Ominous

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.Gizmodo’s Top Five Gadgets of 2023A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water containing a very rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba went up his nose. He died a few days later in the hospital. The toddler wasn’t the first person in the United States to contract the freshwater amoeba, Naegleria fowleri, this year. In February, a man in Florida died after rinsing his…

Somewhere, someone has woken up in a cold sweat and faced the realization that they might not have actually escaped the wrath of Nicki Minaj. In the early hours of the morning, the rapper took to social media for an impromptu meeting of the Barbs as they gear up for the release of Pink Friday 2 on her birthday, Dec. 8. Among the slate of teasers that she shared on X (formerly Twitter), was a pointed warning: “If you on my $h!t list, you will never EVER recover,” Minaj wrote. “The. Fkng. End.” In a recent…

Coraline, based on the novella by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman, is a creepy film. From its animation to its characters to its morbid themes, Coraline is not some fun kids’ animation, oh no. As if the movie wasn’t disturbing enough, one TikTok user has pointed out another disconcerting fact that makes the Other Mother even more terrifying. The film’s opening credits showcase a pair of sharp pointed, needle-like fingers taking apart a doll before using the doll’s skin to remold it into the shape of Coraline. This is all…

Image via ScottGames Amid the plethora of modern-day horror projects that completely set the genre on fire and ignite a burning passion among the fandom, the common denominator would be Blumhouse — one of the genre’s most successful production houses which attaches its label to virtually every project out there now. In the past, Blumhouse leader Jason Blum has dropped cryptic tweets in an attempt to paint a larger message for the horror world. Flash forward to now, and the acclaimed producer is back once more…

Illustration: MBARIThe dark red areas on the map above show that the Pacific waters off of South America are currently very warm. This is an unusual “coastal El Niño” that is not linked to the larger El Niño with global climate implications, says biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. A classical El Niño is a band of warm water that develops across the Pacific. That’s in contrast to the La Niña we’ve had the past few years, which is a band of cold water in the…

As the US invests billions in local semiconductor manufacturing to end its dependence on China, the bonhomie between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin can be seen as an effort by Beijing to somehow negotiate on raw materials needed in semiconductor manufacturing.Russia and Ukraine are major producers of two key materials used in semiconductor manufacturing - neon and palladium.Ukraine represents about 70 to 80 per cent of the global supply of neon, while Russia produces about 35 to 45…

This week, Argentina and Uruguay declared national health emergencies following outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, the fast-moving virus that destroys poultry flocks and wild birds, and for decades has been feared as a possible spark for a pandemic among people. That makes 10 South American countries that have recently marked their first-ever encounter with the virus, including Peru—where more than 50,000 wild birds died last fall, and more than  600 sea lions in January. Combine the sea lion infections…

Above the islands of Hawaii on January 28, a green laser was seen piercing the night sky, silently tracing a path towards the horizon like a stutter in the Matrix's code.The scene was caught on camera from a telescope atop Hawaii's tallest peak.You can check out the scanning laser in the footage below.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn_PMiND4Yw frameborder="0″ allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen>Thankfully, this wasn't some alien…

The sky is a hazy shade of—er, summer—on Mars, as captured in a new image by NASA’s Perseverance rover.Mars has four seasons, like Earth does, but they are a bit different from what we experience on our wet, life-filled planet. A Martian year is 687 Earth days, made up of 668 Mars sols, so its seasons last longer, too. They’re also more inconsistent than ours: In the Martian northern hemisphere, spring lasts 194 days, while autumn lasts only 142 days. Mars’ atmosphere is just 1% the density ofEarth’s, and the entire…

Image via Universal Pictures M. Night Shyamalan‘s latest work, Knock at the Cabin, will hit theaters before we know it. With the writer-director boasting one of the most wildly inconsistent filmographies as far as overall quality goes, we’re hoping this one falls near the end of the spectrum occupied by The Sixth Sense, rather than the one that houses Old. Thankfully, based on promotional content alone, it seems that the latter is the case with Knock at the Cabin, with the likes of Dave Bautista‘s sinister…