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There is no permanent good in this world. One minute, everything seems fine. The next minute, the forces of darkness steal away Chantek, the beloved, 39-year-old signing orangutan. Zoo Atlanta Reports: The Zoo Atlanta family is saddened to announce the passing of Chantek, a 39-year-old male orangutan, on August 7, 2017. Although his cause of…
With a new iPhones due out later this fall, the Apple rumor mill is hitting peak froth. Not only does 2017 mark the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, but after the iPhone 7 didn’t deliver as much of an improvement over the iPhone 6s as people expected, there’s a lot riding on Apple’s upcoming crop…
On Saturday, Gizmodo published a 10-page-long screed written by Google software engineer James Damore blasting the company’s diversity policies. In the now-viral document entitled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber,” Damore asserts that women are biologically ill-equipped to handle the rigors of the tech industry. The encouraging news is that Damore has now been fired from Google,…
Getting a tattoo is (mostly) a lifelong commitment. So what’s more impressive than this Bart Simpson kickflip animation is that tattoo artist Phil Berge somehow convinced 19 different people that The Simpsons was still cool and relevant enough to get random frames of this flipbook inked on various body parts. Given the long-running animated series…
Google fired a software engineer yesterday in response to public outrage over the man’s 10-page screed against women being represented proportionally in tech companies. But the firing has become a call-to-arms for alt-right voices on the internet who are crowdfunding money for the engineer, James Damore, and are now calling for a boycott of Google.…
On Monday, the New York Times published a copy of the special science section of the draft 2018 National Climate Assessment, which federal climate researchers had completed but feared Donald Trump’s administration and new Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt were plotting to smother in its crib. The draft report reflects federal scientists’ continued and unshaken…
Last month, internet service provider Cox began charging residential customers in Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, and Oklahoma an extra $10 for every 50 gigabytes of data they use over 1 terabyte in a month, bringing the total number of states it charges caps for to 16. Cox’s moved matched other leaders in the industry aggressively implementing…
James Damore, the Google software engineer who authored a 10-page anti-diversity manifesto, has been fired, Bloomberg reports. A statement from Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday evening, obtained by Recode, notes that “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.” Google has…
The hackers behind a massive intrusion into HBO systems have released a month’s worth of a senior HBO executive’s emails, dumping a “publicly accessible link to a cache of internal documents” which also included the script to yet another upcoming episode of Game of Thrones, Hollywood Reporter wrote Monday. The Reporter said evidence of the…
John Zhang, a New York fertility doctor, wanted to push the boundaries of science and fertility by giving women at risk of passing on serious genetic conditions a chance at healthy kids through an IVF technique that uses the DNA of three people. But on Friday, regulators at the Food and Drug Administration issued a…
Drone enthusiasts take heed: If you don’t want to see your precious drone blasted into a million pieces, keep clear of US military installations. The Pentagon has approved a new policy that authorizes military bases to shoot down private and commercial drones encroaching on its airspace. First to report the news, the Military Times says…
Late last week, Washington, DC-area news outlets began reporting that a self-driving car was being tested on public roads in Arlington, Virginia. The reality, however, was much more low-tech. ARLNow.com first broke the news with a video and report of a driverless car driving through the Clarendon neighborhood. DCist shared the video in a since-updated…
According to emails obtained by The Guardian, staff at the USDA have been informed that they should change their language when referring to climate change. Specifically, the staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) were told to avoid using the phrase “climate change,” and were instructed to alter various phrases that acknowledge the effects…
Hey you out there. Did you know LG is planning on announcing a new flagship phone later this fall? No? Well apparently neither did a few users on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s collaborative video site HitRecord, when they started posting videos showing off the rumored LG V30. While the videos have since been pulled from HitRecord, we…
Honest Abe is lying about being human. The people who handle Walt Disney World’s Animatronics have built an all new, slightly frightening Lincoln that makes the perfect facial expressions for reacting to the upcoming talking Trump in the Hall of Presidents. https://gizmodo.com/disney-says-president-trump-will-speak-at-the-hall-of-p-1796412771 Garner Holt Productions [GHP] has built thousands of animatronic figures for theme parks…
Fire up your Start menu or Dock and think carefully for a moment: Out of all your aging desktop apps, how many do you really rely on these days—or even better, how many of them don’t already have very capable web app alternatives you could use instead? Unless you’re a film editor or a graphic…
The rollout for SpaceX’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, has been handled with a nearly concerning level of nonchalantness. On July 27th, Elon Musk announced on Twitter that its maiden voyage will be sometime this November. Now, the SpaceX founder and self-proclaimed Boring Person has released an animation showing the rocket launch on his…
You might want to think twice before giving a driver a low rating. It could inspire them to change your rating to a one-star. Uber provides information to drivers so they can get a better sense of how riders are rating them. The company doesn’t provide specifics, but it seems to be just enough data…
A senior US official has admitted to being the source behind a claim that the FCC was “hacked” in 2014 during the net neutrality debate. Internally, however, the agency’s security team had assessed there was no evidence of a malicious intrusion. Dr. David Bray, who was the FCC’s chief information officer until last month, spoke…
Religion has played an important part in countless wars, conflicts, terrorist attacks, murders, and genocides, yet people seem to associate it with morality. In fact, these same people—even other atheists—seem to think atheists are the immoral ones. A new study from an international team of scientists tried to add some data to the “moral distrust”…
