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People riding electric-powered bikes are more likely to risk serious injury than those on conventional bikes and motorized scooters, according to a recent study. But e-scooters have their own unique health risks, too.Read more...

Despite the privacy concerns, labor strikes, and reports that Amazon is selling literal trash on its platform—in the face of all of the myriad reasons shoppers should have avoided buying through Amazon this year—the company still made a killing this season.Read more...

Scientists have linked two silicon quantum bits with photons over a relatively large distance. The new advance could end up being a watershed moment for a lesser-known quantum computing processor architecture, bringing silicon quantum computer a step closer to reality.Read more...

“If we don’t get it, shut it down” is a staple call-and-response of worker protests for good reason. Even without a clear antecedent, the meaning is obvious to bosses: these are out demands. Meet them, or you may find the usual means of extracting profit difficult. This week, Amazon saw the outcomes it set itself up…Read more...

The planet is in rough shape due to rising carbon emissions, and the world’s governments don’t seem to be in any hurry to change course. That has us on a collision course with dramatic climate change, and that has at least some scientists looking at a dramatic, last resort: dimming the sun to cool the Earth.Read more...

There’s a big, if unintentional, consequence of Baby Yoda’s existence. Because we were told how old the little guy is (50) and we think we have a decent understanding of how old Baby Yoda is developmentally (approximately 18 months) considering what we’ve seen of his actions so far in The Mandalorian, we can infer how…Read more...

A woman’s years-long beauty regimen caused severe mercury poisoning and irreversible neurological damage, say her doctors in a recent case report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this month.Read more...

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Turkey’s Constitutional Court ruled 10-6 on Thursday that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government violated civil liberties with its April 2017 ban on access to Wikipedia, the Associated Press reports.

Peacock is getting more movies. Unfortunately, not all of them will be great.Read more...

Back in the 1960s, Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev claimed there was a secret project going on deep in the country. It had a ship—this half-plane, half-boat contraption—that was capable of breaking the land speed records of the era while carrying an unprecedented amount of cargo. These projects were called…Read more...

Social media and news headlines are ablaze with talk of the red giant star Betelgeuse since astronomers noted that it’s growing fainter than ever before. Yes, the red giant star is growing closer to the end of its life, and that end will likely be explosive.

You can get comprehensive lists of everything coming to streaming services anywhere. But half of those titles you don’t care about, and the other half are terrible. Where’s the good stuff? io9 is here to help.

Reader, I’m sure you came to Earther expecting news of the impending climate apocalypse just as I woke up today expecting to write about it. But instead we’ve both improbably arrived here, at a blog where I am about to explain that Cats is, in fact, a documentary. Or at least there’s one thing that’s not totally made…Read more...

A Holiday Decor Gold Box, EVOO 11.6" Ultra-Thin Laptop, and a Walmart Toy Clearance Sale lead off Thursday’s best deals from around the web.Read more...

There’s a lot of reasons why you should probably chuck that DNA kit you got for Christmas in the trash. That’s doubly true for military personnel, the Pentagon warned in an internal memo.Read more...

In 1962, John F. Kennedy predicted, wrongly, that his administration would ultimately be measured by its contribution to the human spirit. Fifty-seven years and about 3,000 Wikipedia revisions later, history has proven that the only presidential measurement that matters is height—a president’s height relative to the…Read more...

In an ideal world, you’ll connect all of your devices up to fast, free-flowing wifi wherever you happen to be, but away from home you’ll often run into restrictions: Maybe only a certain number of devices can be connected per user, or maybe wired Ethernet access is free but wifi comes at a premium.Read more...

Dangerous, toxic chemicals are everywhere: in your furniture, on your walls, and even on your dinner plate. These harmful substances should’ve been banned long before they made it into anyone’s home, but perhaps they’ll finally meet their fate in the roar this new decade will bring.

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You can’t buy Tesla’s electric Cybertruck yet, but you can get a vehicle that looks pretty close. All you need is 666,666 rubles ($10,800) and a laidback attitude. Why a laidback attitude? The fake Tesla-branded hubcaps are probably going to fall off, judging by a new video of the thing tearing through a parking lot…Read more...

Holiday Decor Gold Box | Amazon

Scientists cooled LEGOs to nearly absolute zero—and hope to one day incorporate a LEGO-style material into a quantum computer.

The last solar eclipse of the decade—and the only annular solar eclipse of the year—will be visible in Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa starting just a few hours after this article’s publication.

Nothing in life is as boring as email, so I’ll make this quick: If you want to achieve inbox zero—that is, no unread emails in your inbox—the best way to do it is to just click “select all” and “mark all as read.” Boom, inbox zero.

As one decade ends and another stretches out before us, it’s time to put old debates behind us and start anew. Today, we settle the debate on how long content should be.Read more...

The Green New Deal is visionary approach to climate politics and American life. If passed, it would completely transform how Americans live from where we call home to how we get our power to the fundamental outlines of the economy. It’s no small thing, and frankly, I get why it can be scary to some.Read more...

