Tech
Recreating the Apollo Moon Landings at Home is Possible, Just Not Practical
Isaac Carlton decided one afternoon to tackle a project that most people would dismiss as impossible. He wanted to film the most famous moments from the Apollo moon landings without rockets, without a massive budget, and without stepping outside his own property. The result looks so close to the original NASA footage that viewers keep pausing to check whether they are watching history or something built from scratch in a garage.
Carlton began with a realistic goal: order a replica of the NASA spacesuit. When it arrived, he tried it on and was surprised to find that the fit worked perfectly for close-up photos. The moon’s surface came next. In his garage, he chopped out pieces of Styrofoam, sculpted them into craters and bumps, and then powdered everything with chinchilla bath powder to replicate the texture of lunar dust seen in old photographs. Black drapes obscured the walls, giving the scene a sense of infinite space.
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Three different scenes made the final cut, beginning with a bird’s-eye view of the astronauts planting the American flag. Carlton came up with an idea for using stop-motion. He purchased some action figurines, bent thin wire into their limbs to control their positions, and stuffed paper towels into the crevices to make the joints appear smooth as silk under the camera. Each minuscule movement necessitated a new photo, dozens of them, until the flag would raise and wave as it had in 1969.
In contrast, the lunar rover sequence required motion rather than stillness. Carlton purchased a vintage mini rover on eBay and matched it with a remote-controlled buggy he discovered online. He then drove his buggy over the Styrofoam countryside while the camera rolled. Then he combined numerous passes and slowed the footage down to make it appear as if the rover was bouncing across the surface under low gravity. The end effect was eerily similar to the original footage.
The zero-gravity jump from Apollo 16 was likely the most physically difficult. Carlton attached a basic pulley system to the rafters in his garage. He bought an Amazon harness and then asked a couple of friends to pull the ropes for him. They filmed at a snail’s pace to make it appear as if he was floating higher when the ropes hauled him up, and then the editor worked his magic to remove all trace of the cables and mix the takes together so it looked smooth and seamless.
Editing required a significant amount of effort, arguably as much as filming. Carlton and his friend Levi spent hours perfecting the color, adding grain to make it look antique, and painting light scratches to make it look like it was shot sixty years ago. They digitally stretched each set’s boundaries, causing the draperies to disappear. Every wire, contemporary shadow, and telltale trace of a home project disappeared in the editing suite.
Tech
UCB pays up to $2.2bn for Candid Therapeutics, doubling down on T-cell engagers in autoimmune disease
The Belgian pharma is buying a two-year-old San Diego biotech for $2bn upfront, the second TCE bet it has placed in months. The thesis: B-cell killers built for cancer can rewire how autoimmune diseases are treated.
Candid Therapeutics is two years old. It does not have an approved drug. Its lead programme has been tested in roughly 100 patients across multiple early-stage trials. On Sunday, UCB, the Brussels-listed pharmaceutical company, agreed to buy it for up to $2.2bn.
That kind of price for that kind of biotech needs an explanation, and the explanation, in 2026, has a name: T-cell engagers in autoimmune disease.
Under the agreement announced on 3 May, UCB will pay $2bn in upfront cash, with up to $200m in additional milestone payments tied to development and regulatory progress.
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The deal, is expected to close by the end of the second quarter or early in the third, subject to antitrust clearance. UCB has reaffirmed its 2026 financial guidance, which suggests it intends to absorb the transaction without recutting expectations.
It is the second time in a matter of months that the Belgian company has reached for the same therapeutic mechanism. In an earlier transaction, UCB licensed ATG-201, a CD19/CD3 bispecific from China-based Antengene, in a deal worth up to $1.1bn. The Candid acquisition lands on top of that and adds a different B-cell target.
What Candid actually has?
Candid’s lead asset is cizutamig, a bispecific antibody designed to bridge two cells: it grabs a T-cell on one end via CD3 and a plasma cell on the other via BCMA, the B-cell maturation antigen, instructing the T-cell to destroy the plasma cell.
The mechanism was developed for multiple myeloma, where killing rogue plasma cells is the entire point of treatment. The 2026 thesis is that the same engine can be repurposed to deplete the autoreactive B-cells and plasma cells driving autoimmune diseases such as lupus, myasthenia gravis, and a long list of less famous conditions in which the immune system attacks its own tissues.
