(Washington, D.C., May 13, 2026) — The U.S. Forest Service today announced an additional 2026 recreation fee-free day on June 6 in celebration of National Trails Day, providing no cost use of all standard amenity recreation sites on national forests and grasslands.

(Washington, D.C., May 12, 2026) – U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has announced the removal of ten lenders from participation in the USDA Rural Development (RD) OneRD Guaranteed Lending Program. These lenders will be precluded from further participation in the program.

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I flagged smart bands as one of the tech trends of 2026, based on what I was seeing, so it’s interesting to watch the rollout of the Fitbit Air and the buzz around the (still unconfirmed) Garmin Cirqa. Whoop, which has long been the undisputed leader in this area, now has a ton of competition. Here’s what I see going on, and what I think we should expect going forward. 

Fitness trackers have reached the end of their evolution, and their universe is rebooting

To explain how we got here, I’m going to take you through a little history lesson with the theme of: What do we expect a fitness tracker to be? Fitbit has been working on this question for over 15 years, beginning with simple digital pedometers that clipped to your pocket. As more advanced technology became more affordable, Fitbits gained lights and buttons and screens and heart rate sensors—the more you could pack into a device, the better. This evolution continued until some Fitbits were full-on smartwatches. To be honest, until about last year, I would have told you that there’s no longer any meaningful distinction between “smartwatches” and “fitness trackers”—they’ve merged into the same product category. 

In parallel with that evolution, smartwatches and fitness watches also gained features, and then stagnated while trackers caught up. Garmins started off as bulky GPS units you could strap to your wrist; the Apple Watch was an extension of your smartphone that happened to be able to measure heart rate. Over time these categories merged into a single watch-shaped format that had an AMOLED screen, a heart rate sensor, and as many software features as the companies could figure out how to stuff into them. “Do I want an Apple Watch or a Garmin?” is a reasonable question to ask, since the overlap between fitness watches and smartwatches is an almost-but-not-quite-circular Venn diagram. 

But smartwatches, fitness watches, and fitness trackers have all arrived at roughly the same place: They have as many features as people want. In fact, they have more features than people want. The fastest marathon runner in the world seems to be perfectly happy with an old Garmin that was the bottom of the line when it launched five years ago. 

Tech companies can no longer grow by reaching out to people who haven’t heard of smartwatches; most everybody who would want one already has one. Companies also have a hard time convincing people to upgrade the devices they already have, since newer models don’t have any killer features that older ones are missing. 

These days, upgrades mostly consist of putting higher-end features in lower-end watches, which isn’t a strategy that can work for long. That brings us nice perks like the flashlight in Garmin’s Forerunner 970, but the result is that hardware companies like Garmin are ratcheting their hardware prices up, and wondering how they can make their money on something more profitable and longer-lasting, like subscriptions. (Garmin seems to be grasping for straws on subscription features as well, but that’s another story.)

Everybody can load an app onto their phone these days, so devices no longer need to stand alone. As a tech company, if all your fitness tracker’s features are in the app, and your customers aren’t excited about new hardware, you might as well go back to basics and offer a simple sensor on a strap. That’s what we’re seeing now.

How smart bands found their new niche

“Smart band” hasn’t been a tech category for long. Until recently there was only one major product in this area: the Whoop band. Whoop’s hardware was never all that fancy—just a heart rate sensor on a strap. The clasp and the charger were (and are) both cleverly designed, and the focus is on everything but the electronic internals. You get device for “free”—it’s the app that keeps you engaged, and the app that makes you feel you’re getting $239/year of value out of it.

My review of the Whoop 4.0 (no longer the current model) is worth a read if you want to see how this played out over time. In the two years I had that band in my possession, its app gained a ton of new features. Whoop markets itself to athletes who want to monitor their recovery and optimize their sleep schedules, and the app has always provided a treasure trove of data alongside tools to highlight what’s most important to focus on. 

But not everybody wants to pay that subscription fee, or think of themselves as athletes hyper-optimizing their routine. For years, people would pop up on tech forums asking if there was a way to get a similar device without paying Whoop for a subscription, but none materialized. 

But last year, that began to change. I’m not sure if there’s a reason for that timing, aside from companies previously preferring to focus on the escalation of features I discussed above. If it turns out there was a legal challenge or technological issue, I’d love to know. In any case, we got the Polar Loop ($199), and the Amazfit Helio Strap ($99), both very basic devices that feed data to humdrum apps. Garmin’s Index sleep band ($169) somehow managed to be even more basic than these, not even tracking exercise—despite apparently having the internals to do so.  

