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For hundreds of millions of years, life on Earth was a purely aquatic phenomenon. The jump from the oceans to the continents was a monumental event, one that would irrevocably change the face of our plant. A new study suggests the first plants to make this evolutionary leap appeared much earlier than we thought. Our…
There was a time when Nokia was the undisputed king of cellphones, with quarterly sales of over 120 million units as recently as 2010. But after a failed partnership ended with Nokia selling its handset division to Microsoft, the company tried reinventing itself by pivoting to wearables, a move capped off when Nokia bought Withings, a…
Facebook’s vice president of advertising, Rob Goldman, just learned an important lesson about tweeting—namely, that he should never do it. The Department of Justice on Friday indicted 13 people for their alleged involvement in Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which used Facebook to spread propaganda in an effort to influence the 2016 US election, among other efforts. In…
Is “leftover Easter candy” an oxymoron? Does such a thing even exist? If, for some bizarre reason, you get tired of consuming chocolate bunnies this April, don’t throw all that candy away. As YouTube user Knifemaker demonstrates, you could actually turn all those sugary treats into a functional kitchen knife. https://gizmodo.com/nothing-to-see-here-just-a-functional-knife-made-of-fi-1821568429 Let’s just make sure…
While conducting an inventory of archived documents, curators at Union College in Schenectady, New York, discovered strands hair attributed to George Washington, #POTUS1, in an envelope inside a leather book. Archivist Daniel Michaelson found the book, titled Gaines Universal Register or American and British Kalendar for the year 1793, at the Schaffer Library. The leather-bound…
After Equifax’s negligence allowed hackers to steal the personal information of 145.5 million Americans, the company promised to give everyone free credit monitoring for a year. But House Democrats have formally requested that Equifax extend the monitoring from one year to three years. Even that, however, feels pretty damn inadequate. “We are writing to request…
The National Center for Biotechnology Information website is an invaluable resource for finding scientific studies and papers. Recently, it also became a promotional vector for a potential phishing site offering pirated movie streams. As Gizmodo discovered Monday evening, the science database was coming up in the first page of results for searches that included the…
Die-hard Donald Trump supporters struggling to find partners who love freedom and despise cuckservatives as much as they do were recently blessed with a new dating site just for them: Trump.Dating. But because everything Trump-related has to come with an embarrassing and horrific publicity flub, one of the mugs featured prominently in the marketing is…
A video game intended to help people become less susceptible to misinformation just rewarded me for pretending to post a tweet from a fake NASA account warning of an incoming meteorite. The object of the new browser game, Bad News, is “to get as many followers as you can while slowly building up fake credibility…
Hackers infiltrated Tesla’s cloud environment and stole computer resources to mine for cryptocurrency, according to the security firm RedLock. According to a report released on Tuesday detailing cloud security threats, RedLock’s Cloud Security Intelligence team—yes, its CSI team—notified Tesla of the intrusion and the vulnerability was addressed. The electric vehicle company was reportedly running one…
Former action movie star and current alleged rapist Steven Seagal has endorsed a suspicious cryptocurrency venture known as Bitcoiin (yes, with two “i”s) 2Gen. What could go wrong. What is Bitcoiin 2Gen? It’s hard to say, since the coin itself is currently undergoing its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) crowdsale and does not yet exist. Still,…
What started out as a seemingly simple bug turned into a real hassle when people figured out it was possible to crash iMessage, Twitter or even the Wi-Fi app on Apple products by inserting a single character from the Indian language of Telugu. And once an app had crashed, it would keep crashing forever until…
Everyone has a Prime account now, don’t they? It’s become almost an afterthought—a utility bill paid once a year (or once a month) in return for fast delivery, a Netflix clone, a Kindle lending library, and some other bits and pieces. But is Prime such a no-brainer? Maybe you’re tired of paying the richest man…
In October, Microsoft admitted that its Windows Phone line was pretty much totally dead after failing to attract app developers and its market share plummeted from 0.8 percent to 0.1 percent by t 2017, with even corporate vice president for Windows Joe Belfiore saying that he had switched to Android. Instead, the company looked an…
The photos and video emerging from the Indonesian island of Sumatra right now are absolutely terrifying. Thankfully, no one has been hurt, but the smoke and ash bubbling from Mount Sinabung after an eruption earlier today is like watching some kind of mythical monster slowing taking over the sky. The volcano was dormant for over…
Chinese security personnel physically “skirmished” with a Secret Service agent as well as White House Chief of Staff John Kelly last year at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People over the goddamn nuclear football, according to a report in Axios on Sunday. Per Axios, five sources confirmed that Donald Trump’s delegation was entering the Great…
Noted tunnel enthusiast Elon Musk is digging again, this time for hazily defined purposes at an abandoned parking lot near the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives headquarters building in northeastern Washington, DC, the Washington Post reports. Per the Post report, Musk’s Boring Company has been granted “an early, and vague, building permit” to…
The HPV vaccine is a fantastic drug that prevents everything from cervical cancer in women to dick cancer in men. But a new study from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has found that vaccination rates for American teenagers is still tragically low. Just 29 percent of 13-year-olds in the US have received the first…
Several major dog food brands owned by J.M. Smucker have been recalled by the FDA after small amounts of a euthanasia drug were discovered inside. And if the story sounds familiar, that’s because a completely different company issued an identical recall back in 2017. The new recall includes everything from brands like Gravy Train to…
Humans do the wildest things to animals—stick them with experimental drugs, mash them into cheap nuggets, mount their severed heads on dining room walls. Against this backdrop of chaos and mass extermination the Puppy Bowl seems fairly benign, as do all those other events, like the Kentucky Derby, where animals are forced to play sports…