According to UCB, cizutamig has now been clinically evaluated in over 100 patients combined across multiple myeloma and autoimmune indications, and is currently in Phase 1 studies across more than ten autoimmune diseases.
UCB describes it, in its statement, as a potential best-in-class BCMA T-cell engager for autoimmune disease, language that is both ambitious and conventional for press releases of this kind.
The reason buyers are willing to write nine-figure cheques on Phase 1 data is that the early autoimmune signals from this drug class, broadly, have been genuinely striking. Patients with severe disease have shown durable remissions after a single course of B-cell-depleting therapy, including in conditions where decades of small-molecule and biologic treatment have produced only partial control. None of this is yet definitive.
Late-stage data, larger cohorts, and longer follow-up will all be required. But the direction has been consistent enough that pharma boardrooms have begun pricing the modality as if it works.
Candid was founded in 2024 in San Diego, with backing from Two River Group and Vida Ventures and a launch financing of $370m. Its chairman, chief executive and president is Dr Ken Song, who previously led RayzeBio through its $4.1bn acquisition by Bristol Myers Squibb in late 2023. Building, scaling, and selling clinical-stage oncology and immunology biotechs is, in other words, what he does.
That history is part of what UCB is paying for. Buyers in this segment of the market are increasingly willing to underwrite management quality alongside molecule quality, particularly when the molecule’s commercial promise depends on disciplined trial design across a large number of small indications.
The valuation gap between the original $370m launch funding in mid-2024 and the $2bn upfront UCB is paying now, in cash, less than two years later, is a fair indicator of what investors think he and his team have built.
It is also a sharp reversal. In March, Candid had announced a reverse merger with Rallybio, a publicly listed but smaller rare-disease company, intended to take Candid public via a back-door listing. That transaction, by all appearances, has now been superseded. UCB’s offer was, presumably, the better one.
UCB’s purchase fits into a pattern that has become hard to miss. Over the past nine months, every major pharma company with an immunology presence has either bought, licensed, or partnered around T-cell engagers aimed at autoimmune disease.
Gilead acquired Ouro Medicines for $2.18bn earlier this year, picking up gamgertamig, another BCMAxCD3 engager. Sanofi licensed a trispecific from Kali Therapeutics in a deal worth up to $1.2bn. GSK paid $300m to license a CMG1A46 candidate from Chimagen for lupus. Prolium Bioscience launched in March with $50m to develop a CD20xCD3 engager. The list lengthens almost weekly.
Two facts explain the rush. The first is that the science, finally, looks like it might generalise; what worked in oncology to remove malignant B-cells appears to work in autoimmune disease to remove autoreactive ones, and the early human data are far better than the conventional pharmacology playbook predicted.
The second is that immunology is, by some distance, the largest pharmaceutical market in the world after oncology. Drugs like AbbVie’s Humira, before its biosimilar erosion, and Sanofi’s Dupixent are reminders that successful autoimmune therapies generate revenue at a scale to which only a handful of categories aspire.
If TCEs work in this setting, the prize is correspondingly large. If they do not, several of these deals will look expensive in retrospect.
Where the AI conversation does not quite fit
It is worth noting what is not driving the deal. Despite the surge of attention to AI-discovered medicines, from Google DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs entering trials this year to ByteDance’s Anew Labs presenting its first AI-designed therapy and Anthropic paying $400m for a 10-person biotech startup to design protein-based drugs, cizutamig itself is a conventionally designed biologic.
It was discovered through licensing relationships and standard antibody engineering, not generative protein models. The molecules driving today’s autoimmune deal flow are, almost without exception, products of a previous decade’s chemistry.
AI’s promised acceleration in drug discovery has, so far, produced more announcements than approvals.
The Candid deal is, in that sense, a reminder that pharma’s largest near-term value creation is happening in molecules that were already in the pipeline before the AI hype cycle began. The next set of acquisitions, in two or three years, may well include AI-discovered candidates. This one does not need to.
What UCB now has, and what it has to prove
For UCB, the strategic logic is clean. The company is mid-sized in pharma terms, with a long-standing immunology franchise and a recent track record of opening up new therapeutic areas through targeted M&A.
Pairing the Antengene CD19xCD3 candidate with Candid’s BCMAxCD3 lead asset gives it two complementary B-cell-depleting mechanisms in a market that increasingly looks as though it will reward platform breadth rather than single-molecule excellence.