Put aside any notions that research is a dull cycle of routine. For scientists who do field work, collecting data means taking risks, exploring remote areas, sleeping outside, and encountering wild animals and extreme weather.Read more...

At least two tech review sites are discussing whether to rescind their positive recommendations of Ring’s home surveillance cameras, a leading digital-rights organization announced this week.

In a recent interview with Out, Dame Judi Dench mused about her relationship to Cats and described how she sees her character, Old Deuteronomy as trans because the role has traditionally been portrayed by male actors. Actors really do say the darnedest things, don’t they?Read more...

Former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg has reportedly severed ties with a company that used prison labor to place calls on behalf of Bloomberg’s presidential campaign, the Intercept reports.

A Bloomberg report on Monday evening said that ByteDance is considering selling off a majority stake in its incredibly popular and fantastically annoying music app, TikTok, amid intensifying U.S. government concerns that the China-based company is a security and espionage threat. However, the firm has denied the reportRead more...

Even viewed from a distance on Twitter, business news has developed its own subgenre of macabre spectacle: the disgrace of the corporate goon. It’s 2019, the Theranos documentary has come and gone, but not a day passes without a new tale of executive melodrama. We look on with amusement at their berserk 2 AM Twitter…Read more...

Christmas Eve news dump: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the man behind the ride-hailing company’s meteoric global rise despite its highly speculative business model that’s never turned a profit, is leaving its board of directors, Uber said in a statement on Tuesday. He’s also dumped all of his remaining stock in the…Read more...

My computer needs are different from pretty much all of my coworkers at Gizmodo. I’m not a gamer, I’m not looking to build my own PC. I don’t even need to use it to word process all that much—I’m a social editor, only occasionally moonlighting as a blogger. So when the 2012 MacBook Pro I had shat the bed two years…Read more...

It can take a new technology decades to fully mature into a product that’s reliable and genuinely useful. Computers and mobile phones have arguably reached that point, but the smart home is barely a teenager by comparison, and as it starts to go through puberty it’s revealing a troubling, rebellious side.

I love the holidays. I love the coquito, the lights, and Christmas music. In fact, I’m listening to Kacey Musgraves’ Christmas album as I write this.Read more...

It’s time to look ahead to the coming year and all things that will be happening in space exploration. With new missions to Mars, a probe returning to Earth with samples taken from an asteroid, and even more batches of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites going into orbit, it’s going to be another fascinating year.Read more...

Beleaguered taxi giants Uber and Lyft won a break on Monday, scoring victory in a New York state court dispute over a law that would have dramatically slashed the number of cars between jobs that the firms let clog up Manhattan streets, Reuters reported.

Former New York City mayor, billionaire, and longshot presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg—who is definitely, totally not just a clueless rich guy running a widely unpopular vanity campaign—is pouring a considerable portion of his gratuitous wealth into a digital advertising firm he founded this year, CNBC reported.

This past weekend, Geralt of Rivia got moody, got on his horse, and “hmmed” his way onto Netflix for the first season of The Witcher. While our review got into a few of the things that worked or didn’t over the first five episodes, with the full season out, we took a spoiler-filled look at a few of our biggest likes…Read more...

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is here, which means it’s over.Read more...

CES typically isn’t a major show for smartphones, but this year could be different now that a Korean newspaper is reporting that Samsung will announce two new phones at CES 2020.Read more...

Even for the best of us, running a marathon can be hellish. But for one 37-year-old man running his first 100-mile ultramarathon in California, the experience became a downright nightmare when he vomited so hard that he tore a hole in his esophagus.Read more...

A Chinese hacking group believed to operate on behalf of the Beijing government has learned how to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) in attacks on government and industry targets, ZDNet reported on Monday.

President Donald Trump is determined on ensuring the Keystone XL Pipeline becomes a reality, including trying to squash lawsuits against him and the project. A court ruled Friday, however, against his motion to dismiss an ongoing lawsuit that could stop the 1,184-mile-long crude oil pipeline.Read more...

North American coyotes don’t live in South America, but new research suggests that could change, should deforestation in Central America continue.

A group of U.S. lawmakers on Monday raised concerns about the proposed sale of the .org top-level domain to a private equity firm by the organization created to manage it, a deal that has drawn significant scrutiny from digital rights groups and nonprofits since it was first announced last month.

So many great (and occasionally terrible) movies came out this year (more on them as a whole later this week), but within the genre films of 2019, there were individual moments that delighted or disappointed us. Allow us to share them with you.Read more...

A 22-year-old boss backed by a gangster cabal of “internet buddies” has been thwarted and convicted in their attempt to blackmail Apple, the UK’s National Crime Agency reports. In 2017, London-based Kerem Albayrak made Apple an offer they couldn’t refuse: deliver $100,000 in iTunes gift cards or $75,000 in…Read more...