Gizmodo

Pregnancy tests these days can get surprisingly high tech—and may even be rigged to play Doom. It’s also an unfortunate reality that these high-tech tests aren’t always accessible for the visually impaired. Because most rely on digital screens, blind or partially sighted people often have to ask someone else to read…Read more...

In 1991, the Star Wars universe changed forever. After a few years of quiet, the Expanded Universe exploded in scope and reach, kicking off with a series of novels from Timothy Zahn that brought us the story of what happened after Return of the Jedi. With it came the rise of Grand Admiral Thrawn and 30 years later,…Read more...

Internet service providers will be vying for some of the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund today, including Elon Musks’s SpaceX. Its Starlink satellite network allegedly has speeds of up to 100 Mbps now, so the company seems to be in a better position to convince the FCC it’s worth a piece of that $16 billion in…Read more...

Octopuses, with their eight suction-cup-covered arms, can taste objects simply by touching them. A team of researchers has finally figured out how these cephalopods are capable of pulling off this remarkable trick.

When the scientists who warned the world last year that 1 million species face extinction issue a new warning about the “pandemic era,” we should probably listen.Read more...

You may remember the Rejuvenique Facial Toning Mask from creepy infomercials in 1999 starring Linda Evans. “If you get the idea of what doing eight situps a second would do for your stomach, you have an idea what Rejuvenique would do for your face,” a smarmy salesman tells Evans, in response to why a person would want…Read more...

This week, Star Trek: Discovery reunited the disparate halves of its cast for an emotional chance to take stock of their unprecedented situation. The crew has arrived in the future and is headed to the ancestral home of the Federation—but as we so often learn when we return to our roots, they come to the stark…Read more...

Phones are expensive. Most people upgrade every few generations, and they want a phone that will take great photos, support the latest software, and won’t shit the bed after just a couple years.Read more...

Nvidia’s RTX 3070 officially hits retail stores tomorrow. After the fiasco that was the RTX 3080 release, actual buyers will hopefully be able to get their hands on these cards rather than see them snatched up by bots to scalp on eBay.Read more...

Finally, a rare bit of good news.Read more...

There was a big hearing in the Senate today regarding the future of online speech and the law that allows the web-as-we-know-it to function. Of the three big witnesses at the hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai may have expected to be in the hot seat given that his company was just slapped with an antitrust lawsuit by…Read more...

Folks, I have heard enough of the bad remote discourse. Let’s settle this debate.Read more...

Early data from an ongoing study in the UK is setting off a wave of alarm over the pandemic this week. It found evidence that levels of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 took a sharp plunge in England’s general population during the summer, prompting fears that immunity to covid-19 may start to significantly wane in as little…Read more...

At least seven people were hospitalized after Donald Trump threw a rally at Nebraska’s Eppley Airfield near Omaha in freezing temperatures on Tuesday night. The president promptly jetted off afterward, leaving thousands of attendees in hours-long lines for campaign buses to return them to the parking lot, leading…Read more...

A re-analysis of two fossils found in the 1980s has led to the discovery of an absolutely enormous Antarctic seabird.

As Halloween approaches, it is paramount that we all take a moment to remember—or discover—Tim Curry’s “Halloween Song” from The Worst Witch. Since HBO aired its extremely low-budget, TV movie adaptation of Jill Murphy’s children’s books in 1986, it has remained one of the most wonderful, terrible, bizarre videos of…Read more...

Change is hard. I get that. Judging by the dismay on Twitter over the Gmail logo change, few people are happy with the multi-colored M. Some have blamed the email logo change for missing important missives. Others complain it’s now visually indistinguishable from Google’s other app logos. To everyone in the throes of…Read more...

The internet is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. While some people have access to high-speed fiber-optic cable running to their house or phones ready to connect to 5G, there are also swaths of broadband deserts where people can’t access internet at reliable speeds.Read more...

