Gizmodo

Time and time again, tech companies have promised a future where commuters will be able to zip around in the flying cars from The Jetsons. And time and time again, that just hasn’t happened.

Why has something that’s become synonymous with streaming seemingly so controversial?Read more...

As disinformation and misinformation have increasingly been blamed for rising political extremism and polarization in the U.S., lawmakers have naturally sought to cobble together some sort of legislative response. The problem is that Congress is, themselves, so polarized that they can’t seem to agree on how to do…Read more...

Chances are you’re probably familiar with using a command like, “OK Google,” “Hey Siri,” or “Alexa” to summon a voice assistant. But now, the company that brought you pokes and likes—and who could forget fake news?— is trying to add, “Hey Facebook” to your rotation.

Here is a completely normal and totally not-nefarious thing that is happening: Scientists from the Pentagon sent a solar panel about the size of a pizza box up to space to test if it’s possible to send extraterrestrial electricity back to Earth.Read more...

Twitter is finally rolling out a way to get paid for tweeting that doesn’t involve putting a Venmo link in your bio, promoting a Patreon, or using the app to hunt for a rich spouse.

San Francisco-based startup Framework just announced a thin, lightweight productivity laptop unlike any other on the market right now. Sure, it looks similar to the aluminum options almost every other laptop maker offers, but this laptop can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that others just can’t.

While around 5,800 Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama vote on whether to unionize, Amazon has been trying to win over hearts and minds with a slew of ham-handed anti-union propaganda in their warehouse bathroom stalls, on their phones, and now on the Amazon-owned streaming service Twitch. Earlier this week,…Read more...

Just two months after running a full-page ad decrying Apple’s impending updates, Facebook is rolling out another campaign meant to defend the targeted ads that make up about 98% of its multi-billion dollar revenue stream.Read more...

Winter has receded in Europe this week. Temperature records are falling as unseasonably warm weather sweeps across the continent delivering an early spring thaw, even while neighboring Russia is simultaneously going through a deep freeze.

Wall Street is abuzz with the news of two new tech IPO filings—called S-1s in the parlance —for crypto exchange Coinbase and cloud host Digitalocean. These two companies are doing solid business even during the pandemic. After all, what can people do when stuck at home but trade bitcoin and play with new websites?Read more...

Many miles off the western coast of the Americas, an undersea cable connects Los Angeles, California to Valparaiso, Chile. Stretched end-to-end, it’s equal to four-fifths of the Earth’s diameter. The cable is fiber optic; it’s a lifeline for data transmitted between the two continents. But according to new research,…Read more...

Rumors that Samsung may potentially ditch Tizen, its proprietary OS for wearables, for Google’s Wear OS, have been flying lately. It’s a baffling idea, considering that Samsung smartwatches are the best Android-friendly smartwatches right now, and Wear OS is a stinking hot mess.Read more...

There’s more to 5G than overblown marketing hype and some really weird (and in some cases, dangerous) conspiracy theories. Here’s what you actually need to know: 5G offers faster download and upload speeds, more bandwidth, lower latency, and enough throughput to support a household of people trying to connect to the…Read more...

“Shadow flicker” from wind turbines, concerns about sparrow habitat on landfills, and worries about “toxic chemicals” from solar panels are just some of the ways municipalities are slowing down renewables installation.Read more...

Large meat-eating dinosaurs took on the role of multiple species while growing up, resulting in a shocking lack of ecological diversity during the Mesozoic, according to new research.

Finally, you can sort the music in your Liked Songs playlist on Spotify.

Author Marissa Meyer (Lunar Chronicles, Heartless) is soon returning to the realm of fairy-tale retelling—her next book, the Rumpelstiltskin-inspired Gilded, arrives in November. Today, io9 has an exclusive look at the gorgeous cover, as well as some insights from the author about her latest fantasy creation.Read more...

Despite the amount of history that sits atop its soil, plenty of stories remain buried below Colonial Williamsburg. One of those stories is that of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, an early Black church that stood until the 1950s on the historic site, on which excavations began last fall. Now, archaeologists…Read more...

If even the tiniest bit of turbulence during a flight has you reaching for the barf bag, then you’ll never want to climb aboard this Russian contraption that uses flapping wings to take flight. But it demonstrates that Mother Nature’s designs can be supersized to one day revolutionize air travel.Read more...

Wizards of the Coast’s venerable card game series has had some peculiar crossovers over the years. But things are only going to get weirder and more wonderful with an expansion of its latest crossover into a true Magic multiverse that would make even the most seasoned planeswalker’s head spin: Lord of the Rings and …Read more...

The arms race between the coronavirus and humanity continues to pick up steam. This week, Moderna announced that its modified vaccine meant to target a worrying variant first found in South Africa is now ready for testing. Pfizer/BioNTech is also set to test out their own contingency plan for new variants soon.Read more...

According to the best available climate science, the U.S. needs to completely zero out its carbon pollution by 2050 to secure a livable future. A new analysis from the nonprofit Energy Innovation lays out a plan to get there, which also would just happen to add a cool $1 trillion dollars to the national economy.Read more...

“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement. It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, an organization dedicated to parity in…Read more...

