Gizmodo

A fire that engulfed a primate enclosure at Germany’s Krefeld Zoo has resulted in the deaths of at least 30 animals. The blaze, which began shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, is being attributed to the illicit use of sky lanterns.

Citing the hard-fought victories and tireless dedication of disability activists like Judith Heumann and Joyce Ardell Jackson, Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday unveiled an exhaustive plan to support the equal opportunity and self-determination of Americans with disabilities—pledging to ensure that advancements in…Read more...

A workout Gold Box, Home Depot Christmas decor sale, discounted Anker car charger, and Batman: The Animated Series lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

Toyota’s North American CEO, Jim Lentz, predicted back in 2009 that by 2020 the world would hit peak oil—the idea that the world’s demand for oil would exceed the world’s supply of oil. And since we’ve officially entered the year 2020, it feels like an appropriate time to look at whether his prediction was correct.…Read more...

In 2019, Apple pushed out iOS 13 and Google launched Android 10—both polished, mature mobile operating systems that offer just about every feature you could want... or do they? We’ve got some ideas about how Apple and Google might go further with these OSes in 2020.Read more...

James Gunn says he won’t bring Yondu back from the grave for the third Guardians of the Galaxy. Nicholas Pesce reveals his plans for even more Grudge movies. Plus, a new glimpse at the next Mobile Suit Gundam movie, and what’s to come on this Sunday’s Doctor Who. Here’s to a new year of spoilers!

The biggest problem with even the smartest robovacs is that they’re not actually that smart. They can navigate your home and avoid collisions with large pieces of furniture, but smaller obstacles, like hazards left behind by pets, they’ll simply plow right through creating even larger messes. Lucy, a new robot vacuum…Read more...

Energy, Diet and Workout Essentials Gold Box | AmazonRead more...

In her first public statement since a top United Nations official equated her imprisonment to torture, former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning reaffirmed her pledge to remain in jail rather than testify before a grand jury investigating WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Music streaming made a killing this decade as far as U.S. market domination—and more and more users are willing to pay for it too, according to statistics from the Recording Industry Association of America.Read more...

After raising the age restriction on vaping and other tobacco products to 21, the Food and Drug Administration is reportedly readying to ban all pod-based e-cigarette flavors except menthol and tobacco.Read more...

ExxonMobil sent out a heartwarming tweet yesterday, wishing the good people of Australia a “safe” and “fun” New Year. Well, maybe heartwarming isn’t the right word. Perhaps “idiotic” is more appropriate, given the fact that large parts of Australia are currently on fire thanks in part to ExxonMobil’s history of…Read more...

If you’ve bought an Apple laptop in the last few years and you try out the new 16-inch MacBook Pro, you will be furious. It’s so good. It works precisely as a laptop should—the issues that have plagued Apple’s laptops in recent years seem absent. Everything about the device seems to follow an age-old Apple edict the…Read more...

Today isn’t just a day to nurse your hangover from New Year’s Eve—it’s also a day to celebrate the public domain. Movies, books, music, and more from 1924 are all entering the public domain today, meaning that you’re free to download, upload, and share these titles however you see fit. And it’s completely legal.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the impending climate apocalypse. I mean, c’mon, I write about it for a living. However, with this clear understanding of where humanity is headed if we don’t get our shit together comes a lot of fear and anxiety. How do I deal with such feelings? Why, plans and preparation, of…Read more...

If you switch on two-factor authentication (2FA) on your accounts—and you really should—then you need something else besides a username and a password when you log in on a new device. That’s where a good authenticator app comes in.Read more...

Julian Assange is slurring his speech and worried about dying in prison, according to a new report from British journalist and former Army officer Vaughan Smith. The journalist spoke with Russian state TV network RT on Tuesday and revealed that Assange called him over the phone from Britain’s Belmarsh prison on…Read more...

Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is currently running Facebook ads in Spanish, a decision that’s perhaps a little strange coming from a president who’s previously criticized others for speaking the language in the United States.

On Monday, Microsoft announced that it had taken control of 50 domains associated with a hackers believed to be operating out of North Korea. Unsealed court documents show that the domains include “hotrnall.com,” “office356-us.org,” and “mai1.info,” among other copycat URLs.

Lots of people have two arms. Far fewer can say they have one on a shelf by their sink. A 37-year-old Canadian man recently joined this exclusive club, turning his amputated limb into a unique conversation piece thanks to a helpful taxidermist—and a hungry colony of beetles.Read more...

President Donald Trump on Monday signed into law a bill that aims to curb annoying spam robocalls that have saturated our recent-call lists over the past few years. And it might help! At the very least, it will make us feel like someone is trying to do something about this relentless mess.

As far as we can tell, the 2010s were nothing close to what most of us expected. Instead of flying cars, we got half-baked semi-autonomous vehicles. Instead of social media birthing kumbaya, it fueled genocide and helped erode the foundations of democracy and reality itself. Rather than tackle the impending doom of…Read more...

Another year has come and gone and with it so, so, so many nerd blogs. Here are the ones you, dear io9 readers, clicked on the most. A big thank you and a Happy New Year to all of you.

