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.

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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: Tesla or Toyota
Answer: CAR

4A clue: What the “M” of BMX stands for
Answer: MOTO

5A clue: Leafy lunch
Answer: SALAD

6A clue: Weighing device
Answer: SCALE

7A clue: “To be,” in Latin
Answer: ESSE

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Pepsi and Coke
Answer: COLAS

2D clue: Dickens’s “___ of Two Cities”
Answer: ATALE

3D clue: Took to another floor, as the [circled letters]
Answer: RODE

4D clue: Apple computers
Answer: MACS

5D clue: Dir. from San Francisco to Santa Monica
Answer: SSE

Samsung‘s new Galaxy S26 lineup is by no means a reinvention of the popular smartphone brand. Instead, it’s a collection of design tweaks and some important, even one-of-a-kind, under-the-hood updates that could change the way you use your phone.

The best features, like the actually unique Privacy Display (a first for mobile phones), are confined to the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Not surprising when you consider it’s the true flagship, and the S26 and S26 Plus are more or less like bridesmaids carrying the bride’s lengthy train.

This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Petlibro

We spend a significant amount of time optimizing our own health: tracking our sleep, monitoring our heart rates, and dialing in our nutrition. But when it comes to our pets, we’re usually left guessing. Cats, in particular, are notorious for hiding pain or illness until a condition becomes severe.

Petlibro is shifting that dynamic with the Luma Smart Litter Box. Since its quiet launch late last year, it has quickly become a staple in thousands of modern households. It moves the concept of a self-cleaning litter box past mere convenience, turning an unpleasant daily chore into a sophisticated system for early health awareness.

AI waste analysis and health tracking

For the data-driven pet owner, the Luma Smart Litter Box provides a level of insight that was previously impossible to get without a vet visit. It’s equipped with an AI waste analysis system that differentiates between pee and poop, and can even identify the consistency of the waste.

Every time your cat uses the box, the system logs their weight and tracks their bathroom behavior. If your cat skips the box for 24 hours, or if there’s a sudden shift in their routine, the app sends a smart alert to your phone. For senior cats or those with sensitive stomachs or kidney issues, this continuous cat health monitoring gives you a critical head start on potential medical problems.

Multi-cat recognition and safety

If you have more than one cat, tracking who did what is usually a guessing game. Luma solves this with a built-in 1080p HD camera and advanced AI that recognizes up to 10 different cats from any angle, even from behind. You get individualized logs and video records for each pet, so you always know exactly whose health you are looking at.

Safety is also a non-negotiable factor with autonomous tech. Since hitting the market in November 2025, Luma has maintained a 100% safe-use record. It features a wide-open, spacious design rather than a cramped globe, and uses triple-check sensors with an anti-pinch system to ensure your cat is completely clear before the cleaning cycle begins.

Autonomous cleaning and odor control

Beyond the health metrics, this is still a highly engineered piece of smart home hardware designed to keep your space clean. It automatically sweeps waste into a sealed drawer after each visit, holding up to seven days of waste for two cats.

To ensure your home doesn’t smell like a pet sanctuary, it utilizes an active odor-control system. A built-in fan pulls air through carbon filters, filtering out 97% of odors, with adjustable fan speeds controlled directly from the app. It’s a quiet, seamless integration into a well-kept home.

The bottom line

The Petlibro Luma represents a maturation in pet technology. It is a smart litter box for cats that respects the aesthetics of your home while acting as a daily preventive care tool for your pets. It replaces guesswork with hard data, offering peace of mind that your cat’s health is always being monitored.

Looking for a new pair of earbuds to pair with your favorite iPhone or iPad? Right now, you can grab the Apple AirPods Pro 3 for just $229 on Amazon or Best Buy, a $20 break from their usual price. They’re our favorite wireless headphones for iPhone owners, with great noise-canceling, easy connectivity, and unique features like heart rate and live translation.

The active noise-canceling on the third generation AirPods Pro has improved a great deal, with our reviewer Parker Hall comparing them to the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 Earbuds when it comes to filtering out all but the highest frequency, loudest noises. The improved ear tips, now lined with foam, are more comfortable and fit better in smaller ears, with four different sizes to choose from. They also have better sound isolation, which improves the noise canceling and transparency mode performance noticeably.

While Android owners have a variety of choices when it comes to earbuds and headphones, iOS users will appreciate the extra features specifically built for anyone in the Apple ecosystem. If you’re into running with minimal devices, the AirPods Pro 3 can actually take your heart rate through your ears, a neat trick that we found surprisingly consistent with other fitness trackers. Another unique feature, live translation, will bring up the Translate app on iOS and relay what someone else is saying directly into your ears in your own language. Once again, we were impressed by how fast and accurate the system was, and as more languages are added it will become even more useful.

