Hasta La Gadget!

Now THAT'S how to make a "Star Wars" hologram worthy of the Huffington Post!

(Credit: SFFworthy)

Ever click on a headline on Twitter because you felt compelled to find out “the only thing you need to read about New Year’s diets” or why did ancients drill holes in their heads“?

This Internet trend of teasing readers to get them to click on headlines has become standard practice on many blogs including Upworthy and Huffington Post. Some frustrated readers call this tactic click bait and have gone so far as to create Twitter accounts like HuffPoSpoilers and UpworthySpoiler that put a damper on the drama by tweeting the answers alongside the headlines.

Sensational, Upworthy-style headlines like these work in Katniss Everdeen's favor.

(Credit: SFFworthy)

But in the case of the SFFworthy Tumblr, scenes from well-known science fiction and fantasy movies and TV shows like “Star Wars,” “Hunger Games,” … [Read more]

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New Year’s wellness resolutions are like prom night: a lot of hype, even more promises, and a disappointing follow-through. A paltry 19 percent of wannabe health nuts follow through with their annual resolutions, according to University of Scranton Professor John Norcross.

The quickest way to dissolve your hardened commitments into a bowl of disappointed Jell-O is to set a course without clear goals and constant improvement. This is where technology and a dash of the scientific method can help.

Instead of relying on fragmented web advice and our own fragile intuition, “quantified self” is all about treating self-improvement with the rigor of an academic laboratory: make singular adjustments, chart progress, and cumulate learnings.

Quantified self can get sort of extreme; I’ve done things with my body that should neither see sunlight nor be talked about in public. Fortunately, cheaper gadgets, diagnosis startups, and web tools have opened up the “quantified self” movement to everyday consumers who just want to save time and feel a little sexier in front of the mirror.

So, here’s how to super-charge your New Year’s resolutions with science.

Set The Right Metrics

First thing first: you need the right numbers. For instance, “weight loss” is a silly path to sexy, sexy abs, since you’ll probably want to pack on heavy muscle while shedding those love handles. What you actually want is lean body mass.

Instead of a standard scale, splurge on one that measures fat percentage, such as the Withings Smart Body Analyzer. I’ve found that the Withings scale isn’t very accurate for measuring my total body fat percentages, but it’s generally good at measuring changes, which is really what counts in a resolution. Or, if money’s tight and you can dedicate more time, just pick up some skinfold calipers (a handheld clip).

In other words, you want a measure that is as close to your goal as possible. Instead of “going to the gym more,” try “increasing my max squat.” Instead of “walking more,” try “total number of hours active per day” (the Nike Fuelband SE has a nice metric for this one, since sitting all day can counteract scheduled exercise).

This makes nutritional goals difficult, because there’s no good way to measure whether your body is, in fact, absorbing them. Best to stick to performance-minded goals and see if eating healthier helps you meet them.

Set The Baseline And Control Variables

Slow your roll, eager beaver. You don’t need to overcrowd the gym on January 2nd. Instead, baseline your normal activity and abilities for a week. What is your one-mile run? What’s your squat max? How many hours a day are you active? How much are you sleeping? What are you eating?

Personally, I log everything on a Google spreadsheet, but all of the fitness trackers have their own daily logging methods.

Now, make one (one!) significant improvement and see what happens over the next three weeks. Cut out grains (yes, all grains). Set a consistent bedtime. For muscle gain, try bulking up with 0.8 gram of (healthy) protein per pound of body fat per day.

I find that setting experimental results helps me commit, because I know that a single misstep can screw up weeks of effort. If your experiment works, great! If not, there’s something wrong and you need to re-evaluate. But since you only changed one thing, you know what works and what doesn’t.

Avoid broad changes, like “eating healthy.” Instead, try exchanging one of your meals for a salad, but with the same number of calories (olive oil or avocado is a great way to pack in healthy fats).

Health is a marathon, not a sprint.

