Some days, you may roll out of bed and wonder why the hell you’re working a job that doesn’t make a difference where your boss treats you like crap. You could come work at Gizmodo Media Group. Or you could wash that sense of ennui away by realizing it could be worse. You could be a scientist at the Environmental…
Neutron stars are having a renaissance, as far as space objects go. These ultra-dense collapsed stars are the source of last year’s most important astrophysical discovery, and they could supply the universe with much of its gold and other heavier elements. But, confusingly, many of their most important properties may…
Some of the Earth’s oldest rocks may have formed from the high temperatures of meteorite impacts, a new study reports.
The indigenous people of Easter Island, the Rapa Nui, experienced a societal collapse after the 17th century because they stripped the island clean of its natural resources. Or at least, that’s the leading theory. An analysis of the tools used by the Rapa Nui to build their iconic stone statues suggests a very…
There’s an exoplanet whose surface is so hot, it rips apart water molecules. It’s almost a star, but not quite; it’s an ultra-hot, Jupiter-like world located around 880 light-years from Earth.
Couples in the U.S. looking to either conceive or avoid pregnancy will now have a new tool available to them. On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration announced it has permitted a digital birth control app to be marketed as such in the U.S. The app, called Natural Cycles, is the first medical device of its kind to…
A recent survey suggests that some people struggling with opioid addiction might be turning to a tragically desperate method to get more prescription painkillers: Hurting their own pets. And veterinarians themselves may be abusing opioids or helping to illegally sell them.
As it speeds away from the Sun, the New Horizons mission may be approaching a “wall.”
Rebecca Waddington arrived in Long Beach, California, last weekend. The 35-year-old was preparing for her first hurricane-hunting mission with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the following day. The pilot had flown for the federal department before to survey marine mammals or even…
A human-made spacecraft is finally heading to the center of the Solar System. NASA’s first launch window for the Parker Solar Probe begins at 3:33 a.m. ET this Saturday, and if all goes well, the ship will then begin its journey to the Sun.
A team of experts injected an ailing orca calf with a dose of antibiotics, in a medical intervention that’s never been tried before on a wild killer whale.
A summer student has been removed from an experiment after NASA decided that a completely accurate note mentioning the President attached to an experiment that fell in a New Jersey field was a “misguided attempt to be lighthearted,” a NASA spokesperson told WNBC-TV.
Globular clusters are among the most fascinating celestial phenomena in the galaxy, packing a hideous amount of stars into a relatively tiny region of space. Given the sheer number and variety of stars within these clusters, it seems reasonable to think they’d also be packed with life. But as new research suggests,…
We really are connected, man. As of Wednesday, smoke from the record-breaking wildfires in California had made its way to the East Coast, according to the National Weather Service. Who knows how far it’s traveled by now.
One of the year’s most active meteor showers, the Perseids, will peak overnight Saturday into Sunday and Sunday into Monday, with 60 to 70 meteors per hour. But lots of Gizmodo readers live in cities. So, inspired by a friend’s tweet, I wondered—will city dwellers see the meteor shower?
When it comes to naming the world’s fastest creature, it’s tempting to think of peregrine falcons, cheetahs, or marlins, but as researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology are apt to point out, we mustn’t forget Spirostomum ambiguum—a worm-like creature that reaches breakneck speeds through rapid shrinkage.
Everyone knows there is no sound in space. After all, a sound wave requires a medium, like air or water, to travel through, and space is mostly a vacuum. But in studying a nearby galaxy cluster, astronomers detected a true occurrence of sound in space—and in this case, the incredibly deep sound was coming from a black…
It’s long been thought that tighty-whiteys and other kinds of snug underwear can be bad for men’s semen quality, thanks to the warmer temperatures they can cause down below. And a new study out of Harvard University seems to confirm that suspicion. It found that men attending a fertility center who regularly wore…
Speaking at the Pentagon earlier today, Vice President Mike Pence outlined the official plan to create the U.S. Space Force, the first new branch of the military in more than 70 years.
Using photos snapped by citizen scientists, Canadian researchers have documented the northerly spread of black widows into regions not typically known to host these spiders, whose bites can cause severe pain.
