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His boss may be able to sell a shit deal with a smile, but Press Secretary Sean Spicer could barely muster a grin as he defended the now mercifully dead American Health Care Act, the GOP’s rushed replacement for Obamacare. The AP confirms that Republicans, without the necessary votes, pulled the bill. Essentially, it got…
Last December, Edgar Maddison Welch—a 28-year-old who claims he had only recently installed an internet connection in his North Carolina home—crossed state lines with several firearms. After arriving at a Washington DC pizzeria to “self-investigate” a conspiracy theory that the restaurant was involved in a child sex trafficking ring, he fired a rifle inside and…
Superfast fiber internet—promising download speeds of a 1000 megabits per second—is a tantalizing but far-off prospect for many people, and even those who live in major cities often can’t access it. It’s exciting, then, when news comes along that a big internet service provider will expand its fiber access. To whit: AT&T announced yesterday that…
We don’t understand quasars all that well, but are pretty certain that these incredibly bright lights belong in the centers of galaxies. So it looked a little weird when astronomers spotted quasar 3C 186 thirty six thousand light years away from the center of its galaxy, seemingly trying to escape. Given their brightness and location…
A company producing ready-to-eat chicken is recalling 933,272 pounds of its ostensibly schoolhouse cafeteria-bound product. That’s equal to 26.5 million McNuggets, based on prior Gizmodo calculations. That is so much chicken. Oklahoma City-based OK Foods, inc.* is recalling chicken produced from Dec 19, 2016 through Mar 7, 2017. This comes after five complaints brought a United…
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the Trump appointee also known as one of the executive producers of the Oscar-winning (*shudder*) film Suicide Squad, was interviewed by Axios’s Mike Allen on Friday, and he had some insane things to say about our president. The interview was ostensibly about Mnuchin’s role in the Trump cabinet, but (as is…
Everybody knows 2016 was a weird year. But guess what: So far, 2017 is even weirder. Like dystopian, wake-me-from-this-nightmare, am-I-living-in-an-episode-of-Black-Mirror weird. We’ve got the tweets to prove it. A simple Twitter search reveals that a critical mass of people thinks the world is suddenly turning into a dark scifi reality, much like the spine-tingling, dystopian…
Guppies might look like mindless, mouth-breathing little bastards, but it turns out some of them make better dating decisions than we do. No, really—these tiny fish, with their infinitesimal brains, are somehow more discerning with their mates than us, and we literally invented rockets. And Doritos. A new study, published on March 22nd in Science…
Humans (not you, you’ll be dead) are going to have to live somewhere other than Earth eventually. There might be some options for new homes on Mars, the planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, or even one of the planets in the Trappist-1 system. But what about the Moon for starters? It’s round like our Earth, it’s…
An archivist working at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library has stumbled upon color home movies taken in the late 1920s by former First Lady Lou Hoover. Incredibly, this is very likely the first color film to show a US President, the First Lady, and the White House. Audio-visual archivist Lynn Smith was working on a…
YouTuber Giaco Whatever is on a quest to build a Nerf blaster that will do more than just leave a tiny welt on someone. He’s constructed an air-powered dart cannon that generates 400 PSI of pressure, and when cranked to full power, it can apparently send a Nerf dart flying at Mach 2.3, twice the speed…
The Wall Street Journal has yet another essential report from inside the meltdown of biomedical company Theranos. The company, which is currently the subject of a criminal probe for allegedly misleading investigators and government investigators, is reportedly offering investors more shares in exchange for a promise not to sue them. The Theranos disaster-saga began after…
When a young boy identified only as Roman couldn’t wake up his unconscious mother, he did what any astute, technologically-adept four-year-old would do: He used his mother’s finger to unlock her phone, and then asked Siri to call emergency services. The boy’s actions saved his mother, but the incident exposes some dark and dangerous flaws…
It’s a widely accepted fact that we’re fucked. That’s sort of in a general sense. You, reader, are certainly not making it past 2100. And civilization? Maybe it will meet its maker from superbugs and nuclear war in 50 years, or sea level rise in a few centuries. Maybe it’ll be an asteroid in a…
There are several ways to prevent those inevitable wine bottle drips from staining your tablecloth. You can wrap the bottle in a napkin while you pour, just skip the wine glass altogether and drink straight from the bottle, or use your physics degrees to re-engineer the bottle’s spout so it never drips again. As a…
You probably want a carpenter using nails to build your house, so, you know, it doesn’t fall down. But for more decorative wooden creations, fasteners can result in an unsightly finish. An alternative is to rely solely on precisely engineered wooden joints that fit together so perfectly you’d swear they were optical illusions. In this…
People like giving official names to things—other groups of people, weird new animals, stars, round planets, and even the shapes that blobs of water vapor condense into in the sky. But move over, other names describing water vapor. There’s a new name in town: Asparagus Asperitas. Today, the World Meteorological Organization is publishing the newest edition…
Trump is, to put it mildly, oversensitive. From the bully pulpit of Twitter he lays into the source of any perceived insult, be it a union leader, Saturday Night Live, or a teenage girl. Similarly, his organizations are known for their willingness to threaten legal action. In concert, that’s what made a story about a…
By most standards, Robert F. Dorr lived the most all-American, patriotic life anyone possibly could. He served in the Air Force, he was a diplomat with the State Department from the 1960s to the 1980s, and he went on to be a successful author and TV pundit about military affairs. But as a teenager, Dorr…
Alaska Airlines announced on Wednesday that it will retire the Virgin America brand sometime in 2019. The Seattle-based airline bought Virgin America last year for $2.6 billion with the hope of expanding beyond the Pacific Northwest. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin America, apparently cried when he heard the news. Why? Well, it means he’ll be…
