It's fair to say Fitbit has been through a few changes in the eight years since I wrote about breaking up with the then-dominant wearable. Spoiler alert: I ran away with the Apple Watch and never looked back. Now here comes the ex with a new announcement, and, uh … I guess you'd say they've had some work done?

Fitbit was bought by Google for $2.1 billion back in 2019. The Fitbit co-founders left the tech giant in 2024, a few months before Google discontinued the Fitbit wearable altogether. The Google Pixel has become the default Fitbit smartwatch, and the Fitbit Charge 6 its sturdy old-school fitness tracker.

Meanwhile, the Fitbit app — where Google sells Premium subscriptions at $8 a month — has been loaded with new features. Now, whether you like it or not, those features include feedback from Google's AI, Gemini — or as it's called in its Fitbit flavor, Coach.

The company has trialed Coach via the Android version of the Fitbit app. The test expanded last month to iOS users — right around the same time Fitbit owners were required to have Google accounts, and the Fitbit accounts were discontinued.

That deadline for switching to Google has been extended until May 19, 2026 — doing little more than perpetuating the agony for old-school Fitbit users.

All of which, apparently, makes this the perfect time for Google to invite Fitbit users to trust the company with their medical data. "When your coach understands your medical history, its guidance becomes safer, more relevant and more personalized," the company wrote in its latest Fitbit announcement.

The company added: "you have control of your data and how it's used, shared or deleted. Your medical records, like other health data in Fitbit, is not used for ads." (emphasis in the original.)

And if you're wondering whether to trust that claim, note that the AI features in question aren't from Google alone. Requests for health records go to b.well Connected Health, an AI platform that aggregates health data from various providers.

Clear, the security platform you may know from the empty line next to the TSA queue at many airports, is another partner, allowing you to search for medical records using a valid form of ID and a selfie.

So, Fitbit, you're looking well, and I see you have some new friends. We must catch up sometime. Bring my medical records? Yeah, let me think about that. I'll let you know!

Put Ryan Gosling and an alien puppet in a spaceship, and you get sheer joy.

That's the best way to sum up Project Hail Mary, a good chunk of whose runtime is a two-hander between biologist Ryland Grace (Gosling) and an alien named Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz). In addition to voicing Rocky, Ortiz also served as the creature's lead puppeteer, helming the crew that brought the endearing Eridian to life.

The final version of Rocky audiences see on screen is a marriage of practical puppeteering and animated effects, but Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller knew they needed that practical base in order to truly sell Grace and Rocky's friendship.

"It's so important for that core relationship in the movie for Ryan to have a scene partner and someone with whom to bounce things off of," Lord told Mashable in a joint video interview with Miller. "That meant getting a real puppet that we could really photograph, and a great team of puppeteers, led by James Ortiz, that could respond to his improvisational ideas and offer ideas to Ryan so that he would not know what was going to happen next."

Gosling's improvisation and Ortiz and his team's responses lead to one of the film's most charming sequences: when Grace first meets Rocky in the tunnel Rocky has built from his ship to the Hail Mary.

While Grace is terrified by Rocky at first, he soon realizes that the alien means him no harm. They establish trust by mimicking one another's peaceful movements, including some perfectly awkward dance moves by Grace.

Gosling shot the scene with an earwig in, through which Lord and Miller pitched him ideas of gestures to carry out. He was also free to try some of his own.

"We left it to the puppet team to try and copy whatever it was that Ryan was doing, and we would be like, 'OK, do a little dance, or do the Macarena, or draw out a gun,'" Miller recalled. "Every time he would do that, the puppeteers had to figure out how they were going to copy what he did."

Even on set, the effect was one of delight.

"As we were shooting it, it was movie magic. You're like, 'I can't believe we're capturing this thing, and it's really happening.' You can see the joy on Ryan's face as he watches the little alien puppet trying to do whatever it is he's doing, and I think there's something so magical and special about that," Miller said.

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Another improvisational moment for Gosling, Ortiz, and the Rocky team? The scene when Grace gives Rocky a measuring tape in the hopes of comparing numerical systems. Rocky isn't able to read the numbers, and instead plays with the measuring tape much in the way an excitable kitten would play with a ball of yarn.

"We put a real measuring tape in Rocky's hands, and we just told [the puppeteers] to play the game of 'Don't look at the numbers, just mess around. Whatever you do, do not do what Ryan's asking you to do,'" Lord said.

"He was really reacting, going, 'Oh my God,'" Miller added.

So when you're watching Project Hail Mary, remember that even though Gosling is acting, some of Grace's wonder towards Rocky (and perhaps even the occasional exasperation) is totally real.

Project Hail Mary is now in theaters.

Like any book-to-film adaptation, Project Hail Mary makes some changes to its source material.

In most cases, Project Hail Mary's changes look like removing elements of Andy Weir's novel in order to streamline the film. For example, in the book, a key part of finding astronauts for the Hail Mary mission is determining whether they have a very rare coma resistance gene, all of which is missing from the movie. Another omission? A plan to power Astrophage production by covering the Sahara Desert in solar panels.

However, Project Hail Mary does make one addition in its final minutes that isn't in the book.

The film ends very much like Weir's novel, with biologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) living not on Earth, but on alien Rocky's (voiced by puppeteer James Ortiz) home planet of Erid. He's sent the Hail Mary's beetle probes back to Earth with instructions on how to breed the Astrophage-eating Taumoeba and save the sun. In the book, after Grace has spent years on Erid, we learn that the sun's luminosity has been restored, meaning Grace's research made it to Earth and humanity is saved.

However, we never actually see what that process looks like in Weir's book. In fact, we never return to Earth, as we're in Grace's mind the whole time.

The movie, on the other hand, does bring us back to Earth as the film winds down. It shows us its now-frozen oceans, a result of global cooling due to the sun's dimming. It also shows us what's happened to Stratt in the years since the Hail Mary launched.

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Stratt's fate remains a mystery in the novel, although she believes that she'll eventually wind up in prison due to the extreme actions she took to get the Hail Mary off the ground. (The Sahara Desert plan, for example, proves an environmentally destructive resource drain, although it gets the job done.) The film takes a more optimistic approach, showing that Stratt is still alive and has received the beetles. Now, she's ready to start work on the next phase of Project Hail Mary.

"Quite honestly, I love writing Stratt," screenwriter Drew Goddard told Mashable while discussing Stratt's ending. "This movie is about three characters, really. It's a triangle between three characters, and we need to give her her moment."

Thus, Stratt's epilogue was born, granting us a hopeful glimpse into humanity's recovery effort.

Goddard continued: "That's what great about movies. You can cut away, whereas the book stayed with Grace. Once I put [the scene] in, no one questioned it. I was really grateful that they let us do it, because I thought it was really important to see her."

Project Hail Mary is now in theaters.