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Fossils of ancient apes are even rarer than those of ancient humans, so very little is known about these important evolutionary missing links. The unexpected discovery of a 13 million-year-old infant ape skull in Kenya is offering a tantalizing glimpse of a new species that lived well before humans and apes embarked upon their very…
Four years after six specimens were discovered in Argentina, scientists have finally given a name to what is now considered the largest animal to ever have walked the Earth. Say hello to Patagotitan mayorum—a Cretaceous-era dinosaur that weighed an astonishing 152,000 pounds. Before we get into the details of the new study, published today in…
You’ve probably seen it: a stock photo of a white-haired old man in a plain red turtleneck with the words “guess I’ll die” scrawled across his chest. But the story of how Mike Baldwin, a 76-year-old retired chemistry and biochemistry professor, actually became the internet’s preeminent expression of fatalism has remained a mystery. As it…
On Tuesday evening, citizens of India were appalled to find that the Internet Archive had been blocked by a growing number of local ISPs. Instead of finding the Wayback Machine, users saw a message that is routinely used when the government restricts access to an online organization. https://gizmodo.com/emulate-the-golden-age-of-the-macintosh-thanks-to-the-i-1794367274 First reported by Indian outlet Medianama, the…
The phones in our pockets might be getting more and more complicated, but many researchers advancing the field of robotics are actually engineering simpler bots designed to reliably perform very basic tasks. So instead of one day facing a terrifying future filled with terminators, these squishy rolling donuts might be our biggest threat. Yoichi Masuda…
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and President Trump are rarely on the same page. But nowhere is that divide more obvious than when the two talk about North Korea. Tillerson is currently on a plane heading from Malaysia to Washington, DC, and just talked to reporters during a refueling stop in Guam. The Secretary of…
The most basic physical laws you’ve learned—those drafted up by Isaac Newton in the 17th century—don’t work for everything. Once you try to applying them to really fast things moving nearly at the speed of light or things heavier than stars, they start to fall apart. That’s where Albert Einstein’s expanded theory of motion and…
A leading American security company and purveyor of anti-malware detection services is waking up to a damning report about a massive vulnerability in its flagship product. The report describes an unimaginable leak, the scope of which covers a wide range of confidential data, including customer credentials and financial records, among other sensitive files. In a…
On Tuesday, notorious rag the New York Post took a swing at the king, publishing excerpts from emails sent by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to staffers and claiming that the emails proved beyond all doubt de Blasio is an “imperious bully of a boss who threatens his underlings with dire punishment if they fail…
Earlier this year, authorities accused 18-year-old dual US-Israeli citizen Michael Kadar of being the individual behind a terrifying, nationwide wave of bomb threats at predominantly Jewish schools and community centers. This week, it emerged authorities also believe Kadar was advertising a “School Email Bomb Threat Service” on AlphaBay, the massive dark net market which law…
Google fired software engineer James Damore on Monday after his 10-page anti-diversity screed went viral within the company. According to emails obtained by Gizmodo, and accounts from four individuals who attended a Ph.D program retreat with Damore, this is not the first time he offended his peers with sexist ideologies. According to emails provided to…
Firearms manufacturer Sig Sauer is offering a “voluntary upgrade” to owners of its P320 line of semi-automatic pistols, which have been on the market since 2014, after they became aware that the damn things fire when dropped on the ground. Per CNBC, Sig Sauer admitted on Tuesday that dropping the pistols could cause an “unintentional…
After The Washington Post reported that North Korea is believed to have successfully miniaturized a nuclear weapon to fit inside its functioning missiles, President Trump addressed the news while speaking to reporters Tuesday afternoon. There was absolutely nothing reassuring about his comments. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” said Trump. “They…
A Google engineer was fired yesterday after he wrote a memo arguing that women are biologically less suited for software engineering jobs compared to men and that Google’s diversity efforts are misguided. The engineer’s memo was circulated widely inside the company on Google+ and on an internal meme generator, Memegen, before Gizmodo published it on…
Mother Nature has done a good job at dotting the planet with hidden caves and caverns that yield amazing footage once they’re discovered. Humans have created similarly spectacular secret locales, albeit accidentally, as this kayaker discovered while paddling through the abandoned MV E Evangelia cargo ship off the coast of Romania. It’s lacking the hanging…
We’ve all been forced to do it: create a password with at least so many characters, so many numbers, so many special characters, and maybe an uppercase letter. Guess what? The guy who invented these standards nearly 15 years ago now admits that they’re basically useless. He is also very sorry. The man in question…
From snapping photos with a cellphone to streaming music through a browser, much of the tech trickery we take for granted in 2017 looks simple on the surface but involves a complex series of computations and calculations behind the scenes to make the magic happen. As an example, take Google.com. You not might think much…
Australia uses five different tests to evaluate potential immigrants’ mastery of English, but only one of those tests uses computer-assisted voice recognition. Louise Kennedy, a native English speaker from Ireland, was unfortunate enough to receive the automated test when she was applying for residency in Australia. She failed. https://gizmodo.com/experts-worry-as-germany-tests-voice-recognition-softwa-1793424680 According to The Guardian, Kennedy has…
Jellyfish-like salp are amazing swimmers, converting their gelatinous bodies into efficient undersea propulsion systems. But these tiny creatures can move even faster and further when banding together to create long, snake-like chains. Researchers have finally figured out how this unusual configuration makes salp even better swimmers. Salps are tiny, barrel-shaped marine invertebrates that move through…
In news that is making the recent Pacific Northwest wildfires look downright ordinary, scientists have spotted a large wildfire raging across western Greenland, a place better known for its enormous glaciers. Satellite evidence of a “sizable fire” about 90 miles (150 km) northeast of the town of Sisimiut was first detected on July 31st, according to…
