A new bird song is spreading like wildfire among Canadian white-throated sparrows, at a scale not seen before by scientists. | Continue reading
An unusually bright star has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions. | Continue reading
If you have shame spiraled after sending a birthday message to a secondary contact on LinkedIn or had a few too many at a professional event, you, too, have probably wondered how much you would be willing to throw down for a networking cheat. Enter the platform Rooftop Slushie, w … | Continue reading
Show me a museum of important historical inventors and I will show you a gallery of deluded mass murderers. I’m not talking about machine gun manufacturers or nuclear scientists—those people, at least, have some sense of what they’re up to. I’m talking about the folks behind the … | Continue reading
A NASA parallax experiment involving New Horizons shows the probe now sees some stars in slightly different positions than we do on Earth, revealing just how far the spacecraft is from home. | Continue reading
The discovery of ancient artifacts and mastodon bones in a submerged sinkhole shows that humans first inhabited the southeastern corner of North America 1,500 years earlier than previously assumed. | Continue reading
Apparently taking a page from Amazon’s book on How to Snub Employees Who Voice Inconvenient Truths, this week Facebook canned an engineer who openly criticized the social media giant’s milquetoast response to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and President Donald Trump’s incend … | Continue reading
Facebook security personnel and engineers helped the FBI track down a notorious child predator by helping a third-party company develop an exploit in a security-focused version of the Linux operating system, Tails, per a Wednesday report by Vice. But they did so quietly and witho … | Continue reading
For the first time ever, archaeologists have used ground-penetrating radar to map an entire city while it’s still beneath the ground. | Continue reading
On July 22, 1962, at 9:20 PM, the Mariner I sat idly on its platform, ready to make history. After investing years of construction, calculation, and funding, NASA had high hopes that its rocket would successfully conduct a flyby survey of Venus, thus shifting the Space Race's … | Continue reading
State regulators and Justice Department officials are purportedly investigating ways to limit Google’s authority in the online search market as part of an antitrust probe. | Continue reading
For the thousands of people protesting and reporting on George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department—or even for bystanders caught up in the demonstrations—arrests, injuries, and even death are becoming commonplace in this moment. And just like protests … | Continue reading
Most social media users know that bot accounts are among us, whether as fake voters with loud opinions or obsessive re-tweeters of a single corporation’s content. When it comes to telling many ‘fake’ accounts from real ones, however—or just knowing how many non-individuals are ac … | Continue reading
Robert Zemeckis’ animated/live-action hybrid noir murder mystery broke boundaries of filmmaking technology and technique, and 32 years later it’s every bit as fresh, warm, and funny as it ever was. Starring Bob Hoskins as gumshoe PI Eddie Valiant on the trail of a sex scandal inv … | Continue reading
Requiring federal agents to have “probable cause” to eavesdrop on the internet activities of American citizens poses a direct threat to national security and would force the FBI to stand by while terrorist plots unfold on U.S. soil, according to a leaked copy of talking points di … | Continue reading
No matter how they may make you feel, licking your gadgets and electronics is never recommended. Unless you’re a researcher from Meiji University in Japan who’s invented what’s being described as a taste display that can artificially recreate any flavor by triggering the five di … | Continue reading
The U.S. Copyright Office has released a long-awaited, 192-page report that could give the music and movie industry an opening to fight for stricter enforcement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. | Continue reading
Well, well, well. | Continue reading
By the end of March, things were looking good for the group video chat app Houseparty as quarantined young people, perhaps put off by Zoom’s relentless security failures, were looking for a less corporate-seeming platform to keep in touch with friends and family. Vogue gushed tha … | Continue reading
Click to viewLike most great ideas, the concept behind Justin.tv is simple: a video stream, anytime, anywhere. But the hardware behind it all wasn't so easy to make, so Justin called up a friend, Kyle Vogt, to hand-build version 1.0 from some off-the-shelf parts, a grip of EV … | Continue reading
It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” describes a major issue with evolu … | Continue reading
Ex-Google engineer James Damore and Google asked a California judge this week to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the enginer against the company. The lawsuit alleged that Google discriminated against conservative white men. | Continue reading
Ex-Google engineer James Damore and Google asked a California judge this week to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the enginer against the company. The lawsuit alleged that Google discriminated against conservative white men. | Continue reading
The road to haircut hell is paved with good questions. Questions like: Is the coronavirus pandemic the Flowbee’s time to shine? | Continue reading