New research detected an intriguing change in the average body temperature of the Tsimane people, an indigenous foraging and farming group in the Bolivian Amazon that has recently started to interact more with industrialized communities. Over 16 years, the Tsimane have experienced a slight but rapid drop in body…Read more...

The Trump administration continues to stretch the limits of decency and legality as it tries to turn the government into a propaganda arm of President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign. The latest example comes from the Department of Interior, which released a Dear Leader-style video touting Trump’s environmental…Read more...

Viewers are turning to streaming entertainment more than ever thanks to the global pandemic, and the plethora of services can serve as a much-needed escape. At the start of each month, most streamers do a little shuffle, adding new movies and taking some away, and io9 is here to help with your decision making.Read more...

It’s kill or be killed out in these freezer aisles, which is to say that Uber’s now locked in a four-way mortal combat with Instacart, Prime Delivery, and FreshDirect. Uber announced that as of today, Manhattan residents will see a “grocery” tab in their Uber and Uber Eats apps, marking an expansion of Uber’s grocery…Read more...

AMD put on one hell of a show-stopper when it revealed all the details about its next-gen processors earlier this month. And it’s done it again with its full-reveal of its next-gen graphics cards today. This may very well be the generation of AMD hardware that finally puts it neck-and-neck with its competitors, not…Read more...

After being kept on life support for arguably far too long, Flash will finally be sent to that big hard drive in the sky by the end of this year. To make the goodbye a little easier, Microsoft has released a new Windows update that purges Flash Player before its eventual demise on December 31.Read more...

Tales From the Loop creator Simon Stålenhag has a knack for playing on our greatest hopes and fears, combining the innocence of youth with science fiction’s fascinating, yet terrifying, unknown. Now, the storyteller is back with a new art book, The Labyrinth, and io9 has an exclusive look inside the maze.

Kal Cobalt is a disabled trans man. Relying on accessibility devices when out in public means using accessible bathrooms, which means that Cobalt knows all too well that so-called accessible bathrooms are sometimes only “technically” accessible.Read more...

An isolated coral reef measuring 1,640 feet tall has been discovered off the coast of Australia. Known as a detached reef, the blade-like vertical structure could serve as habitat for a variety of undiscovered sea creatures.

The Craft has become a cult classic thanks to its indelible portrayal of misfit teen witches gone wild, with an appealing dose of 1990s nostalgia baked in. The Craft: Legacy aims to capture the spirit of the original, and while it definitely succeeds in putting a modern spin on the story, it comes up lacking in most…Read more...

Phone makers have pushed out a wave of premium 5G phones this fall, but when it comes to more affordable handsets that support next-gen cell networks, pickings are still kind of slim. However, starting at just $400, the TCL 10 5G UW is now the cheapest 5G phone on the market.Read more...

André Øvredal has an update on the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark sequel. Disney+’s Moon Knight show has seemingly found its director. Hasbro’s bold new Power Rangers reboot has tapped a writer. Plus, a new look at Freaky, and what’s to come on Soulmates and Moonbase 8. To me, my Spoilers!

We discovered this week just how big the PlayStation 5 is, and, well, it looks sort of like a basketball arena with its swoopy design and towers over even the heftiest consoles, like the Xbox One and the original Xbox. But what’s most clear about the PlayStation 5 is that it is not meant to be stacked with other…Read more...

Yesterday, we showed you what the PlayStation 5 looks like in the wild. But that’s not the only next-gen console coming out next month. In the event you’ve been living under the planet’s most soundproof rock, on November 10, the Xbox Series X—and its less-expensive, less-powerful counterpart, the Xbox Series S—will be…Read more...

The trackball is a contentious kind of peripheral. Most people point to the mouse or the trackpad as superior ways to move a cursor across the screen, but for a small subset of nerds, myself included, there is nothing as gratifying or exact as a trackball. A flick of your thumb and the cursor screams across huge…Read more...

Cryptocurrency-loving hackers partially defaced the Trump campaign website for about 30 minutes today. The hackers complained of the president’s tendency to spread fake news and asked visitors to send cryptocurrency to one of two anonymous addresses.Read more...

