more...

The Expanse is a show with an ensemble cast, but if you had to pick a “main character,” it would probably be James Holden. Played by Steven Strait, who’s also a producer on the show, Holden captains the Rocinante and has a unique connection to the dangerously mysterious protomolecule.Read more...

It’s been four years since the laborious process of pulling the UK out of the European Union began, and one would expect the language in the final deal to be thoroughly considered. But if a section of the 1,246-page agreement regarding encryption standards for transferring DNA is any indication, this package might be…Read more...

Typically the holidays are a time of giving, however following a camera update earlier this fall, users recently discovered that Google has removed the ability to use Astrophotography mode with the ultra-wide cameras on the Pixel 5 and Pixel 4a 5G.Read more...

Here’s how weird 2020 was for movies: Unless you saw something in January or February (like The Invisible Man, Birds of Prey, or Bloodshot), there’s a good chance you didn’t see a movie in a movie theater for the entire year. A whole year without going to the movies. Frankly, it’s hard to even fathom, even though we…Read more...

There are plenty of (very justifiable) tropes when discussing video games, but the one that I can’t let go of when I’m thinking of PC gaming is the keyboard being mightier than the sword. It can make or break your gaming experience. And there are so many mechanical gaming keyboards available that choosing the right…Read more...

On Christmas Eve, the United States Patent and Trademark Office publicly released an application submitted by Toyota for a “car wash judgement system.” It’s not a patent application for a system that judges how well you washed your car, nor a system that washes your car while judging you and calling you a bad owner…Read more...

In a notice on Wednesday, the U.S. Treasury Department warned of an uptick in cyberattacks and scams linked to covid-19 vaccines, saying ransomware poses a particular threat as criminals search for ways to exploit the ongoing public health crisis.

It didn’t feel like it, what with a major pandemic and massive financial crisis, but 2020 was actually an incredible year for gadgets. For companies like Apple and Microsoft, this could have been a landmark year were it not for everything else going on. While the competition for our attention this year was steep,…Read more...

Ripple’s rough few days just got way worse. After the fintech company was the subject of an SEC lawsuit over its flagship XRP token last week, Coinbase announced in a Tuesday blog post that trades of Ripple would be suspended on its platform.

Wonder Woman is supposed to be the best of women. This isn’t me starry-eyed about a fictional character and forcing her to be a defender and icon. William Moulton Marston created her to be the best of women. The character, besides being heavily rooted in Marston’s love of bondage, was also rooted in his love for women…Read more...

Experts with the World Health Organization issued a somber warning on Monday: The next pandemic to strike humanity could be even more devastating than covid-19 has been, especially if we don’t learn our lessons this time around.

HP Envy x360 15 | $570 | HP | Promo Code WINTRSAV5Read more...

In a time when you have to go out of your way to buy a new TV with less than 4K resolution, one Redditor has decided that their eyes don’t need such luxuries as 4K, 2K, HD, or even standard def videos, and have created a custom VCR that plays full-length movies on floppy disks with just 1.44 MB of storage.

His Dark Materials ended its second season on heartfelt reunions, sinister plots, and a hero’s journey into a land of angels. Lee Scoresby’s story was a battle he’d been preparing for his whole life–one that actor Lin-Manuel Miranda knew was coming thanks to Philip Pullman’s books couldn’t quite prepare himself for…Read more...

The United Kingdom, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is now home to the wind energy revolution that’s reaching a new crescendo. Great Britain hit a major milestone late last week when wind farms generated more than half of the island’s energy needs.Read more...

Back in October, Twitter temporarily blocked a New York Post story that was reportedly based on materials taken from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden. The story’s dubious sourcing and suspicious timing led to widespread skepticism, and Twitter decided to temporarily ban links to the story under its policy against…Read more...

The King of OLED TVs is finally getting on that mini-LED train. Last night LG announced that it plans on introducing its first ‘QNED’ TV at CES 2021.Read more...

James Gunn heads a bizarre Peacemaker rumor off at the pass. Mission: Impossible 7 will resume filming after some covid-19 concerns. A small peek at Disenchantment season 3 and more. Spoilers right this way...

There’s a niche arms race among hardware hackers to create ultra compact versions of video game consoles, and YouTube’s GmanModz appears to have successfully miniaturized an entire Nintendo 64 into a portable that’s not much bigger than an N64 game cart—making it possibly the world’s smallest to date.Read more...

A new Apple TV could be arriving in 2021, but how will it compete with so many powerful streaming devices when it retails for three times the cost?Read more...

Shower Beer Holder and Speaker | $10 | GameStopRead more...

Panasonic has started testing a new delivery robot in suburban Tokyo. And it’s just so darn cute. The new delivery robot, first reported by the Japan Times, is being tested in what’s called the Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town. Panasonic staged a test run for members of the press earlier this month.