We really only had two minor complaints about the AirPods Pro 3, one of which was that the default EQ is a bit V-shaped, with a slightly overdone bass that’s either really appealing or slightly grating. Thankfully you can tweak your EQ in Spotify or Apple Music to dial in that experience. The other issue is that these have limited compatibility with Android devices, so if you’re on a Samsung or Pixel, you’ll want to check out our other favorite earbuds. For iPhone and iPad owners looking for the latest and greatest for their listening experience, the discounted AirPods Pro 3 are an excellent choice.

Photo credit: NASA/Chris Gunn
The Cranium Nebula has piqued astronomers’ interest, due to some stunning new images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. These photos reveal the layers of a faraway cloud of gas and dust wrapped tightly around a star as it begins to die. This planetary nebula, officially known as PMR 1 and informally known as the exposed Cranium due to its uncanny appearance to a brain tucked inside a phantom skull, sits quietly in a backwater area of space that has only recently gained attention.

Webb captured the entire scene with two of its most powerful tools, beginning with its Near-Infrared Camera, or NIRCam, which produces a crystal clear image with innumerable background stars and distant galaxies piercing the nebula’s veil like tiny needles. A prominent dark channel runs vertically down the center, plainly dividing the entire image into left and right parts that resemble cerebral hemispheres. The outer edge has a faint, almost white glow, while the middle is a deep orange, with clouds that appear to be pushed outwards from the center in a sequence of waves, as if they were colliding in midair.

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When you switch to the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), the entire picture changes. The cosmic dust blazes brightly in a variety of tones that can make you just feel the texture. The same center black lane remains visible, of course, but you can now see where all of the material being emitted by the central star is heading. Stuff is rushing out at the top and bottom, probably in two large opposing jets that chisel their way through the inner gas, providing intricacy to the nebula’s overall shape.

That level of information is a significant improvement over what the Spitzer Space Telescope was capable of more than a decade ago. Spitzer was the first to reveal the brain-like shape, but it was like gazing at the Cranium from a distance; all you could see was the overall outline. The Webb, on the other hand, allows you can see the fine features much more clearly and demonstrates how different wavelengths of light can highlight different parts of the nebula. The near-infrared shows the dust getting blown away, while in the mid-infrared, the dust itself is lit up like a stage.

With its rapid-fire bursts, this nebula tells the story of a star that is running out of fuel and beginning to shed its outer layers. The inner area is a jumble of heavier gases and more intriguing patterns, whereas the outside shell is primarily composed of hydrogen that was expelled early. Things are becoming quite crazy in there, as evidenced by the central dark channel, which is most likely the result of a big outburst or couple of jets. It could finish up as a tiny, slowly cooling white dwarf or explode as a supernova, depending on the star’s initial characteristics, size, and other factors.

Since the power of a true random number generator comes from the actual unpredictability of the physical world, software equivalents are simply constrained by patterns in the algorithms they employ after the starting point is known. Hardware techniques become somewhat more intriguing, utilizing chaotic phenomena such as quantum effects or thermal movements. One project just followed the easiest route, extracting randomization directly from a camera sensor’s noise.

YouTuber “Maker Theory to Thing” started by attachin an OV3660 camera module to an ESP32 microcontroller. Then, to totally block light, they placed a sheet of black electrical tape directly over the lens. The sensor is still able to detect minute changes even in almost complete darkness. Heat builds up and begins to jostle the electrons inside each pixel as the device heats up and operates, producing a variety of noise speckles across what should be a nice, even black picture.

He began by focusing on the least important aspect of each individual pixel after obtaining the raw pixel data from a few frames. That one bit would oscillate between a zero and a one, reacting excessively to even slight variations. They gather all of those bits and combine them into streams of lovely, unpredictable data because even a single electron moving from one place to another can tip it.

When he initially tested it, the findings weren’t very promising because there was a slight imbalance, with 51 percent ones and 49 percent zeros. As it happens, some of the camera’s pixels would remain fixed on the same value from frame to frame (due to dust, a scratch, or simply a manufacturing quirk somewhere along the line). Some predictable aspects would be added to the mix by those consistent pixels. They therefore devised a straightforward method for comparing the frames and eliminating the regions that remained unchanged. The distribution of ones and zeros became considerably closer to being lovely and even after that phase.

The results are collected and streamed over the air by the ESP32. Users can access a simple online interface and ask yes-or-no queries. When you press a button, you will receive a response from the noise-derived randomness. It’s much faster because everything stays local and you don’t require the internet. The camera’s ability to quickly scan across thousands of pixels is what gives it speed.

