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Beyond Neptune sits one of the stranger dwarf planets, Haumea. This icy rock receives its flattened dinosaur egg shape from its lightning-fast rotation—a day only lasts four hours there. But it gets even weirder. New evidence is consistent with the presence of a ring. A tiny ring for a tiny planet. An international team of…
A man is being held on $100,000 bail for robbing a bank in Largo, Florida last week, and like any of us about to attempt an unfamiliar task, the 26-year-old William Joe Johnson turned to Google for tips first. As the Tampa Bay Times reports, the culprit’s search history wasn’t turned over to authorities—Johnson informed…
An Indiana couple visiting Longboat Key, Florida, were disturbed to find a hidden security camera in their Airbnb rental the day after they checked in. Derek Starnes, who works in IT, told local news outlet WFTS that he noticed a small hole in the smoke detector on the ceiling of their Airbnb’s bedroom on September…
Remember the mindless doodles you made in your notebooks as classes felt like they’d drag on forever in high school? Jake Fried uses similar materials, ink and Liquid Paper white-out, to bring a complex cut-and-paste collage to life in his short film, Paper Trail. You’ll want to watch it several times to catch every last…
The porg is easily the most controversial new character in the Star Wars universe. You either love it or hate it, but either way, everyone wants to make photoshops of this strange little creature. And Gizmodo readers delivered. Yesterday, we asked you to send us your best porg photoshops and we got way too many…
On October 3rd, the founders of the GIF search engine Giphy were riding high. A cover story in Fast Company chronicled the company’s rise to power and execs were spouting off about their dominance. One claimed that Giphy’s hold on search results is so strong “we own happy birthday now.” The next day, the company’s…
When you work as a filmmaker, watching one of your cameras get destroyed is like watching part of your livelihood disappear. But it’s hard to be upset when the perpetrators dismantling your expensive equipment are a actually a pack of curious arctic fox pups—or kits, as they’re more accurately called. This adorable footage is now…
We already know we’re being watched. We may even know who’s watching us. What we don’t know is what they’ll do now that they’ve seen us. Andrew Guthrie Ferguson’s “The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement,” out on October 9 via NYU Press, is a dense, academic, and…
When Amazon released the Kindle Oasis back in the spring of 2016, we said it was the best e-reader ever made. But that doesn’t mean it was perfect, and in the year and half since it came out, it’s become clear there was room for improvement. With a starting price of $290, the old Oasis…
On Monday, we looked at some of the complaints filed with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) about the treatment of travelers at the US border. People regularly have their electronic devices searched, often for no good reason at all, leading to an invasive and violating experience. And today we have more horror stories from…
The ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reached absolutely bizarre, reality-bending levels this week, with Trump responding to reports Tillerson had called him a “moron” by suggesting that they could “compare IQ tests … I can tell you who is going to win.” This juicy little distraction was apparently…
The Google Home Mini fits most of the features of the tech giant’s popular Home smart speakers into a $50, four-inch-wide package, except for the larger, $130 version’s better acoustics. But it is still very, very good at listening. As many as 4,000 Google Home Minis handed out at Made By Google press and pop-up…
Twitter has ended a standoff with Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn one day after taking down advertisements containing her Senate campaign announcement video, in which she bragged about fighting “the sale of baby body parts.” In a statement to Gizmodo, a Twitter spokesperson explained the original call was made on the basis of its advertising moderation…
A major flaw on T-Mobile’s website could have allowed hackers to extract personal information belonging to millions of customers, according to the researcher who discovered it. The bug was fixed on Friday after the company was approached by a security reporter. On Tuesday, Motherboard reported that it had contacted T-Mobile last week to inquire about…
Bitcoin’s having a wild day. It kicked off with a strange flash crash registered by the CoinDesk tracker that momentarily caused the cryptocurrency to appear to plunge by 12 percent. Almost simultaneously, Russian President Vladimir Putin called for regulatory restrictions on digital currencies for the first time. And then, as it does in recent times,…
A judge ordered the web hosting company DreamHost to redact identifying information about visitors to a website used to coordinate a protest during President Trump’s inauguration, imposing further limits on an extensive warrant obtained by the Justice Department that initially aimed to collect visitors’ IP addresses. Chief Judge Robert E. Morin of the Superior Court…
In 1944, Marcel Nadjari—a Greek Jew who was forced to remove bodies from the Auschwitz gas chambers—buried a letter in a forest near the camp. The text was rediscovered in 1980, but it was virtually unreadable. Using a new imaging technique, scientists have finally reconstructed the letter, and it’s providing harrowing new details of the…
When it comes to physics, fewer things are more exciting than proving something wrong. Proving theories wrong has led to entirely new fields of study. The fruits that come from wrongness can be so rewarding that scientists devote a considerable amount of time to probing well-known theories, hoping to find a crack. But a team…
Of all the giant machines you’ll find on a construction site, the steamroller seems like it has the best potential for realizing your destructive childhood fantasies. There’s an endless list of objects you could stick under its rolling steel drum, but obliterating a giant gummy bear somehow stands out as one of the most satisfying.…
In the latest leak of sensitive medical records in the United States, lab test results and other patient files belonging to an estimated 150,000 Americans were unearthed online by security researchers late last month. The records, discovered by researchers at the Kromtech Security Center, had been stored on an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket. According to…