Last year after a somewhat lackluster product cycle, I said Samsung couldn’t afford to hold back anymore. And in 2019, it seems Samsung took that message to heart because it released some of the most exciting phone tech we’ve seen in the last 12 months.Read more...

In the last week and a half, two Star Wars sagas have come to a close. First The Rise of Skywalker wrapped up the sequel trilogy, followed this past Friday by season one finale of the first live-action Star Wars TV series, The Mandalorian. Only one of these stories managed to unite and delight the bulk of the…Read more...

This is the time of year when we talk about nice things. Hopeful things.

When asked to be interviewed for this blog, a team of emoji designers for a major emoji platform requested to see the text of the article before publication, for fear of violating their company’s contract. This isn’t rare; media representatives and other employees potentially facing reprisal do this all the time (and…Read more...

Over a decade in, the value proposition of Twitter as a medium is murky, not easily defined—though one area it undoubtedly excels is allowing important people to show every embarrassing contour of their entire ass to the rest of the world. Albeit buried under months or years of less interesting posts, miraculously,…Read more...

Gadgets have to work a lot harder to suck in 2019 than they have in years past. They have to bankrupt companies, reveal our data, or be so overpriced they even make Apple look cheap. The gadgets below did all that, but some went even further. Some were pointless Skymall dreck, and some nearly ruined much nicer and…Read more...

The ongoing Australian bushfire crisis has forced thousands of people in the southeast part of the country to flee towards waterfronts, Bloomberg reported, with an estimated 4,000-5,000 individuals in Mallacoota in Victoria state sheltering on beaches and piers as flames swept in on Tuesday.

Democratic presidential contender and Joe Biden has some advice for the recently disrupted: learn to program.

There were a lot of interesting video games that came out in 2019, with deep and complex stories that are begging for the big screen. Of course, seems like even the popularity of shows like The Witcher might not be enough to break the video game movie curse...but could one of 2019's games finally succeed?Read more...

Science fiction would not be what it is today without the influence of Syd Mead. Mead, a futurist and industrial designer whose work on films such as Blade Runner, Tron, and Aliens, died early this morning at the age of 86. Curbed confirmed the sad news.Read more...

Trashing your old electronics is bad for the planet—a big reason why you might’ve noticed tech companies push sustainability programs in recent years. Sonos recently joined the recycle brigade in October, launching its Trade Up hardware upgrade program that gives users discounts if they “responsibly recycle older…Read more...

Much like its protagonist, Nathan Drake, the Uncharted movie keeps falling off a cliff.Read more...

California is becoming a monument to how much businesses surveil and abuse its residents, as apps and stores are scrambling to put up “Do Not Sell My Info” notices in compliance with the state’s hefty data privacy law.Read more...

Netflix’s “best of” content rankings reek of bullshit. And based on Netflix’s own metrics for popularity, they are.Read more...

The 2010s will be remembered as the decade when we could no longer deny climate change.Read more...

ProtonMail—an email service that makes it stupid-easy to encrypt communication—has now made it stupid-easy to encrypt your schedule.Read more...

Researchers working in the Outer Hebrides island chain off the west coast of Scotland have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown rock monument located within a stone’s throw of the iconic Calanais Standing Stones.Read more...

In its quest to create new ways to make its denizens dissociate from reality, Snapchat is launching a cartoon series that puts user avatars in the episodes.

Over the past ten years, smartwatches have gone from futuristic tech relegated to sci-fi flicks to something so common, it’s not a surprise to multiple people sporting them on your daily commute. These wrist-sized computers can’t do quite as much as your smartphone, but these days the modern wristable can do…Read more...

Star Wars has dominated much of the pop culture landscape in the past several years, but 2019 was ridiculous. With one saga of films ending, a whole new era of TV starting, the hype leading to both, and then all matter of other media, there’s a chance we’ll never have as much Star Wars as 2019 provided. Then there was…Read more...

An Indiana woman who poisoned her 15-year-old son with his own feces while he was on chemotherapy in 2016 is now set to spend more than a half-decade behind bars.Read more...

Who’d have thought the company that developed a discreet and highly addictive nicotine product would have trouble preventing its very own employees from using it in the workplace?Read more...

Proles were enthralled to discover in the wee hours of this morning that Sharon Stone is on Bumble, the dating app where ~ladies~ make the first move. Around 1 AM EST, she tweeted a screenshot showing that her account had been disabled; after what must have been a furious few hours for the Bumble customer service team…Read more...

Disgraced Chinese scientist He Jiankui has been sentenced to three years in jail for creating the world’s first genetically modified human babies.

After four generations of Pixel phones, one might imagine that Google with its vast resources and massive reach would be enjoying a similar position to what Apple enjoyed following the launch of the iPhone 4, or at least something close to that. But even after accounting for a wildly different gadget landscape and the…Read more...

Coal may continue to reign in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has proposed to skip a carbon tax on this dangerous fossil fuel, according to documents Reuters reviewed. Given how urgent the climate crisis is becoming, the world simply cannot afford any more handouts to the coal industry.Read more...

Making your own digital camera sensor isn’t as complicated as you’d think, as YouTube hardware hacker Sean Hodgins discovered. But you’ll need a solid understanding of electronics, an immense amount of patience, a steady soldering hand, and very low expectations of how your homebrew hardware will perform.Read more...