No matter how you feel about contact tracing, it’s been openly embraced by federal authorities around the world, from the UK, to Germany, to, well, you name it, as a way to curb the spread of the current pandemic. And while every country grapples with the long-term privacy implic … | Continue reading
Kickstarter has been transparent that, as a result of the pandemic, the number of fundraising projects on the platform is nowhere near normal. Today, the company confirmed to Gizmodo that shrinking revenues have forced it to drastically reduce staff. | Continue reading
A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs that may provide new insight into the allegations of fraud stemming from agency’s 2017 net neutrality rollback. | Continue reading
God help us if Mark Zuckerberg’s next congressional hearing is on the subject of the Bloody Insurrection of 2020. As HuffPost first reported, a scourge of far-right extremist accounts on Facebook appear to be gearing up for a meme-inspired civil war amid the covid-19 outbreak. | Continue reading
Palantir, the surveillance firm founded by conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, has landed a contract with the feds to build a database tracking the spread of the novel coronavirus around the country, according to the Daily Beast. | Continue reading
Does it really take years of practice and dedication on the basketball court to compete with the talents of NBA players? Apparently not. All you need is some basic knowledge of physics, access to computer simulation software, and enough tools to build a curved backboard that dire … | Continue reading
Stephen Wolfram, computer scientist, physicist, and CEO of software company Wolfram Research (behind Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica) made headlines this week when he launched the Wolfram Physics Project. The blog post announcing the project explains that he and his collaborators c … | Continue reading
Are you a quarantined Star Wars collector craving social interaction as well as new merch? Do what I’ve been doing: In recent weeks, I’ve once again found myself enamored with Star Wars Card Trader. | Continue reading
Online drug sales gained notoriety thanks to the Silk Road market, but the buying and selling of illegal mood-altering substances through computers goes a lot farther back. In fact, the very first online transaction was a drug deal. | Continue reading
This past week, assistant zoology professor Daniel Baldassarre at SUNY Oswego published a paper in a supposedly scientific journal with the following abstract: | Continue reading
This past week, assistant zoology professor Daniel Baldassarre at SUNY Oswego published a paper in a supposedly scientific journal with the following abstract: | Continue reading
A team of astronomers shocked the world back in 2016 when they revealed evidence of an Earth-sized exoplanet in the habitable zone of our nearest stellar neighbor, a star called Proxima Centauri. Scientists are hunting for a second planet in this system—and maybe, maybe, they’ve … | Continue reading
Particle physicists have released the results of a decade-long search, taking us a crucial step closer toward understanding where all of the universe’s antimatter has gone. | Continue reading
It’s 2020, and millions of Americans—now bound to their homes—still don’t have reliable internet access. In a pandemic, that’s a public health crisis. | Continue reading
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has seen a recent surge in demand for its boards due to the covid-19 pandemic. Part of that demand comes from people experimenting with the cheap computers with newfound time to kill at home, but the foundation is reserving some of its Pi Zero inventor … | Continue reading
Seismometers around the world are recording the decreased seismic activity resulting from people staying home amid covid-19 social distancing orders. | Continue reading
Star Trek. It’s one of the most quintessential pieces of science-fiction television around. And there’s a whole damn lot of it, even if you cut it down to the current eight different shows in the franchise (there’s even more on the way!). Want to start, but need a little guidance … | Continue reading
Chiropractors in Canada and elsewhere are being told to stop advertising their services as a treatment for covid-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. | Continue reading
For those unaware, Zoom officially has a porn problem. The multibillion-dollar video messaging mainstay among employees at Johnson & Johnson and the Department of Homeland Security—not to mention a household name among currently house-bound citizens across the country—has bee … | Continue reading
Space is hard. We now have another reminder of this sad fact, as a prototype of SpaceX’s next-gen rocket collapsed in on itself during tests this morning, in what is now the third incident of its kind for the Starship program. | Continue reading
Human evolution was messy, with multiple human species living and interbreeding at the same time, in a convoluted process that eventually led to us. Such is the emerging narrative in anthropology, and it’s a theory now bolstered by three fascinating new studies released today. | Continue reading
Like other countries, COVID-19 rocked both Russia and its neighbors, with recent numbers pointing to a collective 4,375 residents across the post-Soviet states being infected by the virus. And while some of these territories are seemingly less than worried about the pandemic, Rus … | Continue reading
Instacart workers are preparing to strike next week in response to the company’s lack of protections for employees who are risking their health and safety to perform their jobs amid the global coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 1,200 people in the U.S. alone. | Continue reading