What UCB has to prove is execution. Phase 1 data in autoimmune disease are encouraging but thin. The competitive density is unusually high, with at least half a dozen large pharma companies pursuing similar mechanisms across overlapping indications. Pricing pressure, both regulatory and from payers, will hit any successful TCE the moment it nears approval. And manufacturing bispecific antibodies at scale is non-trivial. None of these is fatal. All of them are real.
By the time the deal closes this summer, the broader market may have adjusted its enthusiasm for the modality up or down. UCB has chosen to act before that adjustment.
Whether that proves to be timely or expensive will be visible in the Phase 2 readouts due over the next 18 months. For now, a two-year-old company that started as an autoimmune-disease bet by an experienced operator has been priced at $2.2bn, in cash, by a pharma company convinced that the bet is correct.
Tech
16% of Parents Help Their Children Bypass Online Age Checks, Study Finds. One 15-Year-Old Just Uses a Fake Moustache
The Independent reports that “more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures” for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters “suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting ‘tricking’ platforms into thinking they are older. ”
Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: “I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old”… From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so.
49% of the children surveyed said they’d still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure “unacceptable,” and complained that age verification measures “are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass.”
The tech industry has spent the last decade asking whether self-driving cars need lidar sensors, cameras, or all of the above. Lidar company Ouster says it has a new answer: put them both in the same sensor.
On Monday, the San Francisco-based company announced a new lineup of lidar sensors it calls “Rev8,” all of which offer so-called “native color lidar.” These sensors are capable of capturing color imagery and three-dimensional depth information at the same time, doing the work of two sensors in one.
Ouster CEO Angus Pacala said the development has been a decade in the making at his company, and he wasn’t shy about his ambitions for the new product lineup in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, calling it the “holy grail of what a roboticist has always wanted.”
“For all of human history, it’s been: you buy a lidar sensor, you buy a camera, and you try to make sense of the combination with some higher level reasoning, and waste an enormous amount of time doing this,” he told TechCrunch. “And companies only get really halfway there in terms of calibrating and fusing the data streams.”
Ouster’s new sensors, he said, change this equation.
“The goal is to obviate cameras. There’s no reason that one sensor can’t do both,” he said.
The Rev8 lineup arrives at a dynamic moment for lidar companies. There has been a years-long wave of consolidation happening, with Ouster buying Velodyne, and Luminar’s assets recently getting acquired in bankruptcy.
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At the same time, the market for sensors is exploding. Waymo and others have finally deployed working robotaxis and are scaling quickly. Robotics companies — humanoid and industrial — are hoovering up investment dollars and need sensors to perceive the world. There’s so much interest in the space that new companies like Boston-based Teradar are popping up and testing the waters with entirely new modalities. (In Teradar’s case, it’s using terahertz imaging.)
A color lidar that combines pinpoint depth information with camera-quality image data could be especially valuable to the robotics players, Pacala said. And he said Ouster worked with Fujifilm and image science company DXOMARK to understand “what it means to build a great camera.”
In fact, Pacala claims Ouster’s color lidar is “improving in many ways on a modern camera” thanks to the way the company already designs and builds its sensors.
Ouster uses so-called “digital lidar” architecture. Instead of the analog approach, which involves many moving parts, Ouster captures the lidar info directly on its custom chip using what’s known as single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) detectors.
The company is using this same SPAD technology to capture the color image data in the Rev8 sensors. Pacala said this novel technique allows its image capture to be more sensitive than a normal camera.
“It’s 48-bit color, 116 dB of dynamic range, like mega pixel resolution. These are top line numbers that make it pound for pound good camera. But it just so happens it’s coming as a pre-fused data stream as a 3D colorized point cloud,” he said. “You can actually use the data as a camera stream as well, but it’s that’s one of the powers of this system, is you can use just the lidar data stream, you can use just the camera data stream, or you can use the pre-fused data stream, depending on how kind of forward-thinking your perception team is.”
Pacala said his company has already shipped samples to existing customers and that it’s now taking orders. He said he’s particularly proud of the OS1 Max sensor, which he said he considers to be “the industry’s best long range lidar.” It can see 500 meters in all directions and is smaller than other long range lidar “by a big margin.”
“We’ve had a long range LiDAR, but it hasn’t been just like clearly a cut above everything else,” he said. “That’s a big leap for Ouster. I think it means that we’ll start to see it much more on high-speed robo-trucking, robotaxi applications, I think a lot of drone stuff will transition to the OS1 Max.”
