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Activity monitors are supposed to help us reach our fitness goals, but when it comes to staying motivated, you might want to look beyond your wrist. In a study published in JAMA on Tuesday, researchers found that fitness trackers weren’t the boon to longterm weight loss they expected them to be, with users dropping far…
Everything we do online is a performance. Tasked with artificially representing ourselves, it’s pretty much inevitable. The best way to get to know someone is IRL. But who has time for that? Luckily, there’s an easy hack for figuring out someone else’s interior life. Buried deep inside their phone are dark secrets that reveal the…
Sure, maybe I’ve thought about doing something like this before while peering over a hotel balcony and staring at the pool on the ground level. And yeah, maybe I’ve considered it as a potential escape strategy for the times in the future that I would be chased by some world class assassin. But no way…
R.I.P. Nice.
On Tuesday, federal prosecutors formally filed charges against Ahmad Khan Rahami, the man who allegedly planted a series of bombs around New York and New Jersey before getting captured following a shootout Monday night. And while the complaint lists multiple pieces of evidence connecting Rahami to the attacks—including recovered fingerprints and surveillance footage—it also provides…
We live in a world of great economic disparity. The rich indulge in unimaginable luxuries. The poor starve. And the son of a Chinese billionaire bought his dog eight iPhone 7s, just for funsies. Wang Sicong—the son of Wang Jialin, a Chinese businessman whose net worth is over $30 billion—bought his precious pup Coco eight…
A single tumbleweed crossing your path is already a telltale sign that something is about to go down. So what about when hundreds of tumbleweeds getting blown every which way right in front of you? Yeah, that’s when you know the world is about to end. There’s no other acceptable explanation. It looks like the…
YouTube is famously terrible at announcing site changes, and the upcoming rollout of its “community” features are thus far no different. Today it created a program to enlist users as moderators, and it’s bound to be a goddamn mess. The video—posted to the YouTube Help channel and entitled “Getting Started with YouTube Heroes”—gives a high-level…
North Korea is something of a locked box to the rest of the world, and even one of the handiest apparatuses through which you can glimpse cultural habits—the internet—is largely inaccessible to anyone outside the country. Thanks to what appears to be an accidental reveal, however, we can now peek inside North Korea’s internet tubes.…
MGT Capital Investment, the penny stock turned “technology company” led by noted liar and trickster John McAfee is crashing on the New York Stock Exchange following a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission. https://gizmodo.com/what-the-fuck-is-happening-with-john-mcafee-s-new-compa-1777425938 This shouldn’t come as much surprise, considering there’s lots of unanswered questions about the company. The SEC wouldn’t say what…
MakerBot was going to change the world. It was going to bring 3D-printing, long a product limited to designer offices and workshops, into the home (or at least the garage). But earlier today, under a veil of marketing speak and glitzy videos, the company announced a new focus on commercial—not consumer—products, and in so doing,…
I’ve never actually watched an episode of Sherlock, but I’ve heard enough good things about the BBC series to know that it’s one of those Good Television shows. You know, the ones that smart-ish people love telling other smart-ish people that they need to watch. Celia Gomez edited together this montage of Sherlock’s use of…
A team of researchers were able to wirelessly attack a Tesla Model S and gain control over some of its internal electronic components including the car’s brakes. And they pulled it off from 12 miles away. The hackers are able to wreak havoc over the Tesla they are testing. Besides slamming on the brakes, they…
When the robot uprising happens, I don’t know which side Donald Trump’s TelePrompter will be on. But I can’t help but think that at the very least Trump’s TelePrompter is currently trying to tell us something. This photo was taken earlier today at a rally in North Carolina. What are you trying to say, little…
Do you put premium gasoline in your car? You’re probably wasting your money. A new study by AAA found that 16.5 million Americans had filled up their cars with premium gas unnecessarily in the past year. That’s $2.1 billion, completely wasted. Roughly 70 percent of Americans own cars that have no practical need for premium…
Fiber-based internet service is great (ask any jealous New Yorker not eligible for FiOS) but laying fiber cable costs tens of thousands of dollars per mile. Infrastructure projects to bring it to every household in a given area so expensive, even Google can’t foot the bill. So AT&T decided to use stuff most places had…
Most selfie sticks deserved to be tossed into an active volcano, but when you attach a stabilizing gimbal, suddenly you’ve got something genuinely worth sharing on Instagram. That’s what Karen X Cheng did, but to make her short choreographed dance look even more ethereal, she filmed herself in front of a giant studio mirror so…
When you run over 150 miles on the same route over the course of a year and take a total of 98,366 photos of that route while braving the snow, the rain, the cold, the heat, and all the crazy things the elements can thrown at you, you get a pretty fantastic hyperlapse video that…
A 10,000-acre wildfire that began just off a Californian Air Force base continues to spread. And it’s heading closer and closer to the base’s rocket launchpads. Firefighters have been battling a blaze near Vandenberg Air Force Base—which includes launch facilities that send up rockets for NASA, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance—since Saturday. The fire has…
The latest version of OS X, now called macOS, is available to download! MacOS Sierra brings a lot of new features to the Mac, the most notable being Siri integration. You can now use Siri on the desktop, asking for directions, upcoming appointments, and for access to documents or stuff on the web. https://gizmodo.com/macos-sierra-first-impressions-what-its-like-to-use-si-1782023959 There…