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The theme this week on Gizmodo was “survival”—how to survive a natural (or unnatural) disaster, the wilderness, the apocalypse, what have you — including, of course, Apple’s new mobile OS. Here are the highlights from this week. 23 Things You Can Do in iOS 9 That You Couldn’t Do in iOS 8 It may have…
Marco Arment, internet pundit and creator of Instapaper, has decided to stop selling his wildly-popular ad blocker, Peace, for iOS 9. His reason? It “just doesn’t feel good.” But there’s more to it than that. Like many other entrepreneurs, Arment released his ad blocker on Wednesday, when the release of iOS 9 meant Apple mobile…
One of the two best feelings a kid can have is that immediate king of the world, I’ve got this life thing all figured out of learning how to skip a stone across a body of water (the other is the freedom of learning of how to ride a bike, I think). But that smug…
The 1960s were a tumultuous decade–but by most accounts, they were a golden age for air travel. The TWA Terminal at JFK, opened in 1962, is a perfect example of that bygone era, but the midcentury masterpiece has sat empty for more than a decade. Now, it will be reborn. After almost 15 years of…
For years, the Ig Nobel Awards have been famous for celebrating the most offbeat and ludicrous forms of scientific discovery. And last night, I was lucky enough to attend the 2015 Ig Nobel ceremony, because a friend was the proud winner of an Ig Nobel. This year was the 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize…
A glider designed to float to the edge of space on air currents will attempt its first flight on Wednesday. Next year, the Perlan Mission II will launch to soaring altitudes of 90,000 feet, where it’ll harvest invaluable data on Earth’s atmosphere and climate. Sponsored by commercial airplane manufacturer Airbus Group, the Perlan Project is…
Reviews Editor Sean Hollister is leaving us today. To which I say: HOW DARE YOU, SIR? Readers of Gizmodo know Sean to be an excellent writer and an astute critic always ready to tell the truth behind the gadgets we covet. His laser-like focus, extensive tech knowledge and wry wit also make him an awesome…
It’s already hard enough to just go mountain biking where there are no trails. It’s already hard enough to just walk on a slackline suspended in the air. So naturally, it makes perfect sense to go mountain biking on a slackline. Wait. What? That’s what Kenny Belaey did. He rode his bike on a slackline…
All those muscles meant he could defend Eternia, but put a pencil in He-Man’s hand and sit him down in front of the SATs and suddenly he’s not so heroic. And is that who you really want your kids idolizing? The Little Giants are a line of three-inch collectible figures featuring real-life heroes who’ve actually…
From asteroid impacts to robot takeovers to superbug pandemics, there are a thousand ways human civilization could be destroyed. Most of us prefer not to dwell on the End Times, but for the folks at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, the apocalypse is just another day at work. In the spirit of Survival Week, I…
One of the weirdest little pocket devices in 2015 is Blackberry’s still “rumored” Venice, a slider smartphone with physical keys running near stock Android. With a new hands on video with an evaluation unit of Blackberry’s new smartphone Frankenstein, Baka Mobile’s brief four-minute tour shows off some cool stuff. My favorite feature (aside from it…
Back in February, I got unreasonably excited about a dart gun: the BOOMco Spinsanity 3X. Firing 30 rounds of flying rubber up to 70 feet away, it looked like it could beat Nerf at its own game. You see, BOOMco has amazing darts that fly incredibly straight and magically stick to specially treated surfaces, but…
Earlier this year, it was revealed that the US Pacific Northwest could face a 1-in-10 chance of a suffering a catastrophic, 9.0 earthquake within the next 50 years. We have to do a better job preparing for it. That’s where Japan comes in. Japan is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world. We…
There’s a good reason why you don’t know how your data gets from one place to another on the internet. The major network cables that truss the United States haven’t ever been fully viewable to the public–until now. In 2006, the US Senator Ted Stevens used a string of four words to describe the internet:…
For thousands of years, history has been recorded piecemeal, in books, artifacts, buildings and legends. But in the age of molecular biology, a new archive is helping to fill in the gaps: your genetic code. Each of our genomes contains a record of the journeys taken by our ancestors, one that scientists are just now…
If you’re a stop-motion Lego filmmaker who thinks that adding moving mouths in post-production is cheating (or too time-consuming) then over on Minifigs.me you’ll want to grab a set of these Minifig heads featuring phonetic mouth poses that can be swapped in while you’re animating. The site actually worked with professional animators to help develop…
There’s no other company that likes to muck around with form factor than Samsung. The Korean company applies strange curves, slopes, and even folds on lots of its gadgets, but for its latest television, it teamed up with one of the world’s best furniture designers to create Serif, a TV that’s more posh than the…
Police injury reports, drug tests, detailed doctor visit notes, social security numbers—all were inexplicably unveiled on a public subdomain of Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the next big data breach horrorshow. Instead of hackers, it’s old-fashioned neglect from companies managing data that exposed your most sensitive information. Texas tech enthusiast Chris Vickery had heard strange…
The Obama administration announced today that it was ordering Volkswagen to recall 482,000 cars sold between 2009 and 2015. The EPA alleges that the cars were designed to intentionally mislead smog emissions testing equipment, using special software installed in the cars. According to the EPA, almost half a million cars were equipped with a device…
When he was 15, Edmund Kemper shot his grandparents, curious about what it would feel like to commit murder. A stint in a maximum-security prison hospital did little to cure him; after his release at age 21, his urge to kill led him to a new target: college girls. His headline-grabbing nickname became “The Co-Ed…