Other new lidars built on the Rev8 platform will include the OS0, OS1, and OSDome, according to a press release.
Ouster isn’t the only company that has started talking about color lidar. Last month, Chinese company Hesai announced its own color lidar platform that it says will enter mass production by the end of this year. Other companies, like Innoviz, have previously pitched their own takes on “color lidar.”
Pacala says most other players trying to “fuse” cameras and lidar sensors are basically packaging them together in a box, though. The approach Ouster (and, to be fair, Hesai) is taking is putting the lidar and imaging tech on the same chip.
This dramatically cuts down on the amount of work Ouster’s customers have to do to make sense of the competing sensor streams, Pacala said, and it also sets those customers up to eventually eschew cameras altogether — all while being cheaper and smaller than Ouster’s previous technology.
“This is kind of fundamentally changing the value proposition of what we’re selling to a customer from this stage forward,” he told TechCrunch.
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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 a tricky one. The purple group requires you to do some mental twisting of letters when you look at the words. 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: Way past done.
Green group hint: Rock out.
Blue group hint: Trendy tea.
Purple group hint: Space jam.
Answers for today’s Connections groups
Yellow group: Qualities of overcooked meat.
Green group: Play some electric guitar.
Blue group: Ingredients in bubble tea.
Purple group: Planets/dwarf planet with first letter changed.
Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words
What are today’s Connections answers?
The completed NYT Connections puzzle for May 4, 2026.
The yellow words in today’s Connections
The theme is qualities of overcooked meat. The four answers are chewy, dry, stringy and tough.
The green words in today’s Connections
The theme is play some electric guitar. The four answers are jam, noodle, shred and solo.
The blue words in today’s Connections
The theme is ingredients in bubble tea. The four answers are boba, milk, sugar and tea.
The purple words in today’s Connections
The theme is planets/dwarf planet with first letter changed. The four answers are Bluto (Pluto), cars (Mars), Darth (Earth) and genus (Venus).
Toughest Connections puzzles
We’ve made a note of some of the toughest Connections puzzles so far. Maybe they’ll help you see patterns in future puzzles.
#5: Included “things you can set,” such as mood, record, table and volleyball.
#4: Included “one in a dozen,” such as egg, juror, month and rose.
#3: Included “streets on screen,” such as Elm, Fear, Jump and Sesame.
#2: Included “power ___” such as nap, plant, Ranger and trip.
#1: Included “things that can run,” such as candidate, faucet, mascara and nose.
After reducing its dependency on the US Postal Service and other carriers, Amazon is opening up its own logistics and delivery services to other businesses. “Today, Amazon is announcing Amazon Supply Chain Services (ASCS), opening its full portfolio of freight, distribution, fulfillment, and parcel shipping capabilities to businesses of all types and sizes, not only Amazon sellers,” the company wrote in a press release.
Amazon is launching the new service with a few major businesses including Procter & Gamble, 3M, Lands’ End and American Eagle Outfitters Inc. For 3M and P&G, Amazon’s freight services will ship products from manufacturing sites to distribution networks, and fulfill orders directly to customers for Lands’ End and American Eagle.
Much like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon built its logistics service for internal use but now plans to sell it to other companies across industries including healthcare, automotive, manufacturing and retail. Amazon noted that its supply chain was never just a function but a “differentiator” to its core shopping experience, “the reason we could offer fast, dependable delivery that nobody else could.”
Amazon’s supply chain is comprehensive with warehouses, planes, trucks and delivery vehicles around the world. It has become America’s largest parcel carrier by volume, according to ShipMatrix. In addition, the retail giant has been selling its fulfillment services to companies that list goods on its retail marketplace for over 20 years. That has made it the world’s largest third-party logistics company, so expanding that service to other businesses shouldn’t be a big stretch.
The move will, of course, pit Amazon against many of its key logistics suppliers including the USPS, DHL Group and others. Third-party logistics services are a huge part of the global economy estimated at more than $1.3 trillion representing “a very large opportunity,” Amazon’s ASCS VP Peter Larsen told The Wall Street Journal. Given Amazon’s scale, the new service could disrupt the entire industry, including the US Postal Service that’s already on very shaky financial ground.
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Whether you’re a seasoned worksite professional or someone who revels in DIY projects at home, you’re hardly hurting to find the power tools needed for one job or another in retail environments. In fact, there are dozens of notable power tool brands available on the consumer market these days, many of which produce high quality tools at budget friendly prices.
