Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle was a fun one for me, as a Seattle Seahawks fan. If you’re struggling with the puzzle but still want to solve it, read on for hints and the answers.

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group hint: This is how we roll.

Green group hint: Capital of Georgia.

Blue group hint: He’s #14.

Purple group hint: Body part hidden in each word.

Answers for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Yellow group: Things with wheels.

Green group: Atlanta teams.

Blue group: Associated with Sam Darnold.

Purple group: Ends in a part of the face.

What are today’s Connections: Sports Edition answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is things with wheels.

The four answers are bicycle, race car, skateboard and Zamboni.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is Atlanta teams.

The four answers are Atlanta United, Dream, Falcons and Hawks.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is associated with Sam Darnold.

The four answers are Jets, Seahawks, Super Bowl LX and Trojans.

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is ends in a part of the face.

The four answers are Bournemouth (mouth), diagnose (nose), Hawkeyes (eyes) and kickflip (lip).

CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of “Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the ’70s and ’80s,” as well as “The Totally Sweet ’90s.” She’s been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She’s Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she’ll be first in line.

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Polling suggests patience with handsets in the classroom is running shorter than a teenager’s battery life

Americans are warming to the idea that schools should be for learning rather than doomscrolling, with support for all-day smartphone bans now outweighing opposition for the first time.

A new Pew Research Center survey of 9,750 US adults found that 77 percent support banning smartphones during middle and high school classes, up from 68 percent in 2024. More significantly, support for so-called “bell-to-bell” bans now stands at 48 percent, compared with 43 percent who oppose the idea.

Back in 2024, opponents held the advantage.

The shift coincides with a rush of state legislation. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 42 states have enacted measures addressing cellphone use in schools, many of which require districts to adopt restrictions during the school day.

There’s little argument over whether phones belong in class anymore, but the sticking point is whether students should get them back between lessons or keep them tucked away until the final bell.

Age plays a predictable role. Adults under 30 remain the least enthusiastic about bell-to-bell restrictions, with just 28 percent supporting them. Older Americans, meanwhile, appear increasingly comfortable with the notion that teenagers can survive a school day without immediate access to social media, group chats, or whatever crisis is currently unfolding on Snapchat.

The partisan divide is smaller than on most US policy questions. Republicans are more likely to support both classroom and all-day bans, but Democrats also back classroom restrictions by a comfortable margin.

The trend echoes developments elsewhere. In the UK, ministers spent much of this year promising to get tougher on phones in schools, only for it to emerge that most schools already had restrictions in place. The government’s reforms mostly gave existing policies more bite, saving ministers the trouble of inventing anything new.

Whether today’s students see their phones as indispensable learning tools or portable oxygen tanks is another matter. Pew’s latest numbers suggest more American adults are willing to let them find out for six or seven hours a day. ®

If you don’t want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there’s a new way to stop them that doesn’t involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish. 

Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost seems like magic if you’re not familiar with the ins and outs of computer fonts. Look at a web page written using a ShieldFont font and it’ll appear exactly as one would expect: All the content words (the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs that give a sentence meaning) are the same as the writer originally wrote.

Inspect the raw HTML that a scraper reads from a ShieldFonted page, however, and you’ll see a sentence that’s essentially gibberish. Typing “good luck reading this, you useless robot” in the online demo version, for example, turns it into “good comfort reading this, you yellow barrier.” 

The goal, as outlined in the ShieldFont white paper, is not to get a scraping bot to reject the text as garbage, but to convince it that the text on the page is unusual but sensible. A noun will never be swapped for a verb, for example, and a verb will never be swapped for an adjective: Swaps only come from the same grammatical pool.

It goes even more distinct than that, The ShieldFont creators noted. 

“Not just noun for noun: plural abstract noun about communication for plural abstract noun about communication,” the white paper explains. “There are about 250 such pools, built by crossing part of speech with sense category, concreteness, singular or plural, verb transitivity, verb inflection and adjective degree.” 

Around a quarter of words in a chunk of text end up replaced, the creators noted, with the hope the copy still gets ingested. Even if it doesn’t, and the group notes scrapers do sometimes reject it, that still means your writing doesn’t get sucked up to train an AI – a win either way. 

