The OnePlus Nord 6 is expected to make its debut as the next offering in the Nord series. This is expected to be the successor to the OnePlus Nord 5, with hardware upgrades. Before its launch, new leaks have shed light on key specifications of the device.

Furthermore, it is rumored to feature hardware similar to that of the OnePlus Turbo 6, which was launched earlier in China. In the past, the Nord lineup has often reused designs and specifications from the Turbo series. Because of this, the Nord 6 may arrive as a rebranded version of the Turbo model, though the global version could include some minor upgrades.

Display and Performance

According to leaks, the OnePlus Nord 6 might feature a 6.78-inch AMOLED display with a 165Hz refresh rate for smooth visuals.

The phone is also expected to be powered by the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset, which could provide strong performance for everyday tasks and gaming. In addition, the device may come with multiple RAM and storage variants to give users more flexibility.

Camera and Battery

For photography, the OnePlus Nord 6 may feature a 50MP primary rear sensor. Some reports suggest the global version could replace the monochrome lens with an ultra-wide camera. It is also expected to come with a 32MP front camera.

Apart from this, the battery life is also expected to be a key highlight of the OnePlus Nord 6. The device is expected to come with a 9,000mAh battery and 80W wired fast charging support. This will help charge the device much faster.

Expected Launch Timeline and Price in India

The OnePlus Nord 6 is also expected to launch in India soon, according to recent leaks from tipsters. As per reports, the device is expected to launch in India between late March and early April 2026. This will make it one of the first new devices from OnePlus this year. As far as the price is concerned, the new device may start at under Rs 35,000 for the base variant. This will be a slight price increase over the OnePlus Nord 5, which was launched in India at Rs 31,999.

A new kind of battery that could charge almost instantly and even power devices remotely is no longer just a theory. According to reporting highlighted by The Guardian, Australian researchers have built what they describe as the world’s first working prototype of a quantum battery.

It’s a device that can charge, store, and discharge energy using the principles of quantum mechanics. The breakthrough comes from a team led by scientists at CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, and marks the first time a quantum battery has completed a full charge–store–discharge cycle.

How does a quantum battery actually work?

Unlike traditional batteries that rely on chemical reactions, quantum batteries use light and quantum interactions to store energy. One of their most surprising properties is that they can charge faster as they get bigger, thanks to something called “collective effects.” In simple terms, adding more quantum cells actually speeds up charging, which is the exact opposite of how conventional batteries behave.

The current prototype can charge in femtoseconds (a quadrillionth of a second) and is powered wirelessly using a laser, which converts light into electrical energy. What’s more, is that same mechanism also opens the door to something even more futuristic: remote charging. Researchers say devices like drones or even cars could potentially be charged while in motion, without ever needing to plug in.

How close are we to using this in real gadgets?

Not very, at least for now. The current prototype can only store a tiny amount of energy and holds its charge for just a few nanoseconds, making it impractical for everyday devices like smartphones or laptops.

Researchers say the next big challenge is increasing both capacity and storage time. Until then, quantum batteries are more likely to find early use in niche areas like quantum computing, where their unique properties could offer real advantages. Still, the implications are hard to ignore. If the technology matures, it could potentially lead to never needing to plug in at all.

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

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It’s a pretty easy one today, but we’ve got all the answers in case you’re stumped. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Ghost’s word
Answer: BOO

4A clue: Magician’s “And just like that, it’s gone!”
Answer: POOF

5A clue: With 7-Across, it’s full of stars
Answer: NIGHT

6A clue: White bills in Monopoly
Answer: ONES

7A clue: See 5-Across
Answer: SKY

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Score of 4 on a par 3
Answer: BOGEY

2D clue: ___ and aahs
Answer: OOHS

3D clue: Frequently, in poetry
Answer: OFT

4D clue: Like the sands of Harbour Island, Bahamas
Answer: PINK

5D clue: Dissenting votes
Answer: NOS

Meta’s Creator Fast Track programme guarantees three months of pay for established creators willing to build a following on Facebook, after the company paid out a record $3 billion to creators in 2025.

Facebook has a creator problem that three billion monthly users cannot solve. The platform is enormous, but the creators who drive the short-form video economy, the ones building loyal audiences on TikTok and YouTube, have largely looked past it.

