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Chris Rock, an independent security researcher, is pissed that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, is more afraid of ISIS than hackers. He’s hoping to change that by teaching hackers how to overthrow governments. “I don’t want to live in a world where ISIS is scarier than hackers,” Rock began. Rock, who runs his…
Elephants are majestic, amazing creatures, but they could be in trouble, along with other species of large mammals. If they disappear, we’d be robbed of the chance to see these giant animals roaming the Earth in their awe-inspiring glory. In response to this, 43 wildlife experts, from across six continents and in seven languages, collaborated…
The torrenting community has been tumultuous these past few weeks. First, Kickass Torrents was seized by the government after the owner’s arrest. Now, one of the largest search engines has vanished. According to TorrentFreak, Torrentz.eu unexpectedly shut down on Friday, disabling its search functionality. The domain is still active, but currently, the site just features…
Sunflowers may look like the sun if you squint your eyes a bit, but they also do this weird thing where they turn to face the sun, hence the name. But how and why these plants move over the course of a day has stumped scientists for over a century. However, a new study published…
Since finding a perfectly dark sky is rare in our electrically-powered world, we at Gizmodo like to highlight the areas that still remain and the photography projects that explore them. This week’s photo series comes from the Altiplano salt flats (Salar de Uyuni) in Bolivia, where a team journeyed to the site and captured some…
Just now, I saw a man almost die. He was holding a robotic oar down by his side while riding a skateboard. The oar, loaded with a motor and fitted with a wheel at the bottom, sent him launching towards the film crew and me at speeds usually reserved for small cars and scooters. Thankfully…
It always sucks when a pet dies in real life. But in movies? It depends on what kind of pet. When a dog dies, it’s a touching and deeply personal moment for the character. We feel their pain. When a cat dies, t’s a hilarious joke played for laughs. Jacob T. Swinney recaps dog deaths…
Say hello to the “Echo Hunter,” a 27 million-year-old toothed whale that’s helping scientists understand how these ancient sea creatures evolved the ability to hear high-frequencies underwater, and then turn that ability into a killing technique. In a new paper published in Current Biology, researchers from the New York Institute of Technology and the National…
Bose has a long history of making great-yet-pricey speakers. But its latest, the BoseBUILD Speaker Cube, is a first for the company—a build-your-own speaker, intended for kids. It’s designed to help teach the basic concepts of sound and speaker design. It’s a cool idea, with dead simple setup and instructions, but for $150 it could…
Now you can eat—and more importantly, drink—like an 18th-century denizen with Outlander Kitchen: The Official Outlander Companion Cookbook. Welcome to Gizmodo’s Happy Hour. Substance abuse for nerds. It’s based on the wildly popular Outlander Kitchen blog by professional chef and food writer Theresa Carle-Sanders. That, in turn, is a tribute to the wildly popular series…
If someone told us that these stunning new photos had been taken on Earth, we wouldn’t have blinked an eye. But they weren’t. Instead, every one of these photographs comes from a planet millions of miles away from us. The new collection of over 1,000 photographs, which you can browse in its entirety right here,…
Sponsored posts from celebrities—or worse yet, “influencers”—are terrible in any form, but they’re especially bad when it’s not clear they’re actually ads. That’s why, according to a report from Bloomberg, the Federal Trade Commission wants to crack down on these fuzzily-labeled posts. “We’ve been interested in deceptive endorsements for decades and this is a new…
Nowhere is the distinction between the haves and have-nots more apparent than when waiting for a flight at the airport. But it turns out you might not need an actual first class ticket to get into a swanky airport lounge—just a custom Android app that spits out a boarding pass-spoofing QR code. Przemek Jaroszewski is…
What if humans didn’t have to respond to major hacks or breaches in the networks they operated, and computers could just do it automatically? That’s a question being asked by DARPA, the US military’s boldest research arm, which set up a multi-million dollar challenge to answer that question. Last night in a Las Vegas ballroom…
A huge storm drenched Phoenix and flooded the streets earlier this week. That’s already bizarre, but the weirdest thing to come out of that storm that happens once a century in the desert is this floating manhole cover. The 150-pound metal plate looks like it’s kind of dancing? Or at least, it’s bouncing around the…
You know how your kitchen looks like a warzone after preparing a large meal? With dirty pots, pans, and utensils strewn about like wounded soldiers? The unfortunately-named Spadle wants to help make cleanup a little easier by replacing multiple utensils with a single transforming solution. Thanks to its curvy, twisting neck that allows it change…
For two weeks, homeowners in Rio de Janeiro will have some highly desired real estate as people from around the world flock to the city (perhaps cautiously) to watch the Olympic Games. Basic economics would suggest the locals will engage in a little bit of price gouging. But woah, some people are getting super gutsy.…
Work diaries chronicling the daily activities of Hitler’s henchman Heinrich Himmler have surfaced in Russian military archives. The recovered texts speak volumes about a key figure behind the Holocaust—a man who could orchestrate mass killings at one moment and then casually switch to mundane family matters the next. Three books consisting of a thousand pages…
The clown prince of crime made his onscreen debut 50 years ago. While The Joker has graced DC’s pages since 1940, his look has (arguably) changed the most through TV and film adaptations—and Burger Fiction gave his many incarnations a proper and thorough send-up. Though they’ve previously chronicled the small and large-screen appearances of comic…
Can you really consider finding a source of power to charge your smartphone a survival skill? For some people, not having a working phone is more dire than not having clean drinking water. So if you find yourself in the great outdoors without an outlet, a little ingenuity can turn random junk into a working…