All three come from companies that already had their own apps that paired with smartwatches. Making a smart band requires no new features of the software, and the manufacturing side must be pretty easy for a company that’s used to making watches. Instead of building a watch with a sensor, you just stick the sensor directly onto a strap and send it out into the world. With that in mind, Polar’s and Garmin’s bands both felt overpriced. Amazfit’s price made a lot more sense, and from what I can tell the demand seems to have outpaced supply. Good luck finding an Amazfit Helio Strap anywhere. 

The Fitbit Air finally puts everything together, and Whoop is right to be scared

Google just announced their own smart band, the Fitbit Air, and I feel like we’re seeing a rare moment of Google reading the room and offering exactly what people need. I say this with great uncertainty, though—everything depends on whether the Health Coach is reliable enough to power the new app. My tests of an earlier version of the Coach were not promising.

But if the Fitbit Air and its new app live up to Google’s promises, then we have a smart band that’s the same cost ($99) as the Amazfit Helio Strap, with a much larger customer base and better name recognition, and a full-featured app that provides analytics and coaching much like Whoop does. 

I’m not saying Google Health will be quite as good as the Whoop app, but if it’s almost as good, and you only have to pay $99 once, ever, rather than $239 every year, almost everyone except diehard athletes would probably prefer the Fitbit. 

And that’s where we get the next stage of evolution. Similar to the trend I observed in smart rings, smart band makers are realizing that hardware isn’t a cash cow, and people don’t want to pay for subscriptions. The money has to come from somewhere else. 

Whoop has already been in the process of shifting to thinking of itself as a health company. You can book blood tests through the Whoop app, and Whoop just announced (somewhat defensively, right after the Fitbit Air announcement) that it will offer video consults with healthcare professionals as a paid add-on service. Healthcare is a big market, since U.S. companies have basically infinite opportunities to take money to fill in the gaps in our crappy healthcare system. 

What I’d buy in 2026

So right now—or coming soon—we have a few viable options for smart bands. The ones I like best are: 

• The reigning champ, Whoop. It still does a lot of things that other bands don’t (like tracking recovery from strength training). If you want the best, I’d still go with Whoop. Get the Peak membership ($239/year) since the more expensive Life ($359/year) doesn’t provide any extras that are worth the cost.

• The new Fitbit Air, with the enormous caveat that I haven’t tried it yet, and neither has almost anyone else. It’s the most affordable smart band (tied with the Amazfit Helio Strap at $99) and works with a full-featured app. It also works with Pixel watches, so you can have a smart band and a smartwatch that feed data to the same app to be analyzed together. 

• The Amazfit Helio Strap, if you can get it. It’s also $99, and can work alongside any of Amazfit’s watches. It’s not as full-featured as the two I named above, but it’s a good basic pick.

I would not recommend the Polar Loop. It’s overpriced for what you get, and any of the three above will give you a better experience. I wouldn’t recommend the Garmin Index sleep band either, unless you’re a Garmin user who really just wants something comfy to sleep in and doesn’t mind the extra cost. 

The Luna band announced at CES has not yet materialized, we don’t know the cost, and there aren’t any smartwatches on the U.S. market that work with the Luna app. Garmin’s Cirqa band—if it’s real, and if it is indeed a Whoop-style smart band—is unlikely to dethrone any of my top picks. But I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.

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If you’re like most people, your TV is the centerpiece of your living room decor. That means when it’s off, all your furniture is pointed at a black rectangle. If this bothers you, the “art TV” trend that started with Samsung’s The Frame could be the answer. These sets are made to look like a piece of art and display an image of your choosing when not in use. The Frame is a pricey option, but other brands have their own offerings—including Hisense and its CanvasTV, which I’ve been using and loving for the past six months.

Already a more affordable alternative to The Frame, you can currently get the massive 85-inch Hisense CanvasTV for $1,697.99 (down from $1,889.99). This is the lowest price ever, according to price-tracking tools.

The primary attraction of the CanvasTV over Samsung’s The Frame is the price: You’ll pay $200 to $1,700 less for the same-sized TV (depending on which size you choose). Not to mention, if you choose The Frame, you have to buy the actual frames that go around the set, and pay for most artwork separately, while Hisense includes all of that in the selling price. Like The Frame, the CanvasTV also comes with a flush TV mount that will allow you to hang it so it looks like an actual art piece.

I also like that CanvasTVs come with the Google OS, which is my favorite smart TV operating system, as it lets you cast seamlessly from your phone (Android or iPhone). The CanvasTV is a QLED TV with Quantum Dot technology and 4K resolution with a 144Hz refresh rate in Game Mode Pro, according to CNET’s review. What gives it the art look is the low reflection Hi-Matte display, which combats glare. You can swap out the teak frames with different colors, including white and walnut frames.

Considering Hisense’s take on The Frame is cheaper and includes less upfront costs, it’s a great option for anyone looking to save money on a TV that won’t dominate their decor—especially at the current discount.

