French Licorne nuclear test, July 3, 1970.Image: Pierre J/Flickr There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects of…

Screenshot: Gizmodo Cortana, like all digital assistants, is supposed to make life easier by organizing your data and presenting you with helpful information when you need it. Unfortunately, that inclination to be useful can also pose a security risk, as McAfee found when it discovered a bug in Windows 10 that let hackers use Cortana…

New York City, as seen 170 million years ago.Image: Ancient Earth/Ian Webster The Ancient Earth map comes with some neat features, including a brief description of the chosen period at bottom right, and the ability to remove clouds and stop planet rotation. Using the mouse, you can orient the map to your liking. Specific time…

Illustration: The Boring Company Billionaire Elon Musk, who also founded the car company Tesla and the space exploration company SpaceX, came under fire (sorry) last week when The Boring Company released a flamethrower of questionable social value. The device, literally called Not-A-Flamethrower, is idiotic, to say the least. “We’ve had three major fires in Orange…

Two of the four frogs found in amber (the specimen on the right shows two views).Image: Lida Xing The extraordinary discovery of four small frogs preserved in amber is providing the earliest evidence of these now-prolific amphibians living in tropical rainforests. New research published today Scientific Reports shows that frogs—an animal that first emerged some…