Gizmodo

A massive blast at an industrial facility in the 4500 block of Gessner Road in northwest Houston killed at least two people, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told reporters hours later on Friday.

Pixel 3a with $100 Amazon Gift Card | $349 | Amazon

Carbon dioxide. We should stop emitting it.Read more...

The dystopian nightmare begins. Today, London’s Metropolitan Police Service announced it will begin deploying Live Facial Recognition (LFR) tech across the capital in the hopes of locating and arresting wanted peoples.Read more...

Sprint says it will fix your cracked Galaxy screen for just under 50 bones, and you don’t have to be a Sprint customer to benefit.Read more...

Tinder has a proven track record of providing a dating platform to some less-than-stellar men who have been accused of raping—and in one grisly case, dismembering—women they’ve met through the platform. But even when the company does something right, there are still privacy trade-offs to consider.

When the Nintendo Switch arrived, I decided it was the first console on which I’d buy all my games digitally to improve its portability. Not having to wrangle a pile of cartridges was great, but I’m starting to rethink that approach after EA recently revealed its iOS version of Tetris was disappearing in a few…Read more...

Our phones carry so much of our lives these days—our social networks, access to our banks, home security apps—that keeping them safe and protected is of paramount importance. These are three of the most common ways your phone can be hacked, and how to stop them.Read more...

A Sperry semi-annual sale, a throw blanket, Give’r gloves, and an LED light Gold Box off Friday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

A recent study is one of the first to highlight the plights faced by a small segment of the population: people who can’t smell the world around them normally. In it, sufferers describe feeling depressed, unable to enjoy eating, and sometimes even scared for their lives.

Shanghai Disneyland will close its gates on Saturday in an effort to stop the spread of a new SARS-like virus that has killed 26 people and sickened at least 881, primarily in China. It’s not known when the theme park may reopen.

Obi-Wan Kenobi first fell on the Death Star. He may have just fallen again in a corporate boardroom.Read more...

Just a few short days ago, Sonos dropped the bomb that some of its older products would no longer receive software updates starting in May 2020. In the initial announcement, Sonos reasoned that the ‘legacy products’ were all reaching the end of their useful life. It then told users they could either recycle the…Read more...

The company behind a popular at-home DNA testing kits, 23andMe, has laid off roughly 100 employees amid waning demand for its product.Read more...

The plan is that soon you’ll be able to waltz into a gym, connect your Apple Watch to a treadmill, and earn cash back or a free watch just for showing up.

Archaeologists in Mexico City have uncovered a pre-Hispanic steambath dating back to the 14th century. Its location in the city’s historic district confirms the whereabouts of a vibrant neighborhood that once stood in Tenochtitlán—an ancient urban center that eventually became Mexico City.

Dreamworks’ Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is all about a group of (mostly) average kids making their way around a strange post-apocalyptic land. It’s been overrun with mutated, sentient animals who’ve driven most of humanity to live in hiding underground. On any given day, chances are good that you could run into a…Read more...

We drove past the perfect-circle frozen pond delineating the Booster—the second in a sequence of Fermilab’s particle accelerators—and then onto the 2-mile ring road that traces the tunnel that houses the Main Injector accelerator. Along the road are unfrozen ponds filled with water used for cooling research equipment,…Read more...

I get it. The Kindle and its ability to shop for and instantly buy books anywhere using wifi or Whispernet are incredibly convenient, and it’s what’s made Amazon’s hardware the obvious choice for consuming ebooks. But supporting awful companies like Amazon is getting harder and harder if you were born with a…Read more...

The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Army Corps of Engineers just removed federal protections for hundreds of thousands of small waterways and many of the nation’s wetlands. Later today, EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler will announce the change at a conference of the National…Read more...

It’s impossible to go a day here in San Francisco without hearing the words ‘tech’ and ‘gentrification’ in the same sentence. And with the tension compounded by outlandish housing costs, a homeless crisis, and fears over major cultural changes being inflicted onto the city, you start to see a culture where it’s easy…Read more...

DirecTV is rushing to move one of its satellites to a higher orbit due to the likelihood it will go boom, pow, kablam, rattle-rattle-bang, Space News reported on Wednesday.

Some of the most impressive custom Lego creations are models that actually do something, like AI-powered brick sorters, a life-size drivable go-kart, and even a machine that can solve Rubik’s Cubes. But over on YouTube’s Brick Experiment Channel they’ve created what could be the first flying drone made almost entirely…Read more...

The Oscars (and most Hollywood awards, for that matter) might be notorious for ignoring women directors but fortunately, genre cinema doesn’t feel the same way. In fact, some of our most anticipated superhero, fantasy, sci-fi, and horror films are directed by women. Imagine that!Read more...

Tinder today has announced it’s rolling out new features to help better protect users both on and off the platform, including by releasing a kind of “panic button” for real-world meetups.Read more...