Even the power tools bearing the brand of major manufacturers can vary dramatically in terms of price, function and overall quality. To that end, if you’re on the hunt for pro grade tools, odds are you’ve at least considered some options from Japanese tool maker Makita, which many compare favorably to more well-known options like Milwaukee and DeWalt.
If you’re shopping for tools manufactured by any one of those brands, you’ve likely noticed that they often cost more than some competitors, and depending on the device, the sticker price could seem prohibitive. That’s particularly true with many tools branded with the Makita logo, and even as a case could be made that you typically pay a premium for quality in the power tool arena, high prices tend to not only induce sticker shock, but leave some users unsatisfied after the fact. On the other hand, some pricier Makita tools are known to deliver the goods and then some on the job. Here’s a few expensive Makita power tools that most users think are well worth the price.
LXT Rear Handle 7 1/4 in. Circular Saw – $259
If you are considering purchasing a pricey Makita power tool, there are several factors you’ll need to consider before doing so. However, if you’re at all familiar with the brand, you likely know that it is particularly well regarded for its saws and cutting tools. As such, it should hardly come as a shock that a pair of pricey, but well-regarded Makita saws turned up in our research for this list. The first is the brand’s 18V X2 LXT Rear Handle 7 1/4-inch Circular Saw, which Home Depot typically sells for $259.
While this is the lowest-priced item on this list, $259 is still a hefty chunk of change for most people. As for the saw itself, it’s fitted with a cooler-running, electronically controlled brushless motor with tech that bolsters its cross-cutting abilities. It also boasts a lightweight, ergonomic design for ease of use, and according to the device’s 4.8-star rating from Home Depot customers, it’s as solid a circular saw as you can buy in a retail environment.
That rating is based on more than 185 reviews, so we can assume it’s pretty legit. The bulk of those reviews praise the saw for its cutting power, reliability, and versatility, as well as its quiet operation and ease of use. They also appreciate the ability to double up on the battery for extended usage times. While a few noted durability issues and poor battery performance, this still looks like a sound investment for those in need, and the folks at Pro Tool Reviews clearly agree.
LXT High Torque 1/2 in. Square Drive Impact Wrench – $339
While saws are a bread-and-butter sort of device for the Makita, the independently owned tool company offers a complete range of devices that are just as revered by worksite pros and DIYers. That list includes Makita’s 18V LXT High Torque 1/2 in. Square Drive Impact Wrench, though that particular tool will set you back a cool $339 through Home Depot’s online storefront.
While that price tag might be enough to put you off the device, we can tell you we’ve been fairly impressed with Makita’s impact wrenches ourselves. It would seem that the bulk of customers who’ve bought and used this particular impact wrench are pretty pleased with their purchase, with Home Depot shoppers rating it at 4.7-stars and Amazon users rating it at 4.8-stars. Between those factions alone, there’s a total of more than 2,500 reviews, the majority of which are 4 or 5-star in nature.
Raw power is a common point of praise from fans, with the impact wrench packing 740 ft. lbs. of maximum torque and 1,180 ft. lbs. of breakaway torque. Many users have put the tool to work in their automotive endeavors, and few have complained about its performance, reliability or its durability. One Home Depot shopper even claimed it was the most powerful battery-operated tool they’d ever used. Even still, some did note that they felt the impact wrench might be a little too heavy for some users, especially with an 18V battery attached. Others noted a potential design flaw in the location of the forward/reverse switch.
Brushless Cordless 7-1/2 in. Dual Slide Compound Miter Saw – $819
Makita’s cutting tools can be pricey depending on your needs, and if you’re looking at the brand’s compound miter saws, you should probably expect to spend around $1,000 even on the low side of the market. That is very much the case with Makita’s LXT Brushless Cordless 7-1/2-inch Dual Slide Compound Miter Saw which will cost you $819 if you’re shopping with Home Depot.
The average DIYer likely doesn’t need a compound miter saw in their home workshop, as it’s hardly the sort of saw you need to make something like custom shelving units. If, however, you’re handling larger woodworking projects that require loads of fast, precision cutting, such a saw could prove invaluable. If you can find one that won’t take up too much space, all the better, with many user reviews noting this cordless Makita cutter very much fits that bill.
