Study after study has told us to watch out for those empty, sugary calories in sweetened drinks like soda, but two new studies remind us about the dangers of diet soda — they too can lead to weight gain and may raise your risk for developing diabetes.

The studies were presented at a diabetes conference this weekend, and together they show that drinking diet soda may just be another thing in our diets that is making us fat. One study followed 474 older-age diet-soda drinkers and found that their waistlines grew 70 percent more than non-diet-soda drinkers, even when the researchers accounted for differences in age, physical activity level, and diabetes status.

The news gets worse; read on for how bad a two-diets-a-day habit is for your waistline.

A new report from Harvard researchers has found the top foods that are making us fat, and the findings are not at all surprising.

The extensive study used data for over 120,000 healthy men and women from previous studies to track their diet every four years from 1986 to 2006 to see how their lifestyle and what they ate affected their weight. The researchers found that within each period the average weight gain was a little over three pounds — which added up to a 17-pound total weight gain over the 20-year period.

What caused that weight gain? Topping the list of culprits are meat, sweetened drinks, fried foods, and any form of potatoes. The biggest cause of weight gain was eating french fries; every extra serving of fries eaten in a day was linked to a gain of more than three pounds, while eating an extra serving of potato chips led to 1.69 pounds. Other diet busters included refined grains (like white rice and white bread) and butter.

But the news wasn't all bad; the study also identified the foods that helped prevent weight gain. Read on for the list of foods that cause and prevent weight gain.

We went a little gaga over the Wii U after it debuted at the E3 conference last week, but new details are emerging about what the console is really capable of. Some of which will be music to gamers ears, and others . . . well, let's just say it may not make an upgrade worthwhile. Check out some of the new facts below.

• It won't play DVDs or Blu-Rays — Nintendo's president recently confirmed that there will be no DVD or Blu-ray playback for the Wii U, stating that "enough people already have devices that are capable of playing" those formats while listing cost as another roadblock.
• But it will be 1080p HD — Thankfully, the Wii U will be light years ahead of the old console, thanks to a better processing chip that will allow HD 1080p viewing.
• It will connect with social networks — No word yet on exactly how the Wii U will connect with sites like Twitter and Facebook, but Nintendo admits that there are no two ways about it — the Wii U will be a social experience.
• Only supports one Wii U controller — Though you can play the multitude of party games that are made for the Wii system with your friends, the Wii U can only support one Wii U controller at a time. Looks like you'll have to keep passing that touchscreen to the left-hand side. Share and share alike!

Google unveiled some hot new search capabilities earlier today in San Francisco, which are available on the latest version of the Google Chrome browser. Though some of you didn't like the Google Instant feature that rolled out last year, there has been another update to Instant that will shave seconds off of your page-load time. Find out more about it as well as the other announcements below!

Voice Search in Chrome

Now alongside your regular text searches on the Google homepage, you can click the microphone button on the search bar and speak your search instead. This is handy for those times when you don't know how to spell something or are on the move. It's the same reliable search you know on your mobile device, just on your laptop or desktop. Rolling out now in English, voice search should be widely available soon.

Search by Image

We love Google Goggles for its ability to translate photos in real time, show us the sky, and more, but now you can search by image on your desktop as well. Next to the microphone button on the Google Images search page, there will now be a camera button to click on when you're ready to search. Either upload a pic from your PC, or plug in a URL for an image for Google to reference, and you'll find out what the image is, what it says, or where the captured landmark is located. Available now on Chrome in 40 languages, there will also be Chrome and Firefox extensions that will enable you to right click an image to search.

Instant Pages

First there was Google Instant, but now there's Google Instant Pages. This feature actually begins loading the top search results in the background of your web browser, allowing you faster page loads when you do decide to click the top search result links. This will save you about two to five seconds on average. Google Instant Pages will be available in the next Chrome beta release.

Check out a demo of the new Chrome Google voice search function, just keep reading

Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at today's WWDC keynote presentation, which promises to move the center of your digital life to the cloud. Essentially, all of the info you receive on your iDevices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touches, and MacBooks) is sent to the cloud first then gets pushed down into your devices, so you're completely synced at all times. Further, iCloud "just works" with all of your apps. It's magical.

Apparently, Steve and Apple learned a lot with MobileMe, but they've written the key elements from that service (contacts, calendars, and mail) from the ground up for iCloud. If you enter a contact on your iPhone, the contact is automatically updated in iCloud and the info is pushed to the rest of your devices. You can even share calendars, which makes sharing parenting duties super easy. These three features are now free with all Apple devices.

But wait, there's more! See what else is coming with iCloud (including one interesting catch) after the break.

I've often wondered why Twitter doesn't have its own photo-uploading feature — it seems like a no-brainer. And yesterday, the company announced that it would be rolling out photo uploading in the coming weeks, essentially cutting out the need for Yfrog and TwitPic completely. Recently, TwitPic has come under fire for allowing user generated photos to be licensed to a photo agency, so this news couldn't come at a better time for Twitter.

But wait, there's more — Twitter also announced an improved search function that adds videos and photos into hashtag or keyword searches right on the homepage. They even put together a little video to celebrate. Check it out after the break.

As someone who is regularly glued to her cell phone, this isn't the greatest news of the day: the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) warns that cell phones may increase the risk of cancer. Panel chairman Jonathan Samet, MD, chair of preventive medicine at the USC Keck School of Medicine says:

"After reviewing all the evidence available, the IARC working group classified radiofrequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans . . . We reached this conclusion based on a review of human evidence showing increased risk of glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer, in association with wireless phone use."

Scary stuff. The cell phone industry responded to these findings by saying that it "does not mean cell phones cause cancer." While this study doesn't prove that the radiation from cell phones cause cancer, it does show that there is certainly a correlation, but that more studies need to be conducted to further prove or disprove these conclusions. In the meantime, here are some ways to minimize exposure to cell phone radiation.