Starting on a new platform from zero is daunting, and Facebook’s history with creators has been complicated enough that even those who’ve heard the pitch have reason to hesitate.

On Wednesday, Meta launched Creator Fast Track, a direct attempt to address that hesitation with cash. The programme offers established creators with audiences on other platforms guaranteed monthly payments for three months in exchange for posting Reels on Facebook.

Creators with at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube can earn $1,000 per month; those who have crossed one million followers on any of those platforms get $3,000 per month.

The eligibility requirements are not onerous. Creators need to post at least 15 Reels on Facebook within a 30-day period, spread across at least 10 different days. The content does not need to be Facebook-exclusive and can include AI-generated material, as long as it is original to the creator.

Participation also unlocks immediate access to Facebook Content Monetization, the broader invite-only programme that pays based on content performance, which means earnings continue even after the three-month guaranteed period ends.

The programme lands alongside a figure Meta is clearly pleased with: in 2025, Facebook paid content creators nearly $3 billion through its monetisation programmes, a 35% increase from the previous year and its highest annual payout on record.

That compares with $2 billion in 2024, a figure Rest of World independently confirmed in February. The number of creators earning more than $10,000 annually on Facebook grew by over 30% year-on-year.

The breakdown of where that money went is also notable.

Sixty per cent of the $3 billion went to Reels, while the remaining 40% was split across Stories, photos, and text posts. That last detail matters for the Creator Fast Track pitch: unlike TikTok and YouTube, which are fundamentally video-first platforms, Facebook Content Monetisation pays for almost everything a creator posts.

A writer who shares text posts, a photographer posting stills, or a creator who mainly works in Stories can all earn from the platform without committing to video production.

Facebook Content Monetisation itself has expanded dramatically over the past year. According to Rest of World’s analysis of data from the Meta Monetisation Archive in February 2026, the programme grew from roughly 2.7 million participants to 12 million in just over a year, with Indonesian-language accounts representing the second-largest cohort after English.

The global scale of that expansion is part of what makes the $3 billion figure credible, and part of what Facebook is hoping to leverage to attract creators who might otherwise dismiss the platform as irrelevant to younger audiences.

Meta is also introducing new metrics alongside the programme to help creators understand their earnings more precisely.

These include a Qualified View metric, views on content eligible to earn money, an Earnings Rate showing approximate pay per 1,000 qualified views, and a Non-Qualified Views breakdown explaining why certain views do not generate revenue.

The clearer feedback loop is designed to help creators optimise their content performance rather than simply guessing why their payouts vary.

The strategic logic of Creator Fast Track is not subtle. Facebook has been pushing Reels hard since 2020, positioning them as its response to TikTok’s dominance in short-form video.

But Reels require content, and content requires creators willing to invest the time to build on the platform. The guaranteed payment model removes the risk that typically stops established creators from experimenting with a new home: the fear of posting consistently for months and earning almost nothing while an audience is still being built.

For Meta, which reported advertising revenue of roughly $160 billion in 2025, writing cheques to a few thousand established creators is a rounding error against the potential payoff of a more creator-rich Facebook feed.

Whether creators bite depends on something harder to measure than the cash: whether Facebook’s audience and long-term monetisation potential are worth the effort of maintaining yet another profile.

The $1,000-a-month tier, which requires 100,000 followers to qualify, is not a transformative sum for a creator at that scale. The $3,000-a-month tier is more meaningful, though most creators at the million-follower level will be weighing it against what they already earn.

What the programme does offer, unambiguously, is a no-downside trial run, three months of guaranteed income to find out whether Facebook’s reach can surprise them.

AI will save us or be the end of us. That’s not fact or even an opinion; it’s a TL;DR reduction of the very real tension between proponents of AI and those who fear it.

Interestingly, sometimes that tension resides in a single person. It is quite fair and reasonable to use ChatGPT for basic deep dive data searches and for quick answers on how to talk to an uncooperative child, but to also fear that perhaps that same AI knows too much about you and might, in its own agentic way, start to act on your behalf and do things you never intended. At scale, we worry about AI controlling weapons or even launching a catastrophic war.