Despite the exorbitant price not including the two 18V battery packs required to power it, real world users appear plenty happy with this compound miter saw, rating it at 4.8-stars out of 5 on its Home Depot product page. Many of those users praise this saw for its compact, lightweight build and easy portability. Even as some noted issues with bent or unbalanced top guide bars out of the box, many reviewers — including some pro factions — believe it provides all the cutting power, accuracy and efficiency most woodworkers can handle. If that’s what you’re looking for in a compound miter saw, this Makita cutter could be an excellent investment.
15 Amp 1-1/8 in. 70 lb. AVT Breaker Hammer – $2,239
On the subject of tools that most people will simply never have a real need for, a breaker hammer — often called a jackhammer — is pretty high on that list. For most people, this is one of those tools that it might be smarter to rent from Home Depot than to buy. If, however, you’re in the business of repairing driveways, sidewalks, or concrete patios, a good breaker is a legitimate must-have tool.
Makita does indeed make a couple of heavy-duty jackhammers, and you can currently buy its 15 Amp 1 1/8-inch 70 lb. AVT Breaker Hammer from Home Depot, assuming you’ve got $2,239 to pony up for the device. Now, we admittedly don’t know much about jackhammers, but we do know that purchasing any tool over $2,200 is a major investment, even if you are in the concrete breaking business. If you’re flinching at the price tag, you might be pleased to know that most users seem happy with their purchase, with Home Depot shoppers rating it at 4.5-stars and Amazon users rating it at 4.6.
Not surprisingly, weight is a common point of complaint from both factions, with others noting some might find it difficult to control, and one noting their bit came loose during use. However, most users state that the hammer performed beyond expectations in breaking up or breaking through various materials. They also appreciate its low vibration functionality, with one user hailing it as “the best investment” you can make if you’re in construction.
15 Amp 12-1/4 in. Corded Planer – $2,979
Like a jackhammer, a wood planer is a tool that most folks will never really need to use. So much so that we’d wager many of you have no idea what a planer even is. In essence, it’s an essential woodworking tool that lets users shape several pieces of wood into uniform levels of thickness while producing smooth surfaces.
As it’s a precision woodworking machine, you’d be correct in assuming that planers are typically not cheap. Nor is Makita’s version of the device, with Home Depot selling the brand’s 15 Amp 12-1/4 in. Corded Planer for a whopping $2,979. While most average Joes will no doubt flinch at that sticker price, pro woodworkers may be more willing to have a look, particularly since both Home Depot and Amazon users have rated it at 4.9 stars each.
Given the fairly niche market for a wood planer, there are not many reviews of the device. Those numbers are still pretty impressive, though, as they essentially show that almost everyone who’s bought Makita’s 15 Amp, 12,000 RPM model believes it was well worth the money. Those who work with timber are particularly happy with its performance, while one user noted the high-priced planer managed to cut their workload “by half.” So, if you’ve got the money to spend and need a first-rate planer, this would seem to be a safe bet.
Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Strands puzzle includes a fun topic. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.
I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.
If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far
Hint for today’s Strands puzzle
Today’s Strands theme is: May the forest be with you.
If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Green and leafy.
Clue words to unlock in-game hints
Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:
- CENT, DOPE, DOPES, NOPE, HEAP, HEAPS, PEAS, SEAL, PRESS, WOOD
Answers for today’s Strands puzzle
These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:
- ASPEN, BIRCH, CEDAR, CYPRESS, DOGWOOD, EUCALYPTUS
Today’s Strands spangram
The completed NYT Strands puzzle for May 4, 2026.
Today’s Strands spangram is BRANCHOUT. To find it, start with the B that’s three letters to the right on the bottom row, and wind up.
Toughest Strands puzzles
Here are some of the Strands topics I’ve found to be the toughest.
#1: Dated slang. Maybe you didn’t even use this lingo when it was cool. Toughest word: PHAT.
#2: Thar she blows! I guess marine biologists might ace this one. Toughest word: BALEEN or RIGHT.
#3: Off the hook. Again, it helps to know a lot about sea creatures. Sorry, Charlie. Toughest word: BIGEYE or SKIPJACK.
A bench trial in Santa Fe could force algorithm changes, age verification, and a $3.7bn mental health fund. Meta has threatened to pull Facebook and Instagram from the state instead.
In March, a New Mexico jury reached a verdict that no American jury had reached before. Meta, the company once known as Facebook, had violated the state’s consumer protection law by misrepresenting the safety of Facebook and Instagram for young users. The penalty was $375 million, the first time a state had won at trial against a major US technology company for endangering children.