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Tech brands love to tout their active noise-cancelling (ANC) earbuds, but none have reached the standard set by the Bose QuietComfort series. For my money, Bose makes the best ANC gear, and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen) are the best ANC earbuds you can buy right now. The downside of Bose buds is that they’re pretty pricey, but you no longer need to spend $300 to get great ANC. The fantastic first-generation Bose QuietComfort Ultra earbuds are going for $179 (originally $299) on Amazon, the lowest price they’ve ever reached, according to price-tracking tools.

Though they’re an older model, the first-gen Bose QuietComfort Ultra Bluetooth earbuds are still excellent earbuds in 2026. They received an “outstanding” review from PCMag, not just for their best-in-class ANC, but for their great audio quality in general, Spatial audio support, and diverse codec Bluetooth support with AAC and AptX, which makes them great for Android and Apple users alike. However, they’re not perfect: They lack multipoint connectivity, which other high-end earbuds at this price point offer, and there is no wireless charging for the case (if you care about that).

The features are what really set these earbuds apart. They have a CustomTune feature that measures your ear canal’s shape to tune the sound and establish your best ANC profile. (You can make your own tweaks in the companion app as well.) Bose’s “Aware Mode” feature allows you to hear your surroundings similarly to how you would when wearing open-ear headphones. You can also mess around with the settings to mix and match outside noise and ANC within the Aware Mode setting on the app.

You’ll get about four to six hours of battery life from the buds and another 12 to 18 with the charging case. The earbuds aren’t waterproof, but they are water resistant with an IPX4 rating, so you can wear them to the gym without worrying about how much you’ll sweat.

If you tried to launch Spotify today to listen to a song or a podcast, only to find the player endlessly loading, you’re not alone: Spotify is down. The company confirmed the issue on X via its “Spotify Support” page, posting “We’re aware of some issues right now with the app and are checking them out!”

You didn’t need to see this X announcement to learn about the outage, however. Anyone trying to access the service right now will run into a roadblock. I can make it to my library, but when I try to stream a song, I just see the playbar loading over and over again. Downdetector, owned by Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis, currently displays tens of thousands of user reports confirming the same.

Service outages are a dime a dozen these days. Most platforms and services experience downtime at one point or another, and, in most cases, the connection is restored relatively quickly. It doesn’t seem to be an issue with a cloud service provider like AWS or Cloudflare, either, since Downdetector isn’t showing many other apps and platforms with service issues at this time. We don’t know exactly what’s causing this Spotify outage, but, barring some unique event, the company’s software development team will soon isolate the issue, and release a patch to fix it. Before long, I imagine Spotify users will be streaming again.

This story seems straight out of a Hollywood thriller: Up to a dozen scientists working on some of the U.S.’s most advanced and sensitive aerospace and nuclear programs have disappeared or died in mysterious ways over the last five years. The FBI is working with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and local law enforcement to find answers. The House Oversight Committee launched its own investigation. Congressman Eric Burlison said the mystery has “all the hallmarks of a foreign operation.” The president called it “pretty serious stuff.”

Congressman James Comer suggested someone is targeting the nation’s nuclear program. Rep. Tim Burchett alleged a cover-up of UAP activity. Some say it’s aimed at people with knowledge of American security secrets.  Or maybe it’s to cover up evidence of time travel.  So what’s really going on here?

Literally nothing. This is a cobbled-together collection of unrelated deaths and disappearances. As a conspiracy theory, it is, as Daniel Engber pointed out in The Atlantic, “unbelievably dumb.”

Scientists are dying, but so is everyone else

There are around two million scientists in the U.S., and, as science writer and debunker Mick West pointed out, over 700,000 people hold top-secret clearances in the U.S. aerospace and nuclear sectors. If 10 or so of this group had died or disappeared in inexplicable ways over five years, it wouldn’t be statistically meaningful, but this theory is even more stupid than that. Many people on the list didn’t seem to have top-secret clearances, and many weren’t scientists. The list includes a construction foreman who once worked at Los Alamos National Lab, a former custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus, and an administrative assistant. And there are concrete explanations for almost all of these deaths and disappearances. The list includes physicist Ning Li who died at 78 of Alzheimers and Carl Grillmair who was killed in a home invasion by a man with a violent history who had a prior disagreement with Grillmair that had nothing to do with science. 

The missing scientist conspiracy theories have all the hallmarks of apophenia (people perceiving meaningful connections in random data) and cherry-picking, and even if we give a lot of credit to the most “mysterious” entries on the list, the theory gets muddy very quickly. 

The strange life and death of Amy Eskridge

The death that arguably supports the “mysterious assassinations” theory most strongly is that of Amy Eskridge. A fringe scientist who founded the Institute for Exotic Science in Huntsville, Alabama to study anti-gravity technology, Eskridge died at 34 of a (supposedly) self-inflicted gunshot wound in 2022, after telling friends she was being stalked and targeted by unknown forces. 