How does this black magic work?

This all seems a bit mystical unless you’re versed in the functions of fonts – specifically fonts in the OpenFont family, which ShieldFont is designed to work with. 

First off, you may be familiar with typographic ligatures, which combine two letters into a single character for the sake of making text look a bit neater, or conveying meaning in some languages but not others. Æ is one classic example in Latin script used in some languages but not others; there’s also fi, which combines a lower case F and I in a way that prevents the top curve of the F from bumping into the I’s dot. 

OpenType fonts all come with ligature tables that define how single glyphs or glyph sequences get substituted automatically by a word processor in a process known as glyph substitution, or GSUB. Even Google Docs supports user-configurable GSUB to an extent – you can fairly easily configure a substitution to automatically fill in for frequently used special words or characters.

ShieldFont works on largely the same premise, but extends GSUB to entire words instead of letters or character pairs. So for example, a word like “daughter” in raw HTML might be rendered as “journalist” when it actually shows up to human viewers on the page.

Here’s what a paragraph written in the ShieldFont looks like as viewed on a web page (above), as opposed to what the raw HTML actually says (below):

Even with that extended GSUB format, the font files are still quite small.

We spoke with Amsterdam design studio Seneda & Abrucio, founded by Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio, the team behind ShieldFont, and they told us that the document/desktop fonts that are ShieldFonted are only around 5 MB, while compressed web fonts that include the entire GSUB dictionary still only come in at around 800 KB – large for your average font, S&A explained, but still considerably smaller than the desktop version. 

There’s more than one GSUB dictionary too – ShieldFont is shipping with three of them, and the GitHub repository explains how users can create their own to prevent reverse-engineering. 

But why poison a few words instead of just scrambling text altogether? S&A told us that they want a deterrent to scraping by introducing uncertainty and chaos into training data, not just a way to get scrapers to ignore some pages.

“Pure scrambling fonts already existed,” the pair explained. “We wanted a mechanism with actual consequences: scrape without asking, and you can’t tell if what you took was real. Concealment alone just gets you dropped and forgotten.”

The default font that ships with ShieldFont is a modified version of Optik from Copenhagen typography shop Playtype, who partnered with S&A on the project.

Like other scraping deterrents, it’s not perfect

Speaking of reverse-engineering, ShieldFont isn’t perfect by a long shot. As the team notes in their white paper, it can be defeated with relative ease.

A screenshot of a page that’s run through OCR avoids the poisoned HTML, as does any other method that a scraper might use to scrape user-viewed pages instead of raw code. Targeted AI that downloads its own copy of ShieldFont and runs through all three GSUB dictionaries can also decode a page.

SheildFont could also impose an SEO penalty on people who use it, as search engines, like AI scrapers, read the raw HTML to look for content, as do translation apps and the copy/paste function built into computer operating systems. Screen readers used for those with visual impairment also have trouble with it too, though there is a feature built in to ensure screen readers can get the user-displayed text, albeit slowly. 

“[ShieldFont’s] purpose is not to stop a determined actor, but to slow unauthorized mass scraping by adding cost, friction and uncertainty,” S&A said in a press release. “Scrapers cannot know in advance whether a site uses ShieldFont or which mapping it uses.”

As for whether ShieldFont is just an experiment or something S&A hope gets widely adopted, the pair told us it’s a bit of both. 

“ShieldFont is real and working today, but it’s v0/alpha, so still improving,” S&A explained. 

“Longer term, it’s a bet on collective pressure,” the ShieldFont designers added. “Nothing currently makes bypassing a publisher’s requests costly. If enough sites make scraping expensive, scrapers have to change how they operate. That’s the point where negotiation becomes possible.”

ShieldFont is now available to try. The online demo encoder can be used to generate protected HTML for embedding in a website, and it’s also available as a React component and for CSS and CDN integration, all of which is explained on the project’s GitHub page and the ShieldFont website. ®

Google may be preparing to challenge Samsung’s most expensive foldable without charging Ultra money. According to Android Headlines, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold will start at $1,899, matching the Galaxy Z Fold8 and undercutting the $2,099 Fold8 Ultra by $200.