A study of more than 84,500 people backs prior indications that surviving the novel coronavirus may be associated with potentially serious cognitive deficits, Reuters reported on Tuesday. While the new study, which is based on an online survey, has some major limitations, other research has found that covid-19 can…Read more...

Creating apps from prototypes is a huge problem. Dragging boxes around a screen and picking fonts is hard enough. Then, once the designer is done, a coder has to plug all of that in to a back end.

A panel of public health experts is set to recommend that people get screened for colorectal cancer starting at age 45—five years earlier than their current recommendation. The proposed change is due to mounting evidence that colon cancer is becoming more common among younger people.Read more...

I’m not crying, you’re crying! That’s my elementary response whenever someone notices how distraught I am that the Xbox Series X is still so hard to come by. I haven’t gotten my pre-order in yet, a real shame considering we’re just a few weeks out from launch. With an Xbox One X that still plays everything I want, I’m…Read more...

Only a small handful of objects are known to pose a serious threat to Earth, and the gigantic asteroid Apophis is one of them. Scientists are now re-evaluating its potential to strike our planet in 48 years, owing to improved observations of the problematic asteroid.Read more...

Transitioning to cleaner cars—including policies to ramp up electrification—will be key to addressing climate change. But a new United Nations report sheds light on the need for more regulation on the cars we send overseas, too.Read more...

Your average smartwatch brand usually puts out at least two types of watches: a premium flagship smartwatch, and a more cost-conscious alternative with about 75% of the flagship’s features. Samsung does it (Galaxy Watch 3 and the Galaxy Watch Active2), Fitbit does it (Fitbit Sense and Versa 3), and now with the Apple…Read more...

It doesn’t matter what mobile device you use, battery life is always limited and always a struggle. Mophie’s Juice Packs, which strap an additional battery to the back of your smartphone using a form-fitting case, dramatically expand battery life, but have also always been device-specific. Its new Juice Pack Connect,…Read more...

You might be forgiven for thinking that we last saw the heroes of UA’s legendary Class 1-A on the big screen a few years ago at this point. But no: it just feels like it. The release of Funimation’s My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising was one of the last Normal Things to happen before 2020 decided to 2020 itself all over…Read more...

A major immigration law firm responsible for screening Google’s recruits from outside the US has confirmed it suffered a breach that exposed the personal details on an untold number of the tech giant’s current and former employees.Read more...

As it is wont to do every few years, Netflix took to Japanese audiences overnight and announced it would continue acquiring and funding a metric butt-ton of new anime projects over the next few years. That’s cool and all but anyway: yo, look at Jet Goddamn Jaguar.Read more...

Scientists have long assumed that a thick, solid mass of permafrost underpins all of Alaska like the sturdy foundation of a house, stretching from the tundra to the and below the seafloor. But in a new study published in Science Advances, scientists found that beneath the seafloor on the northeastern coast of Alaska,…Read more...

The rapid recovery and analysis of a meteorite that fell onto a frozen lake in Michigan two years ago is illuminating the pivotal role these rocks played in delivering the basic building blocks for life to Earth.

Despite a renaissance in outdated gaming tech, there’s a small blip in the history of retro gaming hardware that has all been all but abandoned in the emulation scene: light guns. The way the technology worked simply isn’t compatible with modern TVs and screens, so if you want to get something like the Super…Read more...

While Nvidia’s RTX 3080 release last month didn’t quite go as planned, there’s no denying that Nvidia’s 3000 series of ray tracing graphics cards are the ones that matter. The RTX 3080 finally made 4K gaming at 60 fps possible and more affordable for the average PC gamer, and the 3000-series as a whole makes the…Read more...

Roughly two weeks from now, the PlayStation 5 will be out in the wild. First (officially) revealed in June, Sony’s next-gen console promises the de rigueur next-gen improvements: shinier graphics, faster performance, killer exclusives, all that jazz. But when the curtain was pulled back, the general consensus seemed…Read more...