Though the real entropy comes from sensor noise in photos of the moving blobs, similar concepts have previously been applied, such as when Cloudflare employed lava lamps. While other builders used diode avalanche effects or optical mouse sensors, this version is notable for having fewer parts. Since no additional components produce the core entropy, a cheap ESP32-CAM board gets the job done.

Under controlled conditions, thermal noise in image sensors provides some fairly consistent unpredictability. Just be aware that bias may be introduced by light leaks or abrupt temperature changes, although this won’t be a problem if the lens is covered. All of the statistical checks verify that the output acts randomly, which is ideal for sporadic or experimental purposes.
[Source]

The NASA astronaut whose serious medical issue prompted the early return of SpaceX’s Crew-11 from the International Space Station (ISS) has spoken out about the incident.

In a statement posted on NASA’s website on Wednesday, NASA astronaut Mike Fincke stepped forward to say that while in orbit aboard the ISS, he experienced a medical event “that required immediate attention from my incredible crewmates,” adding that “thanks to their quick response and the guidance of our NASA flight surgeons, my status quickly stabilized.”

Fincke, 58, continued: “After further evaluation, NASA determined the safest course was an early return for Crew-11 — not an emergency, but a carefully coordinated plan to be able to take advantage of advanced medical imaging not available on the space station.”

Crew-11 arrived at the ISS in August 2025 and weren’t due to return until at least a month later. But it became apparent that all was not well aboard the orbital outpost on January 7 when NASA called off a spacewalk involving Fincke and colleague Zena Cardman that was scheduled for the following day.

In his statement, Fincke declined to give any details about the nature of his medical condition, but at the time the situation was deemed serious enough for newly installed NASA administrator Jared Isaacman to bring the four-person crew home early aboard their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down off the coast of San Diego on January 15.

“I am deeply grateful to my fellow Expedition 74 members — Zena Cardman, Kimiya Yui, Oleg Platonov, Chris Williams, Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, and Sergei Mikayev — as well as the entire NASA team, SpaceX, and the medical professionals at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla near San Diego,” Fincke said in his statement. “Their professionalism and dedication ensured a positive outcome.”

He added that he’s “doing very well and continuing standard post-flight reconditioning at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston,” describing spaceflight as “an incredible privilege,” and how it sometimes “reminds us just how human we are.”

Crewed space missions have, very occasionally, been shortened due to technical issues, but the rescheduling of Crew-11 marks the first time in NASA’s history that an astronaut mission has been cut short over health concerns.

While the ISS has various medical facilities to cope with health emergencies, in this case it was clear that the safest way forward was to bring the crew home.

Panasonic has unveiled two very different additions to its audio lineup: the audiophile-focused Technics SL-1500CS direct drive turntable and the party-ready SC-BMAX30 transportable speaker.

The Technics SL-1500CS marks the return of the well-regarded SL-1500C. It has been updated with the company’s latest audio innovations such as the ΔΣ-(Delta Sigma) Drive technology, which it has borrowed from more expensive models in its line-up.

The addition of the ΔΣ-Drive, as well as reducing motor vibrations and improving the rotational stability of the platter, is whyTechnics claims the SL-1500CS delivers “best in class” standard for sonic performance.

A built-in phono equaliser is included, making it easier to connect the deck directly to amplifiers or speakers without the need for dedicated phono preamp. Given the SL-1500C came out seven years, the design has also been a much-needed lick of paint refreshed, with a metallic grey colourway that retaining Technics’ minimalist aesthetic.

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The SL-1500CS will retail for £1,099 when it goes on sale from March 2026 onwards.

From the Panasonic side of the audio department comes a new flagship party speaker in the SC-BMAX30. It’s able to deliver 320W of power, a speaker that’s main intent is to boom out a deep bass performance. We were at Panasonic’s Experience Event in Germany and ti delivers plenty low frequency welly.

Despite its size, portability is clearly a priority. The SC-BMAX30 has wheels, a telescopic handle, and can reportedly last up to 14 hours of battery life.

A metal grille conceals a dynamic lighting system designed to sync with your music, and the design is also rated to IPX4 to protect this party speaker from splashes and light weather.

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For connectivity options include Bluetooth Multipoint for pairing two devices simultaneously and Wireless Chain Connection for linking multiple units together. Moreover, there are dedicated mic and guitar inputs for karaoke or live sessions, though as one person pointed out, it could do with some RCA connections.

The SC-BMAX30 goes on sale March 2026, and it is priced at £399.99 / €449.