Live Captions is one of the most useful features on Android phones, allowing your mobile device to automatically transcribe any audio it’s currently playing. And now it seems Google is bringing Live Captions to Chrome, with the feature already available as a hidden option in the browser.

The hardest part about house hunting in a city is figuring out whether your realtor is telling you the truth about how quiet a prospective neighborhood is. It would be nice if, say, there was a website that could tell you exactly which areas are noisy. Which is exactly what the Japanese website DQN Today does.Read more...

As a journalist and content writer, I often have to go on Zoom calls every day with clients and interview sources who request to use this platform. I am also hard-of-hearing, which makes following what people say on calls tiring, due to listening fatigue.

The least enjoyable part of a friendly Nerf battle isn’t getting hit, it’s constantly having to stop to reload your blaster. The inconvenience improved with Nerf’s Rival line, which debuted in 2015, but for 2021 the company is introducing a new Hyper line of blasters that fire smaller foam balls so you’ll be spending…Read more...

In the first teaser trailer for Zack Snyder’s upcoming Army of the Dead, little’s explained about how whatever contagion that’s caused a zombie outbreak in Las Vegas first made it out into the public, other than that it isn’t long before most of the city’s population is turned into a legion of the undead. Scott Ward (…Read more...

I know, I know, it’s hard to be excited about new graphics cards when there’s a chip shortage and scalpers and crypto miners are snatching up all the stock before regular ol’ consumers can buy ‘em. I know. Waiting sucks, especially when new GPUs keep cropping up. But while that money is burning a hole in your pocket,…Read more...

Smartphones have come a long way toward becoming the best cameras we carry. A long journey through megapixels, multiple lenses, optical zoom, image stabilization, and various other upgrades has gotten us to today’s handsets, but today, much of the work in capturing a great photo is happening on the software side.

Facebook finally banned the military in Myanmar, known as Tatmadaw, from the social media platform several weeks after the military staged a coup that toppled the democratically elected government. The ban on the country’s military includes Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

GameStop, little diva that she is, is in the spotlight once more after shares of the company skyrocketed more than 100% on Wednesday.Read more...

Paramount+, the new streaming service replacing CBS All Access, will launch as both an ad-supported and ad-free product.

In the early hours of Christmas Day in 2020, an RV in downtown Nashville, Tennessee, began broadcasting the sounds of gunfire and warnings for anyone in earshot to immediately evacuate. After about 15 minutes, it exploded, killing the perpetrator, wounding at least eight others, and damaging hundreds of buildings.

The graphics card availability situation may look a pretty bleak right now, but that’s not stopping AMD from forging ahead with its plans. The company announced on Twitter today that it’s launching a new graphics card in its Radeon RX 6000-series line next week.

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team of anthropologists have looked at the 4.4 million-year-old fossilized hand of one specimen (affectionately dubbed…Read more...

Adapting Superman is always a daunting task. He’s the ultimate beacon of hope, to some that perfection makes him either too simplistic to be interesting or in desperate need of a flaw. Superman & Lois, the CW’s latest foray into the DC universe, straddles a line between the two that feels quite unlike anything it’s…Read more...

The Red Planet’s two tiny moons—Phobos and Deimos—could have formed after an ancient collision, according to new research. It’s an intriguing possibility, but not everyone is convinced by the evidence.

Attention, haters: you have officially been put on notice by Facebook’s VP of Global Affairs Nick Clegg.

LG will make its webOS software available to other companies.

As we lean into a few more months of WFH life, none of us are looking for the thinnest and lightest laptops out there. The road warriors hunting for something slightly lighter than a cinder block are stuck inside, and couch surfing is now usually done on the phone, not on some wafer-thin slab of plastic and silicon.…Read more...

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to soon grant an emergency use authorization (EUA) to Johnson & Johnson’s covid-19 vaccine, possibly as early as this weekend. That decision would make it the third such vaccine to become available to Americans. So it’s as good a time as any to go through the similarities…Read more...

It’s a tough time to run a print magazine. It’s an even tougher time to run a print magazine about the film industry. And after more than 40 years of definitive coverage of the special effects industry, Cinefex has shut down.Read more...

YouTube is attempting to bridge the gap between its dedicated Kids app and regular YouTube for parents with tweens and teens.Read more...

There was plenty to like about how Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island and Michael Dougherty’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters spent ample time playing to the visual majesties of their respective kaiju. But both movies suffered dearly whenever their focuses turned toward the human characters, whose relatively…Read more...

In India, agriculture employs more than 50% of the country. It’s also in crisis due to climate change and groundwater loss. A new study shows how these two factors are putting the country’s farmers at risk.Read more...

Microsoft is officially getting into the website-building biz. On Wednesday, the company’s digital marketing wing rolled out a shiny new suite of tools which promise to give businesses a quick and easy way to set up their own landing pages. And unlike some of the other site builders on the market—like, say,…Read more...

HP is already one of the biggest computer makers in the world, complete with its own line of Omen gaming systems. But today HP’s gaming empire is about to get bigger with the acquisition of HyperX.Read more...

A newly compiled 3D map has revealed more than 1 million binary star pairs located within 3,000 light years of Earth, highlighting the ubiquity of these celestial objects.