The conspiracy theorists’ line about Eskridge is that she was a brilliant scientist who made a breakthrough discovery in anti-gravity research and was taken out by mysterious pro-gravity forces before she could go public. It’s a compelling narrative on the surface, but when you unwind it, you find the kind of half-truths and exaggerations you always find when you look into conspiracy theories. 

What actually is a scientist? 

Whether Eskridge belongs in a list of scientists in the first place is debatable. Some online have categorized her as an important researcher with a background in physics, but her highest degree was a bachelors in biochemistry, and she doesn’t seem to have published any research in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Eskridge didn’t have the kind of professional background that suggests access to top-secret government programs, either. 

Maybe Eskridge’s gravity research was too esoteric to be accepted by the “mainstream science,” but even that is questionable. Judging from this public presentation (and accompanying slides) that Eskridge gave not long before she died, she didn’t seem close to any kind of breakthrough. Her speech points out that you can’t build an anti-gravity machine without first developing a theoretical framework for how one could actually work, and that that theory doesn’t exist right now. This is exactly what the scientific establishment would say. 

Eskridge’s presentation wasn’t a revelation of ground-breaking new technology. It was a catalog of past attempts to conquer gravity. ending with a stab at finding a patron to fund basic, step-one theoretical research. Despite the posts from conspiracy theorists, there’s no indication that Eskridge, or anyone else, got beyond the whole “based on everything we know about how the physical world works, anti-gravity isn’t possible” thing. 

Eskridge’s death is (somewhat) mysterious

Eskridge’s death does raise questions. According to police and the medical examiner, it was a suicide, but according to conspiracy theorists it was a murder, and they have receipts.

On May 13, 2022, one month before she died, Eskridge reportedly sent a message to business partner Samuel Reed that read: “If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed, I most definitely did not…If anything happens to me—suicide or an accident—it wasn’t, it’s suspicious, treat it as such.”

She also reported repeated death threats and other harassment, and posted a video of supposed burns on her hands to prove a directed energy weapon was being used against her. 

On the other hand, members of Eskridge’s family publicly stated that she had suffered from chronic pain, and reported no suspicion about how she died. Eskridge didn’t post recordings of harassing phone calls or dark messages she received, nor did she provide any other evidence that she was being targeted. 

That isn’t proof she wasn’t murdered, though. The case of Eskridge and the rest of these scientists runs across a common problem of debunking conspiracy theories: We don’t know enough to say for sure, and we can’t prove a negative. That leaves us with asking which explanation is more probable: a shadowy, unnamed cabal of assassins targeting a woman who was interested in anti-gravity, or a woman who was paranoid about a non-existent cabal and took her own life.

From what we know for sure, Eskridge was interested in developing an anti-gravity hypothesis. Some claim she was about to break the field wide open by publishing her findings, but she didn’t actually publish anything. Even if we accept that her theory existed, the argument is still “assassins targeted someone for thinking about anti-gravity,” which is still an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. And there isn’t any. 

Eskridge’s death, heartbreaking as it is, would not have attracted attention if she hadn’t spent her final months making predictions that later appeared, to some, to come true, but that’s not enough to prove anything. We only have Eskridge’s word that harassment took place, and it all could have been the product of paranoid delusions on her part. 

While plenty of intelligent, mentally healthy people hold unconventional views about physics and government secrecy, Eskridge believed that she, specifically, was being hunted for her research. Psychiatrists call this “persecutory ideation,” and it’s associated with serious mental illnesses and correlates to suicide.

We don’t have evidence to prove Eskridge was suffering from a mental illness, just as we can’t prove that she was murdered, but mental illness is, in general, a more common cause of death than shadowy cabals of assassins targeting people over scientific theories. Roughly 800 to 900 Americans aged 34 die by suicide every year. As Eskridge’s father, a retired NASA employee, told NewsNation, “Scientists die also, just like other people.”

The families just want theorists to stop

Eskridge’s father isn’t the only family member of someone on the list to have spoken out. Carl Grillmair’s widow Louise told BBC that she has been fielding calls from conspiracy theorists, despite the fact that her husband’s alleged killer has been charged with murder. Relatives of others on the list have publicly called the conspiracy theories “terrible” and “disgusting.” And not a single family member has publicly suggested there’s anything suspicious about any of these deaths or disappearances.

It’s fun (and sometimes politically useful) for conspiracy theorists to dream up connections between unrelated events, just like it is fun for people like me to shoot holes in their theories, but these were real people with families, friends, and in many cases genuine scientific legacies. They deserve better than a walk-on role in a conspiracy theory.