Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle is tricky. The purple category is especially difficult, but try reading the clues out loud for help. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: A good person.

Green group hint: The internet is another one.

Blue group hint: Richard Branson’s company name.

Purple group hint: Sounds like…

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Principled.

Green group: Game-changing inventions.

Blue group: “Virgin” things.

Purple group: Ending in nickname homophones.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is principled. The four answers are decent, honest, moral and stand-up.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is game-changing inventions. The four answers are light bulb, printing press, sliced bread and wheel.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is “virgin” things. The four answers are Mary, mocktail, olive oil and Virgo.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ending in nickname homophones. The four answers are brain stew (Stu), broccoli rabe (Rob), jungle gym (Jim) and open mic (Mike).

Summers in Florida are terrible, forcing people to get creative in order to stay cool without breaking the bank or overloading the electricity grid. Hyperspace Pirate took on the problem and came up with a clever mechanism that absorbs solar energy throughout the day and stores it as ice for use when cooling is required, bingo.

Three regular 100-watt solar panels are put on the back of a vehicle and simply plug into a normal charge controller connected to a 35-amp-hour lead-acid battery. Once the battery is fully charged, the microcontroller activates an inverter, which powers a miniature refrigerator compressor. That compressor sucks up around 80 to 100 watts and begins to draw heat from a 2-gallon water bucket coated in substantial insulation, as we’re talking one-inch foam panels and a lot of fiberglass wool here.

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Hours under the hot afternoon sun transform the entire bucket into a solid block of ice. The phase transition from liquid water to ice manages to store approximately 2.5 million joules of energy in that rather normal container. When the procedure is reversed, these numbers add up to adequate cooling capacity to provide around 700 watts of chilled air for an hour. On the cooling side, a pump circulates a 50-50 mix of water and ethylene glycol via twenty feet of copper tubing coiled deep inside the frozen block. That liquid sucks cold from the ice and drains to a standard automobile radiator with a little fan attached. Only a few watts are required to run the pump and fan, so the battery may continue to provide power even after sunset.

The insulation around the bucket is so strong that heat only leaks in at about 7 or 8 watts. Testing revealed that the ice remained frozen solid for several days, with almost no evidence of melting. The microcontroller’s voltage logging revealed that the compressor was kicking in at 12.9 volts and shutting out at 11.1 volts to keep the battery happy, while solar was still charging. The real-world trial put it through its paces inside the truck cab. Even on a warm day, circulating that refrigerated glycol significantly reduced the inside temperature over a few hours. The entire setup is slightly heavier than a basic battery pack, but it is still suitable for mobile use or small structures where grid ties do not seem like an option.

Scaling up becomes easy from here on out, since adding more solar panels and a larger water tank increases the output to several kW. Cabins and recreational vehicles were already an appropriate fit, both in terms of size and energy requirements. As an added plus, a whole house may use the system as an extra cooling source when it’s really hot outside without having to transfer any excess electricity back to the power company.

Water carries the load rather than all those chemical batteries. So the storage remains compact while the pricing remains affordable. One cubic metre of ice has roughly 93 kilowatt-hours of cooling power and weighs less than a stack of cells. The compressor runs on standard n-butane refrigerant that has been charged into a closed loop. It never interacts with the glycol side. Every last piece was built with off-the-shelf parts, some copper fabrication, and some custom code for monitoring.
[Source]

Tallinn-based European ride-hailing player Bolt is teaming up with Nvidia ‘to build the AI foundation for scaling autonomous vehicles in Europe’. 

Bolt says the new collaboration will combine its own extensive ride-hailing and car-sharing fleet data with Nvidia Omniverse libraries, Nvidia Cosmos world foundation models, Nvidia Alpamayo AV foundation models, and Nvidia AI infrastructure “to accelerate safe AV development for European roads”. The new AV platform will be deployed on the Nvidia Drive Hyperion computer and sensor architecture.

The news could mark a major boost to Europe’s autonomous vehicle and robotaxi ambitions. Today Bolt operates in more than 50 countries and 850 cities, and claims 200m customers.

“Real-world data is the most valuable asset in the race for safe autonomy,” said Jevgeni Kabanov, president and head of autonomous driving at Bolt. “By marrying Bolt’s operational scale with the Nvidia Hyperion Platform, Alpamayo foundation models, AI infrastructure, and open models and libraries, we are creating a European-led AV offering that ensures our continent remains at the forefront of mobility innovation while maintaining full control over our data and technology.”

“Autonomous vehicles require a full-stack approach that unifies AI models, high-performance compute and a robust sensor architecture,” said Philippe van den Berge, EMEA vice-president of automotive at Nvidia, who said the new initiative would enable a scalable foundation for safe, high-performance autonomous mobility services designed for the “complexity and diversity” of European roads.

According to Bolt, the new collaboration will establish a life cycle for AI development – from data provision to common base models – enabling new mobility applications that will be safe, auditable and “uniquely European”, and said any processing of Bolt’s fleet data will ensure “strict compliance” with GDPR and EU cybersecurity standards.

