Gizmodo

Incredible video taken last night in Australia shows what was likely the late-stage of a Russian rocket burning up on re-entry, in a light show that was seen across the southeast portions of the country.

After shutting down its US-based repair centers over two months ago as a result of the pandemic, Nintendo is starting to reopen them again, which is good news for Switch owners still dealing with Joy-Con drift. Hacker Matteo Pisani came up with a different solution: a Switch without joysticks is a Switch that never…Read more...

When stay-at-home orders were first issued, wearing the Muse S headband, a smart headband intended to help you practice mindfulness and meditation, seemed like a good idea. I am an overly anxious person with too much brain poisoning from Twitter and I’m weathering lockdown in a cramped studio apartment with my partner…Read more...

Earlier this year, Airbus unveiled a sleek new concept aircraft with a blended wing that looked incredibly futuristic. And while it looks like it could have been ripped out of a sci-fi movie from the 2010s, the plane concept also has many elements of retro-futurism. Specifically, the plane looks similar to the…Read more...

Alan Menken has joined Skydance’s new fantasy musical. Mike McMahan discusses the dynamics between the hapless stars of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Scooter and Skeeter are coming to the Muppet Babies reboot. Plus, Shudder taps a new western-horror film, bad news for Emergence, and what’s to come on The 100. Spoilers now!

Alabama is running out of ICU beds to treat coronavirus patients, according to the mayor of Montgomery, the second largest city in the state. The dire news comes as Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, continues to lift restrictions put in place last month to slow the spread of covid-19.

In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Google’s adding a long-overdue feature to its Maps app that puts details about a location’s accessibility facilities front and center.

Facebook is the latest tech giant to broaden its telecommuting policies in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In a livestreamed employee townhall Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to “aggressively” ramp up hiring for remote workers and begin taking applications for permanent remote work among…Read more...

But only some. You know how Christopher Nolan is.

Earlier today, Cult of Mac posted the most egregious rumor: Apple is apparently crafting a pair of special edition augmented reality glasses that will look like Steve Jobs’s moderately iconic ones. Apple will then reportedly sell these glasses for money. The claim comes from Jon Prosser, a YouTuber who has made waves…Read more...

Fitbit owners wear their watches and fitness trackers day and night, which gives the company tons of data about their health. Fitbit is now launching a study to determine whether all of that data can be used to diagnose covid-19 before any noticeable symptoms—including fever and cough—even begin.Read more...

Cluck, cluck, cluck, puk puk pukaaak—that’s the sound a Ford makes, apparently.

A brewing fight in the U.S. House of Representatives over the future of internet privacy came to head on Thursday during a Democratic caucus call in which party leadership allegedly misportrayed the position of one of their most senior members.

Netflix is planning to purge its service of subscribers whose accounts are no longer actively being used—but you may have a chance to save your precious streaming data if you resubscribe before it’s wiped.

It’s neither an asteroid nor a comet but something in between. It’s also parked within Jupiter’s orbit, making this object the first of its kind to ever be detected.

Vivo teased some pretty ambitious tech with its Apex 2020 concept phone, but now it’s putting one of those far-out innovations into something you might actually be able to buy.Read more...

Community platform Nextdoor is courting police across the country, creating concerns among civil rights and privacy advocates who worry about possible conflicts of interest, over-reporting of crime, and the platform’s record of racial profiling, per a Thursday report by CityLab.

Yesterday afternoon, Apple and Google’s highly anticipated contact-tracing tech was officially rolled out, with Apple already baking it into the backend of its latest update. The question now is whether it’ll be the godsend for public health that both of the tech giants initially pitched, or if doubts surrounding the…Read more...

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, along with several states, are muddling the statistics on covid-19 testing, according to reporting from The Atlantic and other media outlets. They have combined the results of two different types of tests in their tallies released to the public, only one of which is…Read more...

A joint poll between University of Maryland researchers and the Washington Post released this week found most consumers, for a variety of reasons, are either unable or unwilling to download the proposed contact-tracing tech Apple and Google are developing to track the spread of the coronavirus. While some consumers in…Read more...

I was minding my own business last night, gaming real hard like I do, when I took a break from blasting away grubs in Gears Tactics to check Twitter. It didn’t take long before for the powers that be punished me for my poor choices by forcing me to look at an old PlayStation controller with all of its buttons missing.Read more...

The dam failures that flooded entire swaths of Michigan on Wednesday didn’t just happen by chance. Boyce Hydro, the company that owns the two dams, has a history of ignoring federal regulations designed to prevent disasters like the floods from happening.Read more...

Yesterday, Twitter announced that it was testing a new feature that allows users to limit who can and can’t reply to their tweets. While this will make it more difficult for people to harass others on the platform, this feature could prevent constituents from replying to publicly elected officials. A Twitter…Read more...

In the wake of school closures necessitated by the current covid-19 crisis, the College Board—the organization that oversees Advanced Placement Exams—is being sued by a group of students who claim that it knew of and even acknowledged issues with at-home testing that could disproportionately affect some students and…Read more...

Have you been laid off or furloughed? Are you a frontline worker dealing with new stresses or irresponsible management? Is working (or not working) from home starting to take a psychological toll? Submit a story using this Google form or send me an email with the subject line “My Covid Story” and provide as much…Read more...