That was the easy part.
On Monday, the second phase of the same case opens before Judge Bryan Biedscheid in Santa Fe. There is no jury this time. Over an estimated three weeks, the judge will hear what New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez wants Meta to do about the harm a jury has already found it caused, and he will decide.
Reuters, in its 2 May curtain-raiser, framed the proceeding plainly: this is the trial that could force changes to Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms in ways the company has been resisting for nearly a decade.
Meta has answered with a threat that suggests it is, finally, taking the prospect seriously. If the orders are intolerable, Meta has indicated, it will pull Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico altogether.
What the state wants
The remedies on Torrez’s list are not symbolic. According to court filings reviewed by Reuters and the Boston Globe, New Mexico is asking the court to order Meta to verify users’ ages, redesign its recommendation algorithm so it does not optimise for engagement among minors, end autoplay and infinite scroll for users under 18, suspend push notifications during school hours and overnight, and cap children’s monthly time on its platforms at 90 hours.
The state is also asking for $3.7 billion to fund teen mental health services across New Mexico, on top of the $375 million already awarded.
Each of those measures has been studied, lobbied for, and partially adopted in pieces by Meta itself, often pre-emptively, often in markets the company is more afraid of than New Mexico. None has been imposed by court order in the United States.
Were Judge Biedscheid to grant even a meaningful subset, it would be the first time a state court had actively rewritten the product specification of a global social media platform.
How the case got here?
The lawsuit is older than the verdict. Torrez filed it in late 2023, citing an undercover operation by his office that involved creating a fake Instagram profile of a 13-year-old girl. The account, he later told CNBC, was “simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from users seeking to abuse children. The state’s case, in essence, was that this was not an accident of scale but a feature of the platform’s recommendation system.
During the first phase of the trial, prosecutors entered into evidence internal Meta communications discussing the consequences of Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 decision to make Facebook Messenger end-to-end encrypted by default.
According to those filings, employees calculated that the change would impair Meta’s ability to disclose to law enforcement what one document put at roughly 7.5 million reports of child sexual abuse material per year.
The jury, according to NBC News, treated those communications as central to its finding that Meta knowingly harmed children. The encryption decision, ostensibly framed as a privacy upgrade, became one of the most damaging exhibits at trial.
Meta has since had the European Commission formally accuse it of failing to keep underage users off its platforms under the Digital Services Act, the first such charge against a mainstream social platform.
Meta’s response, articulated in pre-trial filings and a public letter cited by The Washington Post and Source New Mexico, has been extraordinary. The company has argued that some of the remedies New Mexico is seeking are technically infeasible, would compromise its ability to operate consistently across markets, and would force it, in the limit, to withdraw Facebook and Instagram from the state.
Torrez called the threat “showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” in a remark widely reported on 30 April.
Whether Meta would actually follow through is harder to assess. New Mexico has a population of about 2.1 million, a fraction of the company’s global user base. The threat is, in part, a negotiation tactic, intended to make the judge consider the spillover effects of any aggressive order. It is also, however, an argument that platform-level remedies in any single jurisdiction set a precedent for the next one.
More than 40 state attorneys general have filed similar suits against Meta, with bellwether trials scheduled across 2026. New Mexico, in that sense, is being treated as a test.
Meta is not arriving at the second phase, having ignored the topic. Over the past several years, it has rolled out a thicket of teen-safety features: AI-driven systems that detect adults messaging minors who do not follow them, “take a break” prompts for excessive use, default-private accounts for users under 16, parental supervision tools, and limits on the kinds of advertising teens can be served. Several of these were announced under regulatory pressure from the EU, where the bloc’s age verification framework is now active.
What Meta has not done, and what New Mexico is asking the judge to order, is to restructure the underlying recommendation engine. The company’s algorithm, as both internal documents and external research have repeatedly shown, is calibrated for time spent on the platform. The state argues that, for minors, calibration is itself the harm.
And there is a cost dimension that increasingly matters. Meta is in the midst of a roughly $145 billion AI capex programme, an investment of historic scale by any measure. Meta’s mounting child-safety legal exposure could, eventually, cost more than the AI cluster bill. The New Mexico phase-two trial is the first time that comparison stops being theoretical.
Judge Biedscheid is being asked, in effect, to translate a finding of corporate harm into a product roadmap. He could rule narrowly, ordering Meta to do little more than what California and the UK already require under their respective age-appropriate design laws.