“Globally, US firm Uber receives a lot of attention for its moves to engage with players across the autonomous mobility ecosystem,” said Forrester’s VP principal analyst Paul Miller. “But Bolt is also a strong player in the European market and, like Uber, the company has been working to build partnerships in anticipation of a future where at least some of its ride hailing vehicles have no driver.”

Miller cites Bolt’s existing partnership with Pony.ai, signed in 2025, which could see the Chinese provider’s autonomous robotaxis tested on European roads in late 2026.

“It makes sense for Bolt to explore where and how [Nvidia’s] stack might support Bolt and Bolt’s partners,” said Miller. “It also makes sense for Nvidia to spread its bets, helping slot its hardware and software into as many autonomous mobility projects as possible.”

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Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today’s Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s Wordle puzzle took me all the guesses to figure out. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need hints and the answer, read on.

Read more: New Study Reveals Wordle’s Top 10 Toughest Words of 2025

Today’s Wordle hints

Before we show you today’s Wordle answer, we’ll give you some hints. If you don’t want a spoiler, look away now.

Wordle hint No. 1: Repeats

Today’s Wordle answer has no repeated letters.

Wordle hint No. 2: Vowels

Today’s Wordle answer has two vowels.

Wordle hint No. 3: First letter

Today’s Wordle answer begins with S.

Wordle hint No. 4: Last letter

Today’s Wordle answer ends with F.

Wordle hint No. 5: Meaning

Today’s Wordle answer can refer to small lines attached to larger lines that make up letters in some typefaces or fonts.

TODAY’S WORDLE ANSWER

Today’s Wordle answer is SERIF.

Yesterday’s Wordle answer

Yesterday’s Wordle answer, March 22, No. 1737, was BASIL.

Recent Wordle answers

March 18, No. 1733: AMPLY

March 19, No. 1734: REHAB

March 20, No. 1735: OASIS

March 21, No. 1736: SLICK

The proposed bill has sparked “broad support from tech leaders and open markets,” according to an announcement from Senator Wiener’s officer:

“This is exactly the kind of common-sense antitrust reform we need if we want the next generation of startups to have a fair shot rather than watching Big Tech pull up the ladder behind them.”

— Jeremy Stoppelman CEO and Co-Founder, Yelp

“California has led the way on privacy, and now it has a chance to lead on digital competition. SB 1074 would prohibit the self-preferencing tactics that dominant platforms use to box out competitors — the same tactics that make it harder for people to discover and switch to privacy-respecting alternatives like DuckDuckGo.”

— Kamyl Bazbaz, Chief Communications and Policy Officer, DuckDuckGo

“When users can freely choose privacy-focused alternatives without artificial barriers, everyone benefits — from independent developers to everyday people who deserve control over their digital lives.”

— Raphael Auphan, Chief Operating Officer, Proton

“[The BASED act] is about stopping market corruption — the moment when a platform uses its control over the pipes to bury rivals, tax every transaction, and quietly swallow the open web. This bill restores something simple and very American: if you build something great, you should win or lose on the merits, not on whether a gatekeeper decides to rig the rules.”

— Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator

“If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the enshittification of digital platforms, it’s this: *someone* is going to regulate the way you use the internet. If governments don’t step in, that regulator will be a powerful *company*, a platform that structures markets to maximize its interests, at the expense of technology makers, technology users, buyers *and* sellers.”

— Cory Doctorow

Odds are, you’ve taken pills before; it’s a statistical certainty that some of you reading this took several this morning. Whenever you do, you’re at the mercy of the manufacturer: you’re trusting that they’ve put in the specific active ingredients in the dosage listed on the package. Alas, given the world we live in, that doesn’t always happen. Double-checking actual concentrations requires expensive lab equipment like gas chromatography. It turns out checking for counterfeit pills is easier than you’d think, thanks to a technique called Disintegration Fingerprinting.

It’s delightfully simple: all you need is a clear plastic cup, a stir plate, and a handful of electronic components — namely, a microcontroller, a servo, and an IR line-following sensor. You’ve probably played with just such a sensor: the cheap ones that are a matched pair of LED and photodetector. It works like this: the plastic cup, filled with water, sits upon the stir plate. To start the device, you turn on the stir plate and actuate the servo to drop the pill in the water. The microcontroller then begins recording the signal from the photo-diode. As the pill breaks up and/or dissolves in the water, the swirling bits are going to reflect light from the IR LED. That reflectance signal over time is the Disintegration Fingerprint (DF), and it’s surprisingly effective at catching fakes according to the authors of the paper linked above. Out of 32 different drug products, the technique worked on 90% of them, and was even able to distinguish between generic and brand-name versions of the same drug.

Of course, you do need a known-good sample to generate a trustworthy fingerprint, and there’s that pesky 10% of products the technique doesn’t work on, but this seems like a great way to add some last-mile QA/QC to the drug distribution chain, particularly in low and middle-income countries where counterfeit drugs are a big problem.

We’ve featured pill-identifiers before, but machine vision is going to be much more easily fooled by counterfeits than this method. If your problem isn’t worrying that your pills are fake, but forgetting to take them, we’ve had projects to help with that, too.

Thanks to [Zorch] for the tip!