The idea that fright or any other kind of stress can turn hair white has endured for centuries. But a new study this week—in mice—provides some of the first concrete evidence of this phenomenon existing. It might also offer a biological explanation for how it happens.Read more...

One of the few joys left in buying stuff online is getting a text alert that your package is on its way. But even that has become a cause for concern now thanks to a new scam that disguises scam texts as FedEx shipping notifications.Read more...

Engineers have developed robots that are capable of picking up objects as delicate as eggs or grapes without damaging them, but soon they could handle even the smallest and most fragile components using a new gripper design that can lift and manipulate objects without actually touching them.Read more...

Typically, blog posts open with a broad statement establishing a thesis, which the writer then substantiates with evidence in order to make a point. In exceptional cases, there’s just information so senseless that it needs no interpretation; in others, the writer isn’t positioned to take a stance on an issue when it’s…Read more...

We are 100 seconds to midnight, which means doomsday has never been closer. Deadass.

Have you ever wondered what an ancient Egyptian mummy would sound like if it could talk? A wild new scientific experiment has finally answered this burning question, but the result is perhaps less impressive (and certainly less ominous) than you might think.

A Cuisinel Gold Box, Vizio surround sound system, hot honey, and Harry Potter wands lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Richard Madden takes flight in even more new Eternals set pictures. Disney is turning to luchador superheroics. Winn’s getting a costume upgrade in new Supergirl pictures. Plus, a creepy new clip from Color Out of Space, what’s to come on Riverdale, and the new Saw movie might have a mysterious title. Spoilers go!

We’re not even through the first month of 2020, and we already broke the record for the day with the most carbon dioxide in all of human history.

He’s a little older. He’s not on a starship. He’s haunted by tragedies of years past. He’s drinking a lot more wine these days. But it would be fair to say that, deep down, Captain Jean-Luc Picard is not a man truly changed when we meet him again in the premiere of Star Trek: Picard. That’s not the question we should…Read more...

I’ve always been a sloucher. It’s impossible to be a tech blogger, curled over a keyboard most hours of the day, and not have terrible posture. I only realized how big of a problem it was after a recent yoga class. While lying down in corpse pose, the class instructor walked past, looked at my shriveled body, and…Read more...

Two more cities in China are being placed on lockdown in an attempt by Chinese authorities to control the spread of a deadly new virus called 2019-nCoV and avoid a global epidemic. The SARS-like virus has killed at least 17 people and sickened more than 570, spreading to at least four countries outside China so far.

A novel analysis of the skeletal remains of Vesuvius victims who sought shelter during the catastrophic eruption 2,000 years ago suggests they endured a slower death than is typically appreciated.

Three American firefighters died in a plane crash while battling Australia’s bushfires in the state of New South Wales on Thursday, according to authorities in the region. It’s not immediately clear what caused the firefighting air tanker to crash.Read more...

Microsoft inadvertently left hundreds of millions of customer service and support requests exposed on several servers without password protection from Dec. 5 to Dec. 31, 2019, the company’s Security Response Center wrote on a blog post on Wednesday.

For the first time in U.S. history, an election conducted by smartphone is underway. The race, a board of supervisors election in King County, Washington, is small potatoes compared to, say, a presidential election, but the world is watching to see how it turns out.

In early 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took a sweeping tour of the U.S. as part of a strategy to rebrand Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy as a modernizing force and pull off his “Vision 2030” plan—hobnobbing with a list of corporate execs and politicians that reads like a who’s who list of the U.S. elite.…Read more...

Game of Thrones’ series finale came, we watched it, and...that was that. But according to George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones’ final season could have potentially worked out much differently had an early pitch to HBO for the series gone differently.Read more...

While attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, a few thoughts tumbled across the barren dunes of our president’s skull space, out through his mouth hole and out onto Squawk Box today. He spoke with the program’s co-host Joe Kernen of tax cuts, the impeachment inquiry, the Fed’s balance sheet, relations with China…Read more...

Spoiling the fun of wondering whether you could be sharing your next flight with an emotional support peacock or perhaps even a miniature horse, the U.S. Department of Transportation is looking to crack down on the practice of bringing non-service-trained animals onto commercial flights.Read more...

She’s voiced Wonder Woman and Batgirl, and appeared in Sin City, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Defenders. And yet, despite that incredible comic book resumé, Rosario Dawson has never lead her own comic book project. Until now.Read more...

Public concern about the climate and plastic crises is surging, and more and more brands are developing more sustainable business practices to cash in on said concern. But not Coca-Cola, which is doubling down and blaming consumers for its choice.Read more...

Like most companies in the tech realm, Twitter is no stranger to weirdly hollow apologies. Some of the company’s greatest hits happened when it was grilled on offensive trending topics (whoops!), leaking account info to hackers (oopsie!), and failing to deal with the harassment-filled cesspool a lot of us know the…Read more...

As an outbreak of a newly discovered SARS-like virus threatens to spiral out of control in China, some scientists think they’ve uncovered its animal origins. Their new research suggests the virus is native to snakes.