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Deals: Your New Soundbar, Custom Bluetooth Speaker, Timbuk2 Sale

Today’s Amazon deal of the day is a highly-rated Polk Audio soundbar that’ll be perfect for upgrading your home theater, or streaming music from your phone via Bluetooth. Today’s price is over $80 less than Amazon has ever sold it for, and I’d be surprised if it lasts all day. [Polk Audio 39″ Bluetooth Soundbar,…

You Can Actually Buy a Flux Capacitor Car Charger Now

The folks at ThinkGeek put so much effort into their April Fool’s Day prank products every year that often times they end up turning them into a reality. Remember the Star Wars Tauntan sleeping bag?, that started life as a prank. And of all the wonderful products ThinkGeek pretended to announce on April 1 this…

Why Can’t We Protect Commercial Planes From Attacks?

Last week’s downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 over the disputed territory of Eastern Ukraine has set off worldwide outcries against the conflict, and calls to better defend commercial airlines from missile attack. But is it even possible to defend civilian jets against military-grade weapons? To understand why it’s so difficult to defend civilian planes,…

The Very Best Finds On The Floor At Comic-Con 2014

The San Diego Comic-Con floor can be both a sensory delight and an overload of color, light, and swirling brand names. To help you cut through the pop culture fog, we’ve collected the sights you won’t want to miss this week inside the exhibition hall. One thing we particularly noticed while walking the floor this…

This video shows that freaking fish are the closest thing to Alien

This slow motion video shows how fish actually eat. Instead of moving their whole bodies as most people think, they expand and throw their jaws forward to create a space where water rushes into their mouths to suck in their prey. It’s kind of gross and disgusting—but so damn cool. SPLOID is a new blog…

Mind-twisting short shows that ignorance is bliss

Imagine that you have the ability to know how many times people lied in their life. Or how many days they will live just by looking at a number displayed on the top of their heads. That’s the premise of this mind-twisting short film by Robert Hloz: Two people with that rare ability meet randomly…

The Pre-Holocene Climate Is Returning — And It Won’t Be Fun

Our planet has been witness to plenty of strange weather happenings recently, from devastating floods to the polar vortex. These events are providing a glimpse of what it was like during the pre-Holocene era — a time of volatility and destruction. But it could also be a demonstration of where climate change is taking us.…

This Super-Efficient Lightbulb Uses Tesla Tech for an Incandescent Glow

Despite their inefficiency, old-school incandescent lightbulbs sure did put out a pleasant, natural-looking light. The folks at Finally Light Bulb missed that light, so they brought it back with an efficient, affordable bulb using technology Nikola Tesla once patented. The team visited Gizmodo’s NYC office to show us the light. The Finally Light Bulb is…

“The device he would use is called a Picturephone…”

“By this month it should be possible for a New Yorker, a Chicagoan or a Washingtonian to communicate with someone in one of the other cities by televised telephoning. The device he would use is called a Picturephone and is described by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which developed it, as ‘the first dialable…

The True History Of Star Trek Is Finally On Its Way

There have been books, documentaries, fan sites, etc., that have attempted to chronicle the history of Star Trek. But none of them will ever be more comprehensive, more complete than the upcoming tome The 50 Year Mission: The Complete Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek. Here are the very first details! The book, which…

Have a Chromecast? You Could Get Three Free Months of Unlimited Music

Chromecast, Google’s $35 3-inch streaming dongle, turns one-year-old today and the company is cutting users in on the celebration. For three months, anyone with a Chromecast can jam out with a free 90-day subscription to All Access Music, a usually $10 monthly service through Google Play. There’s only one major catch: No dice if you’ve…

Looks Like Instagram Is Working on a Snapchat Rival

Someone at Instagram has a slippery trigger finger: Some Instagram for Android users are reporting links posted to a “one tap photo messaging app” called Bolt. It sounds an awful lot like a very popular photo-sharing app not owned by Facebook that rhymes with “App Hat.” The link brings you to a dead page at…

Science and Entertainment in One Glorious Package

While the rest of io9 will be bringing you the hottest, latest, and greatest in pop culture and entertainment news from Comic Con, I’ll be prowling the halls in search of science. Do you have any burning questions you want me to ask our favourite Peep-tormenting astronomer or mohawked rocket scientist? https://gizmodo.com/welcome-to-comic-con-2014-1609860861

Space Junk Is Becoming a Serious Security Threat

Theresa Hitchens wants to make the world safer. She’s director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, but one of her biggest concerns floats above national boundaries. She told io9 about the growing dangers of orbital space debris, and the obstacles standing in the way of cleaning it up. Previously, Hitchens was director of the…

Behold The Warcraft Movie’s Doomhammer, Lion Shield, And Dragon Sword

Lookie what popped up on the Comic-Con floor! The first look at some excellent weapons from Duncan Warcraft movie — plus the official logo treatment, which has updated the original orange letters into something a bit more sexy. If these props are any indication of the feel of this flick, things are going to be…

Anti-GMO activist Mike Adams, featured recently on Dr. Oz, has issued a call for his followers to kill journalists he calls “Monsanto collaborators” because they have written about the possible benefits of GMOs. His homicidal logic is based on the myth that GMOs are causing mass suicides in India, which he’s dubbed “genocide.”

A Brief History of Pi

That the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is constant has been known to humanity since ancient times; yet, even today, despite 2000 years of thought, theories, calculations and proofs, π’s precise value remains elusive. Ancient Civilizations Babylonian By the 17th century B.C., the Babylonians had a relatively advanced knowledge of…

A Surveilliance Drone That Can Fit Inside A Soldier’s Pocket

U.S. Army engineers are working on a mini aerial surveillance drone for troops working in challenging environments. Once deployed, the scifi-like device could allow soldiers to get a bird’s-eye view of their immediate area, or scan the contents of a room as they clear a building. It’s called the Cargo Pocket ISR, where ISR stands…

There’s an Actual Piece of the Wright Flyer Inside Bremont’s New Watch

Starting in 2010, Bremont has been paying homage to significant moments in the history of technology with a unique line of watches that includes the Codebreaker which celebrated the work of the WWII Enigma machine crackers. Now the watchmaker is honoring the Wright Brothers’ achievements with a new timepiece that includes an actual piece of…

What World-Changing Technology Actually Changed Nothing At All?

Sometimes a revolutionary new technology comes along, promising to change everything — and it does. And then sometimes, a new tech promises to change everything, and everything stays exactly the same. Today we want to know about the tech that fell in the latter category. Tell us about what the new tech was, what it…