The government of India is considering an 18% tax on all bitcoin transactions, according to a new report from the Times of India. It’s not clear whether the proposed goods and services tax (GST) would apply to other cryptocurrencies like ether, the second largest after bitcoin.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced a new set of drone regulations on Monday that will, among other things, mandate that every drone sold in the U.S. weighing more than .55 pounds come with a mechanism to broadcast its location to local authorities by 2022— a digital license plate, of sorts.Read more...

Welcome to our dystopian hellscape, where you might soon have to flash your Apple Wallet when trying to enter an airport in order to prove that you’ve been given the covid-19 vaccine.Read more...

A man’s habit of hunting feral pigs exposed him to a rare brain infection, doctors in Florida say. In a recent case report, they detail how the man developed a serious kind of infection that’s mostly disappeared in the U.S., caused by Brucella bacteria.Read more...

When the universe was a fledgling billion years old, a galaxy spewed a ginormous, fast-moving jet of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans in the form of a blazar. The jet was recently imaged and analyzed by a team of Italian astronomers. Their findings,…Read more...

When I’m using Wikipedia, I’m usually spending hours getting lost in the site’s bottomless pit of random factoids for hours on end. Apparently though, this puts me in the minority. If you look at the most popular pages on the platform from this year, you’re most likely to find pages discussing politics or the global…Read more...

Viewers are turning to streaming entertainment more than ever thanks to the global pandemic, and the plethora of services can serve as a much-needed escape. At the start of each month, most streamers do a little shuffle, adding new movies and taking some away, and io9 is here to help with your decision making.Read more...

The Apple Watch has become an iconic smartwatch, but things could’ve turned out very differently. Leaked images of what appears to be an Apple Watch prototype show just how far it has come since its early days in development.Read more...

R.I.P Chatroulette, the last, vast Wild West for exhibitionists whose incessant masturbation has delighted and startled onlookers since my college days. Wired reports that the platform in which users endlessly scroll through each others’ webcams resulting in an unceasing 11-year dongfest, has thrived lately thanks in…Read more...

Apple’s services aren’t terrible—it’s just the competition is usually better. Despite Apple’s best efforts, Spotify is most people’s music streaming app of choice. TV+ is nowhere near the best TV streaming service. Apple Arcade just doesn’t have much appeal to die-hard gamers. There are a bazillion other cloud storage…Read more...

The Environmental Protection Agency just enshrined the nation’s first-ever air pollution regulations on the aviation industry. But don’t get too excited, because they do basically nothing.Read more...

Over the weekend, a particularly awful pair of words started trending on social media: super gonorrhea. That’s because the World Health Organization recently warned that the pandemic is helping fuel the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. Unfortunately, the situation is…Read more...

This is a scientific experiment.Read more...

In Pixar’s Soul, a music teacher with a burning passion for jazz suddenly dies. The event puts him on a path in the afterlife that makes him realize how he never lived with much passion during his time on Earth, and how hard he’s willing to fight for another chance.Read more...

Quick question: What the heck is going on with HBO Max’s content discovery?Read more...

This past autumn, people all across the U.S. southwest were finding an astounding number of dead birds littered along roads, on golf courses, and in their own driveways. Some estimated that hundreds of thousands of the creatures perished. Months later, new findings are shedding a little more light on why the spooky…Read more...

After spending the past few years funneling billions of dollars through Ireland as a way to take advantage of the country’s relatively low taxes, it looks like Facebook is packing up its overseas operation.Read more...

Wonder Woman 1984 has been quite the lightning rod since its release. On the one hand, there’s the epic scope, complex romance, rousing score, and positive messages. It also has an incredible cast including Gal Gadot, Kirsten Wiig, Chris Pine, and Pedro Pascal. On the other hand, some have criticized the visual…Read more...

Last week, Los Angeles-based artist Cali Rockowitz uncovered an interesting loophole in Bumble’s shirt regulations. After blocking her numerous attempts to upload photos in a bralette, the company told her that her attire would be allowed only if she’d posed in it outside, and if it were a plausible bikini.

In the early ‘90s, Nintendo surveyed the massive success of the Game Boy and thought, what if you could also work on this thing? Enter the WorkBoy, an accessory that converted Nintendo’s handheld system into a sort of early PDA. But despite a lot of evidence of the WorkBoy’s existence, it vanished before ever making…Read more...

More than 190,000 fans sold at Home Depot in the United States and Canada have been recalled by the manufacturer because the blades can detach, fly through the air, and hit people.

OnePlus 7T (T-Mobile) | $300 | B&H PhotoRead more...

Season three of Cobra Kai is the show’s most confident, nostalgic, and entertaining season yet. The hit Netflix show based in the world of The Karate Kid once again builds on the relationships and characters we know and love from the previous seasons, as well as the movies, but this year it’s much more focused,…Read more...

Blast off to adventure in the amazing year 2021! No doubt, we’re expecting a ton of cool and exciting space-related happenings next year, with these stories being among the most highly anticipated.