He could rule broadly, accepting most of Torrez’s list, in which case Meta will appeal, fight a stay, and decide in real time whether the threat to leave New Mexico is a bluff. He could also split the difference, ordering algorithmic changes for minors but stopping short of the 90-hour cap. He is not expected to rule from the bench; the trial is scheduled to run roughly three weeks, with written orders following.
A separate Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable last year in an addiction case, and Indonesia became the first Southeast Asian country to ban under-16s from major social platforms in late 2025. The legal weather around minors and social media has changed.
New Mexico has, until this trial, mostly been a state where Meta did business unobstructed. Whether it remains one in three months will depend less on what the judge writes than on what Meta decides to do about it. For a company that has spent two decades insisting it could fix its harms voluntarily, that is, finally, a different conversation.
Age verification became mandatory for chat access on Roblox in January — and Friday morning Quartz reported it’s apparently impacted the company’s financials:
Roblox cut its full-year 2026 bookings forecast by roughly $900 million at the midpoint on Thursday, blaming stronger-than-expected headwinds from its mandatory age-verification rollout on an audience that skews heavily toward children and teenagers. Full-year 2026 bookings are now projected at $7.33 billion to $7.60 billion, a range that sits roughly $900 million below the prior guidance of $8.28 billion to $8.55 billion; analysts had expected $8.38 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. Roblox stock fell almost 22% in premarket trading….
Daily active users rose 35% year over year to 132 million, while hours engaged climbed 43% to 31 billion hours… Daily Active Users and hours engaged fell below forecasts of 143.8 million and 33.68 billion, respectively, according to Yahoo Finance… Users who have not completed age checks have faced restricted communication features, and the process has weighed on the platform’s ability to bring in new users. Russia’s blocking of the platform, which took effect in December 2025, added further drag on user growth, according to Yahoo Finance. As of the end of the first quarter, 51% of global daily active users had completed age verification, with 65% of U.S. users having done so, Roblox said….
The safety push has come with legal costs. Roblox accrued $57 million in the first quarter for settlements and settlement proposals with certain states over youth-related consumer protection and digital safety matters, with payments structured over multiple years, the company said.
Roblox acknowledged in a letter to shareholders that “our aggressive push to enhance safety lowers our expectations for topline growth in 2026.” But they argued that it also “makes our platform fundamentally better and amplifies the long-term growth potential of Roblox through more effective content targeting, tailored communication experiences, and improved community sentiment.”
Tech
Rivian achieved a 50% lower cost in making the R2 EVs. Let’s hope the benefits pass on to buyers
Rivian may have figured out one of the hardest parts of building an affordable EV, as it has managed to reduce costs in producing one of its upcoming EVs. During the latest earnings call, the company said the upcoming R2 has achieved a cost reduction of more than 50% compared to the R1. With the R2 being made as the more accessible mass-market EV, this is a big deal.
How Rivian found ways to save up
According to InsideEVs, Rivian outlined several ways it brought costs down. The company reduced the R2’s wiring harness by 2.3 miles, cut the number of connectors by 60%, and reduced high-voltage cabling by 70% by consolidating multiple power conversion units into one. The company also simplified its new Maximus Drive unit, which has 41% fewer parts compared to the Enduro drive units used in R1 vehicles. Rivian mounted the inverter directly on the drive unit and used smarter cooling and packaging to cut parts and manufacturing complexity.
All of this sounds like boring manufacturing stuff, but it is making a real difference now. Fewer parts usually mean lower cost, easier assembly, fewer failure points, and better scaling.
The upcoming Rivian R2 is using a simpler mechanical setup, which reportedly helped achieve 70% cost savings on the front suspension by moving from a double-wishbone setup to MacPherson struts.
Meanwhile, large die castings also reduced the underbody part count by 90%, while rear door complexity was cut by 65%. CEO RJ Scaringe expects a reduction of more than 50% through design-for-manufacturing work and higher production volumes. He further added that this is how the company expects to ship the T2 profitably, while also keeping it at a more accessible price point without losing performance and utility.
So what about the buyers?
Rivian has positioned the R2 as a more affordable EV, with a target price around $45,000. But the T2 Performance is expected to kick things off at around $58,000 when deliveries begin. The expected price tag reveals that this isn’t an affordable car, though it is still more approachable than the R1S and R1T, which are positioned as premium models.
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