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Rebel Alliance Cops Arrest Stormtrooper Outside of School

This is why you leave the Empire’s public outreach to the professionals. Earlier this week, police arrested a man dressed in an Imperial Stormtrooper costume outside of Brickett Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts. According to WHDH 7 News, The man triggered a lock-down of the school when school officials saw that he carried a prop…

What caused this unique gas disk? Artist’s impression of vast disk of gas surrounding a bright Wolf-Rayet star whose companion star is pulling gas away from it, causing some of the stellar gas to escape and form this never-before-seen disk.

The Best of Gizmodo This Week

This week, lots of you devoured our “morning inspiration” series—glad to know there are optimists reading Gizmodo! We did a deep dive into high-speed rail and continued to shame people about the California drought. Here are the favorites. First off, I skipped the Best of Giz post last week, so let me give a shout…

Farmers Are Pumping So Much Groundwater It’s Making California Sink

What happens when your water supply runs dry? You go underground. In some parts of California, drought-plagued farmers are digging groundwater wells that plunge deeper and deeper into the earth, siphoning away the water of their neighbors, and causing the ground to collapse—potentially destroying the soil for good. A story in the New York Times’…

Hannibal Is Back For Season Three, And It’s As Bloody Gorgeous As Ever

Hannibal is back for its third season, its carnage-drenched season two finale still lingering in viewers’ minds. The premiere’s title, “Antipasto,” suggests we’re about to see a pre-meal taste of what’s to come, and indeed many familiar characters (the ones who are still alive, anyway) don’t yet appear. Spoilers follow. We open at night as…

Chinese Hackers Accused of Two More Huge Security Breaches

Remember when hackersaccessed files from US health insurance firms Anthem and Premera last year? According to the New York Times, it wasthe same Chinese hackers suspected of breaching the US Office of Personnel Management’s files. These data breaches yielded an enormous amount of personal information. For the OPM, at least 4 million former and current…

The Ice King Is A Perfect Immortan Joe In Adventure Time/Mad Max Mashups

It’s Fury Time! Ryan May has cast the characters from Adventure Time in Mad Max: Fury Road. In his hands, Finn is Max, Princess Bubblegum is Furiosa, and the Ice King is a princess-stealing Immortan Joe. May has also done mashups of Aliens and Adventure Time, Archer and the Avengers, and Rick and Morty and…

Awesome orchestra plays an awesome medley of 30 hip hop songs

There are few things I enjoy more than hearing music played in a different way, especially when it’s hip hop music being played by an entire orchestra. It’s like the musical equivalent of getting a new haircut, you still recognize yourself but you’re just different enough that you come in with a completely brand new…

Damn, This Fake Orca Sucks At Being a Fake Orca 

The small fishing village of Astoria, Oregon, tried to scare off a pesky sea lion colony with a large fake mechanical orca. It was a cunning scheme, one that pitted the sly artifice of man against whatever it is sea lions have. But alas—nature won. The plan to unleash the fiberglass orca—which is actually a…

Let’s Talk About Whatever You Want Right Now

Greetings, friends. We made it to the weekend. Look at this tiny frog. It feels like one of those weeks that flew past and also like it has taken so long that my brain is reduced to mush. Yeah, one of those. Today we learned that you can use Google search to determine just how…

How Patrón Uses Big-Ass Rocks to Make Delicious Tequila

When Patrón invited me to their distillery in Mexico last month, I was hesitant. I didn’t think I’d see anything new. I’d heard the company talk up its centuries-old “tahona” method of production, but wrote it off as yet another brand trying to get in on the craft distilling trend. But I agreed to go…

Seaweeds Only Smell Because They’re Trying To Attract Sperm

You know that characteristic funky seaweed smell? It isn’t a by-product of the plant’s metabolism or environment. It’s a scent manufactured by seaweed for one reason only; to lure the sperm of a mate. When you sniff dried seaweed, or when you add regular seaweed to a dish, you notice a pungent green scent. The…

Robot arm beats a master swordsman at slicing things

It’s a totally unfair fight since this Yaskawa Bushido industrial robot arm basically stole all of master swordsman Isao Machii’s moves and is not human, so it can be programmed and won’t get tired, but it’s really fun to see man vs machine swinging swords to see who can slice things best with diagonal cuts,…

Google Will Now Tell You When Its Driverless Cars Crash

Last month, a vehicle rear-ended one of Google’s self-driving cars at a Mountain View intersection. No one was hurt, but Google didn’t exactly broadcast the news to the public. Now, anyone will be able to download monthly reports about where the cars are and what they’re doing, thanks to a new transparency initiative from Google.…

The io9 Guide to Doctor Who

For over 50 years, Doctor Who has changed the face of science fiction.

Peer Out The Window Of A Rocket Returning To Earth

What does it look like when one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets falls back to Earth? Here’s the view of our gorgeous planet captured during the uncontrolled tumble to reentry. The coolest thing about the Falcon 9R rockets is hidden in the name — that R stands for “reusable,” an ambitious if not-quite-yet-proven attempt to…

Mark Duplass Is The World’s Most Alarmingly Manic Host In Creep Trailer

Mark Duplass and first-time director Patrick Brice co-wrote and co-star in Creep, a psychological thriller about a videographer who’s hired to document a dying man’s life for his yet-to-be-born child. Or so he thinks, until the man’s behavior starts to get ever-more erratic and terrifying. Creep, which is produced by horror guru du jour Jason…

These North Korean Propaganda Videos Are Downright Fascinating

Naturally, we can’t trust propaganda videos to give us a sense of life inside another country — especially when that country is North Korea. But what these videos do show us is what the North Korean government wants to communicate to its citizens — about everything from its military prowess to shopping. Shopping is easy…

You’re Way Less Apathetic About Privacy Than You Realize

I have heard people use every kind of wording – from offhand quip to nine-part rococo longread – to say “we’ve all given up our privacy and nobody cares.” It’s the worst kind of knee-jerk cynicism, especially because it’s probably untrue. Yesterday in the New York Times, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote about how much…

Classic Movie Posters Redrawn As Vintage Album Covers

Admit it: You know you want to hear that B-side cover version of Obi-Wan Ob-Li-Da live. Commenter poorfishy made (and then shared with us) these TV and movie posters, inspired by classic rock album covers. It’s what would happen if you put the vinyl sleeves from The Beatles, Duran Duran, The Who, Olivia Newton John,…