Prophecies, ancient sisterhoods, a bible that’s orange for some reason. Religion in Dune can be a bit confusing. To help, io9 parsed the main, spoiler-free stuff you need to know before Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation arrives this December.

A lake on the outskirts of Portland, Maine, became a highly unusually scene last summer when a kayaker happened upon a dead bald eagle floating face down, pierced through the heart.

Scams and creepers abound on Facebook Messenger. To combat them, Facebook is now turning to artificial intelligence. A new AI-powered safety feature for Messenger will now help people, particularly kids, identify bad actors and notify them about suspect accounts—all without reading the actual messages themselves.

A team working to restore a historic building at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland have stumbled upon numerous items hidden by prisoners inside a chimney.Read more...

One can spend hours combing through the web looking up his or her next procurement and it can get a little lonely when there aren’t meets to attend and fellow fans to hang out with. Luckily for Mike and Amanda Kieler, they’ve found solidarity in collecting togther, even if their collections are wildly different.

Samsung Galaxy Buds+ | $120 | eBayRead more...

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back has been around for so long, it’s easy to forget how much it changed Star Wars. In the 40 years since its release, all of the sequel’s characters, planets, ships, and ideas, have become core pieces of the franchise. But upon release, no one knew what a Force Ghost was. Or who Lando…Read more...

If you’re going to put a smart speaker in your home that disregards your privacy and functions only to rake in profits from you in any way possible, it might as well be a disembodied interactive version of Futurama’s Bender instead of Siri, Alexa, or Google Assistant. “Bite my shiny metal ask me anything.”Read more...

Lifehacker Managing Editor Joel Cunningham had a quirky quarantine-inspired question the other day: His three-year-old keeps on mashing the brightly colored buttons on his MacBook’s Touch Bar, prematurely ending his participation in various video chats. Cute as that might be [Managing editor’s note: IT’S NOT CUTE], he…Read more...

No matter what kills the heroes of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s upcoming adaptation of Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández’s comic book The Old Guard, their inexplicable ability to heal ensures that they always rise back up from the dead ready and willing to take out anyone dumb enough to fight them. The movie’s first trailer…Read more...

It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell is taking on the superhero genre. Steven Soderbergh believes Bill & Ted Face the Music is the perfect movie for our current moment. Don Mancini teases Chucky’s goals in the Child’s Play TV show. Plus, a new look at Doom Patrol’s return, and what’s to come when Harley Quinn takes on…Read more...

Four months after AMD announced SmartShift, we’re finally getting a taste of the new technology that will feature in a whole lot of gaming laptops going forward—as well as Sony’s PS5 later this year. Today, Dell launched the G5 15 SE, a new laptop equipped with the brand new Ryzen 4000 series CPU and the Radeon RX…Read more...

A new analysis of 250 studies has found that the negative impacts of deep sea mining would be severe and could last millions of years.

Even if you and your family haven’t been financially affected by the global pandemic we’re living through, no one can deny that these are very uncertain economic times. That means you might want to consider cutting down on your monthly expenditures—and that includes all those music, movie, cloud storage, and software…Read more...

Charlie Kirk, the leader of a right-wing advocacy organization called Turning Point USA and a frequent guest on Fox News, sent out a tweet yesterday with a shocking claim. Kirk posted a photo showing someone in New Mexico who had been sent “multiple ballots multiple times,” and suggested it was evidence of voter…Read more...

Insignia 32" 720p Fire TV | $130 | AmazonRead more...

Congress is poised to pass legislation that would place several powerful surveillance tools back into the hands of federal law enforcement agencies that have a history of abusing their authority. But bipartisan support is now mounting to increase privacy protections around Americans who’ve been spied on by their…Read more...

Four U.S. senators are pressuring the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to “closely monitor the negotiations” between Uber and food delivery giant Grubhub Seamless to merge their parasitic services into one market-dominating giant.

Though there’s no Game of Thrones reunion special scheduled anytime soon, HBO alums Peter Dinklage and Jason Momoa are about to partner up for a different sort of adventure involving conniving warriors trying to murder each other for personal gain. This time, though, the story’s going to involve Draculas and the…Read more...

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Robert Redfield is on thin ice at the White House, according to a Wednesday report by CNN, with sources telling the network Redfield is personally concerned that he may be out of a job during the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

BB-8, the spherical orange and white robot that makes whirring noises as cute as kitten purrs doesn’t exactly seem cut out for use in a police force or military. It’s a great toy, but not designed for detonating bombs, sniffing drugs, or whatever else those agencies use robots for. But Sphero, an educational STEM toy…Read more...

We can’t go to theme parks right now. That means no funnel cakes, no turkey legs, no churros, and definitely no roller coasters. What wouldn’t any one of us give to scream our head off on a roller coaster right now? Well, it turns out, you may have one or two in your movie collection.Read more...

AT&T’s use of 5G E to disguise what is really just 4G LTE has been bullshit since the beginning, and after other carriers complained and a lengthy review process by the National Advertising Review Board, AT&T will finally a stop using its misleading branding. Well, sort of.Read more...

A 14,000-year-old genome scraped from a prehistoric tooth found in southern Siberia is now the oldest known connection linking living Native Americans to North America’s first migrants.Read more...

HBO Max, the super-packed streaming product that launches next week, is doing a pretty good job at positioning itself as a streaming service for nerds—including by ensuring that it’s available across multiple gaming consoles on launch day.Read more...