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Edward Snowden: Advanced Encryption May Stop Us Communicating With Aliens

On Friday, Neil deGrasse Tyson welcomed Edward Snowden to his StarTalk podcast. Along with the usual conversations about privacy and government, Snowden had another important warning to provide: encryption may hurt our abilities to see, or be seen by, extraterrestrials. Speaking to deGrasse Tyson from Russia, Snowden explained that the current need for data encryption…

Six Easy Ways to Tell If That Viral Story Is a Hoax

“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”. The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers. For those resistant to accepting refugees…

The long-delayed extradition hearing of Kim Dotcom has begun in Auckland, New Zealand. It’s expected to last weeks, as he battles against claims from U.S. authorities that he cost cost music and movie companies over $500m.

This Is What Happens When an Indie Band Experiments at the LHC

It’s normally just researchers that get to experiment at the LHC. But one physicist has decided to invite a series of bands to play around at the world’s largest science lab — and this is the result. The first event of a new an initiative called Ex/Noise/CERN, that’s led by Dr. James Beacham, saw the…

The Closing of the Hungarian Border, As Seen by Drones

This drone video captures what’s happening right now on the border between Hungary and Croatia. All you can see for kilometers on the road are busses and checkpoints. It’s yet another instant mega-fence for Central Europe, where countries are pouring resources into preventing Syrian refugees from crossing over borders as they flee to the west.…

Crane Controllers are the Most Overkill Way to Play Pong

Ever looked at the wireless remotes you use for shop cranes — boxy yellow things the size of shoe boxes, with industrial STOP buttons — and think they’d be perfect for controlling the world’s simplest video game? No, me neither. The intrepid YouTuber who put together the demo hooked up two crane controllers to a…

Thank An Aging Population For Facebook’s Proposed ‘Dislike’ Button

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company is finally working on a much-desired feature: a “dislike” button. According to Zuckerberg, this feature has long been one of those most-requested by the Facebook audience. Although his comments suggest that the new button more likely will express sympathy or empathy, rather than simple dislike, Facebook…

There’s a new update forAmazon Echo that adds a bunch of new features, like news headlines on a particular topic, more smart home controls, and better control over alarms and timers. The full list of Alexa’s tricks is over on Amazon’s site. [Amazonvia Engadget] Contact the author at [email protected].

Drones Autonomously Build a Bridge, So the Robot Army Never Has to Stop

In the future war against the machines, humans might have gained a brief respite by powering through the flowing rivers where electronic killer robots cannot tread. These bridge-building quadrotors have now closed off that avenue of escape. The pair of drones you can see in the video use a spool of rope – about 120m…

Apple is Cleaning The App Store Of its First Major Malware Attack

Apple cleaned the App Store of apps containing malware today, having discovered a long con that saw developers using infected software tools, inadvertently turning their legit apps into data-collection tools for hackers. According to Reuters, hackers duped developers into using a bad version of Apple’s Xcode app-development tools. The bad version of Xcode, dubbed XcodeGhost,…

The First Crazy Teaser For Chinese Blockbuster Lost In The Pacific Is Here!

The first teaser for the Chinese blockbuster Lost in the Pacific recently screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it like it’ll be a wild ride. rs. The film is being hailed as China’s first English language and 3D scifi film, and it stars Brandon Routh and Zhang Yuqi. The movie was filmed earlier…

So You Want To Join The Empire: A Leg To Stand On 

We took a short break from assembling things last week, focusing on some of the tools that you might use when you’re assembling a set of stormtrooper armor. This week, it’s back to business as we start to assemble the legs. The legs are pretty simple, especially now that we’ve done the upper arms and…

Enceladus Is Home To A World-Wide Ocean

A scientific study has concluded that Saturn’s moon Enceladus is home to a much larger ocean that previously thought: it likely covers the entire moon, hiding under a layer of ice. Using Cassini to observe Enceladus over the last couple of years, researchers have concluded that there would be less of a wobble in the…

Gambit Production Runs Into Another Problem: No Director

That didn’t last long: not long after Channing Tatum almost left the upcoming Gambit movie, the production is now looking for a new director. Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) has left the production after delays. https://gizmodo.com/channing-tatum-officially-joins-gambit-movie-1721526620 The X-Men spinoff has faced several new issues during pre-production: an evolving script and rising…

These 4 New Spider Species Just Want to Be Your Friends

Arachnologists have found a whole new genus of spiders in the deserts of Namibia and South Africa, and a couple of the new species seem to have some peculiar habits. Recently, Peter Jäger and Henrik Krehenwinkel examined some spider specimens they had collected with their colleague Dirk Kunz back in 2004. They noticed that the…

57 Films Make Up This Great Phone Call Supercut

This is a lot of fun: Burger Fiction put together an impressive super cut of one really entertaining phone call that pieces together scenes from 57 movies. Here’s the full list of movies used. [AV Club]

Here’s Your First Official Look Of Supergirl‘s Red Tornado

When Supergirl starts up later this year on CBS, it’ll be a new outlet to realize more characters from DC’s lineup for the television screen. Case in point: Red Tornado, of whom we now have our first official look. The character will be portrayed by Iddo Goldberg (Tut, Salem), and is described by CBS as…

Massive Wildfires Are Only Going to Get Worse

Welcome to this week’s Reading List, Gizmodo’s weekly collection of fascinating science and technology reads from around the internet, gathered in one place just for you. This week, we’ll catch a ride with Uber, play with AI for kids, peer into the grim future of mega-wildfires, and jump into the hoverboard patent wars. This year’s…

Someone Sent A Pair Of TVs To The Edge Of Space For This Music Video

This is pretty cool: director Joe Connor sent a pair of televisions up to the edge of space by balloon to film his music video for Kelvin Jones’ song Call You Home. Here’s what he had to say about it: Yup, that really is a TV in space, for real. I created this video by…

When you think about reading science fiction, you often look towards the latest novel. The book is a reasonably recent development in the science fiction world, and over on Kirkus Reviews, John DeNardo of SF Signal charts the history of serialized SF.