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Are Religious Beliefs Going To Screw Up First Contact?

Are humans really prepared to meet an extraterrestrial civilization in this century? A new study suggests we’re psychologically ill-prepared for this monumental event — and that the prominence of religious beliefs has a lot to do with it. Despite the eerie Great Silence, there’s good reason to suspect we’ll eventually make contact with aliens. Our…

See Your City Like a Hazy Point Cloud from Another Dimension

We saw last month that data sets hidden in Google Street View can be extracted to create immersive 3D point clouds that make every city look like a holograph. Inspired by that work—by designer Gonzalez Vivo—Callum Prentice has mocked up an interactive version, a Google Street View search that shows you any available address as…

The Future Is a Real-Life Tron Bike

Gizmodo’s Home of the Future is full of items that will help you get around today that seem like they’re from tomorrow. Motorized longboards? Check. Murdered-out bikes with USB ports? Check. An actual street legal Tron bike? Check, check, mother loving check. Maybe you know Mott Street Customs bikes. Maybe you know Revolights. But you…

Why It’s So Hard To LIsten To A Song All The Way Through, In Graphs

You’re almost exactly as likely to skip a song while streaming music as you are to listen to the whole thing. This series of graphs explains what it is that makes it so hard to listen to a song through the end. Paul Lamere (who previously used music streaming data to generate maps of the…

Get ready for the age of “cli-fi,” or “clean climate finance.” The bulk of the $10.5 trillion that the International Energy Agency estimates will be needed to pay for decarbonization over the next 15 years will come from private capital, reports the Brookings Institution.

29 Wonderful Bike Ads From the Golden Age Of Cycling

For a few brief decades of human history, just before combustion engines and motorcycles and cars burst onto the scene, the bicycle was the most advanced personal land vehicle around. They were wonders of technology and personal style—as these beautiful ads show. As Gizmodo continues its Bike Month coverage, take a second to imagine what…

Legends Of Oz Comes From the Island Of Misfit Animated Movies

Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return arrives in theaters limping. After long delays, endless rewrites and decisions like “let’s add songs by Bryan Adams,” it finally comes out with a 5 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. What the heck went wrong with this film, anyway? Legends of Oz is a sequel to The Wizard of…

ABC’s New TV Line Up Is Full Of Aliens, Singing Princes And Immortals

ABC is fully committing to being the network that delivers campy fairy tale shows. And now they’re raised the bar, because their latest fairy tale show has the cast SINGING. Check out ABC’s new scifi and supernatural TV line-up. As Upfronts rolls on and each TV channel trots out their latest wares the biggest genre…

X-Men: Days Of Future Past‘s Quicksilver May Be Awesome After All

We’ve seen his outfit and raged. We’ve seen him eat hamburgers and wept. But this new promo centered around the speedster has a lot of new footage of Quicksilver in action, and all that footage is looking pretty damned awesome. To be fair, most people who gotten to watch X-Men: DOFP early have said that…

Meet The Lizard That Looks Just Like Spiderman

Meet the Red-headed rock agama, Agama mwanzae. The lizard, native to East Africa is a fascinating critter, and not just because it likes to cosplay as Peter Parker’s alter-ego. These lizards are unique among agamids – there are more than 350 species in the Family – because they cluster in groups. They may group together…

Netflix Is Now $1 More Expensive For New Members

Remember that Netflix said in April that its service was going to get more expensive? Well it has: from now on, new members will have to pay $9 a month instead of the current $8. In an email sent out this norming, Netflix announced the increase, which has already hit Europe: In order to continue…

Snowpiercer‘s Red-Band Trailer Is Totally Freaking Awesome

Let’s be real, a movie about a post apocalyptic train that is speeding through the destroyed Earth struggling under a bloody class war could be… silly. But the new red-band trailer for Bong-Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer shows the movie is anything bute. This new trailer finally shows off the massive train and its many, many different…

Beats Sale Seemingly Confirmed by Dr. Dre in Facebook Video

Yesterday’s news of Apple’s plan to buy Beats for $3.2 billion seems to have been confirmed by Dr. Dre himself, if this video, posted to Facebook by actor Tyrese Gibson, is anything to go by. The video was posted to Facebook overnight, and shows Dre celebrating in his studio. At one point, Dr. Dre describes…

Here’s Why the U.S. Missile Defense System Is Utterly Broken

Last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report: the system to defend the U.S. from ballistic missiles doesn’t work, and probably never will. But it gets worse. Congress then voted to expand the broken system, allocating money for a new, sub-par missile defense site. How did this happen? It’s the latest iteration…

Did you know you can actually play a violin strung with human hair?

Artist Tadas Maskimovas used his own hair to string a violin in this surprising video. The hair is meticulously worked to form the right sized strings and then is glued together so it becomes more resistant. The experiment was designed to prove that you can make music with almost anything you want. SPLOID is a…

What Could Google’s Mystery “Flounder” Device Be?

A listing in a tracker database has pulled out a Google-made device operating under the codename “Flounder.” Google likes to give new things in the Nexus line fishy names, so this may be the anticipated Nexus 8. Or the mythical Nexus 10 update. Or… something else altogether. Not many additional clues are offered by the…

The Agents Of SHIELD Survive For A Second Season

Good news for people who have stuck with Agents of SHIELD and watch it slowly turn into a fun, reasonably action-packed show with a compelling story and high stakes: ABC has renewed the show for next year, and approved a 13-episode Agent Carter series along with it. I’ve gone from kind of forcing myself to…

Surprise! We’re Throwing Ourselves A GIF Party!

Shhh! No one tell the GIFs. Today’s GIF Party is a surprise. Or as much of a surprise as a regular, weekly event can be. Still, go ahead and tell us about your most exciting news and updates, along with your best old or new GIFs to describe it all. Let the party begin!

This Self-Healing Plastic Oozes Goo That Clots Like Blood

Good news for klutzes: this new plastic heals itself by oozing liquid, which can solidify to automatically fill holes and cracks—just like blood clots to repair wounds. There have been bio-mimicking materials that could heal microscopic crack in the past, including ones made by Scott White at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—who’s also responsible…

We’ve Finally Found Our Sun’s Long-Lost Sister

For the first time ever, astronomers have identified a star that emerged from the same cloud of dust and gas as our own. Intriguingly, there’s a “small, but not zero” chance that our sister sun hosts planets hospitable to life. For those of you who have been watching the rebooted Cosmos series, this announcement couldn’t…