Look For Patterns And Anomalies

Self-experimentation is more Christopher Columbus and less Pirates of the Caribbean: often the best results are accidental. For instance, I learned that early-morning light was screwing up my last REM sleep cycle after looking over my Zeo sleep headband output (Zeo went belly-up, unfortunately). So, I picked up some blackout blinds.

I also discovered that I could replace coffee with 30 seconds of exercise after I decided to do a quick Crossfit workout one morning after a terrible night’s sleep.

Every body is unique; mulling over your data will help you discover things you never knew helped.

Before the quantified self, I used to be a roller coaster dieter, haphazardly patching together bits of advice. It rarely ever worked. Now, I know what works for my body and what doesn’t. The control has brought sanity to the typical chaos of self-improvement. With a bit of science and some technology, this might be the year that your New Year’s resolutions work.

[Images: Bryce Durbin]

When you want to have a night in, nothing makes for better ambiance than lighting a few candles. They cast a soft, warm glow on everything that puts your mind at ease. This is truly a perfect pairing for a movie, warm blanket, and hot cocoa or a glass of wine. Their lifespan sometimes seems regrettably short though, and if they’re not placed strategically out of your way, they can toss wax on everything.

If you enjoy their effect, but don’t want them to go out prematurely or be knocked from where they were placed, then the LUN Pods might better serve you. They are small, closed pods made of a satin finished metal, and frosted glass that will flicker like flames once turned on. That being said, there’s no switch to turn them on as you merely shake it lightly, and it will turn itself on or off. You will have to deal with losing the small measure of warmth an actual candle will provide, but that may be less of an issue if you have enough blankets and sweaters lying around.

They come with an unobtrusive charging ring that looks like it could be part of the display. Once charged though, you can move them wherever you’d like, and they should stay lit for some time (the length of time they will stay alight on one charge isn’t listed). Purchasing a set of three of these will cost you around $62, which should work out fine if you use them enough to make it worthwhile. Although they’re probably not child-proof, they’re much safer than an open flame.

Available for purchase on Unikia
[ LUN Pods act like tea candles, but have no chance of burning your house down copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Raise your hand if you kept all of your New Year’s resolutions in 2013. Good, okay, now only raise your hand if you weren’t lying just now. Ahh, nice to see both of you. We always start the new year with the best intentions but, man, old habits die hard. Let’s see if we can do better this year. Here are five tips that might just help.

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Let’s be real here: there’s a decent chance that you picked up a new smartphone at some point during the holidays, so you’re off the market for at least a little while longer. As it turns out though, you may have been better off waiting a bit.

In a show of New Years magnanimity (or, you know, a ploy to push more units) Motorola has slashed the prices of its sans-contract Moto X — a fully-customized 16GB model for any carrier will now only set you back $399 rather than the $499 it would’ve originally cost. Sadly, those of you with a woodgrain fetish will still have to pay a premium for those newly-available bamboo backs — $100 to be precise.

Does this ultimately mean you should pick up a Moto X over, say, a Nexus 5? Not necessarily — much as I love what the new Motorola is up to these days the Nexus is still my pick for Android device of the year — but it’s a little heartening to see a big name manufacturer is working to reduce the gap between on and off-contract device pricing for high-end smartphones. If anything, it’s that pricing precedent that seems most interesting here. Between this price cut and the introduction of the wallet-friendly Moto G back in late November, Motorola is positioning itself as a player that can deliver new remarkably solid (and in the X’s case, remarkably thoughtful) smartphone experiences at prices that can seem outlandishly low compared to most competitors.

But where does Motorola go from here? Will it be stuck playing the price game from here on out? It’s possible, but maybe that was the plan all along. CEO Dennis Woodside has mentioned multiple times in the past that he wanted Motorola to deliver cutting edge tech at reasonable prices, and I personally took the Moto G as an affirmation of desire. By slashing the price of its flagship device though, Motorola may be testing the waters to see if it can feasibly move its future products with similarly low price tags. If so, Samsung and rest of the low-cost smartphone leaders really need to keep on their toes.