Its rumored hardware makes that pricing especially interesting. Google’s foldable appears much closer to Samsung’s Ultra model in display size, even though it would cost the same as the smaller Fold8.

How Google closes the hardware gap

The Pixel 11 Pro Fold reportedly has an 8-inch inner display, matching the Fold8 Ultra and exceeding the regular Fold8’s 7.6-inch panel.

Its 6.4-inch cover display follows the same pattern. It nearly matches the Ultra’s 6.5-inch screen, while the standard Fold8 uses a narrower 5.5-inch panel.

Google may also offer longer optical reach. The leaked Pixel includes a 10.8MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom. Samsung leaves a telephoto camera off the regular Fold8, while the Ultra tops out at 3x optical zoom.

Where Samsung still pulls ahead

Those larger screens come inside a heavier phone. The Pixel reportedly weighs 239 grams and measures 10.1mm thick when folded. Samsung’s Fold8 weighs 201 grams, while the Ultra comes in at 215 grams and 8.9mm thick.

Both Samsung phones also support 45W wired charging. The Pixel is reportedly limited to 30W, which feels stingy for a device approaching $2,000.

The Fold8 Ultra keeps the advantage in its main cameras too, with a 200MP primary sensor and a 50MP ultrawide. Google’s longer zoom won’t automatically make it the better camera phone.

Why the price could decide it

The regular Fold8 looks like the awkward one here. Google may offer buyers larger displays and dedicated optical zoom for essentially the same price.

Samsung’s Ultra still has a case for anyone prioritizing a thinner body, faster charging, and stronger main cameras. Everyone else may struggle to justify paying another $200 if Google confirms these specifications.

Photo credit: NintendoWire
Kevin Braun runs OneStopWonders, a small retro shop in Waukesha, Wisconsin, about fifteen miles west of Milwaukee. Six years ago a man walked in with a plain rectangular box and sold it to him. The seller explained that his grandfather had operated a precious-metal recovery business. Nintendo had once sent the company old NES circuit boards so the gold contacts could be melted down and salvaged. This particular box never made it into the furnace. Instead it sat in a garage for more than twenty years before landing in Braun’s temperature-controlled storage unit.

Jason Ganos, editor-in-chief of Nintendo Wire and a lifetime Nintendo fan, stopped by the shop for some normal work. While Braun was showing him the ropes, he revealed that he still had an old box of NES games that he’d been saving for a while. Ganos expected to find some run-of-the-mill used copies of Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt, you know, the pack-in cartridge that came with all those old Action Set consoles, but when he opens the box, he is astonished to find something quite different.

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Ninety-seven cartridges were sealed inside, each wrapped in its own clear plastic bag, just like Nintendo used to do with new consoles and console games. Behind each one, there was a printed manual. There were stickers on the outside of the box with a mix of English and Japanese text, with one listing a December 1995 ship date and another simply saying ‘100 pcs of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt’, while another stated that three of the original hundred had gone missing somewhere along the way, leaving the remaining 97 looking as if they’d never been touched.

Ganos chose to share a few images of the lot with his private high-end collecting club. Within hours after publishing, two directors from different grading businesses messaged him, and both agreed that either the games were extremely intricate fakes or brand-new, never-documented varieties of the games.

Ganos placed all of the cartridges into a case, flew to California the next day, and gave them in person to Professional Sports Authenticator.PSA thoroughly examined the boards, labels, manuals, and manufacture codes, and each and every one passed the test with flying colors, indicating that they were 100% original. Five of them received a flawless 10 rating from PSA, the first time that mark was given to a NES cartridge. Sixty more got 9.8. Thirty-one people scored 9.6. One had a score of 9.4. They then encapsulated each cartridge, together with its original manual, which was a first for the company, as far as I know.

When they took a closer look, they saw why the cartridges were different. The back labels were in many languages, not simply English, as with the ‘regular’ models. The manufacture codes indicated that they were produced in the 40th week of 1993, late August of that year, which was later than any other known batch of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt cartridges. The wording in the manuals changed slightly but consistently, from’maintenance or repairs’ to’maintenance or service’ in all documented copies. The circuit boards contained text that could not be found in any previous versions of the game.

Nobody knows for sure why Nintendo created this small batch of games. Some theories include that they were a lot of warranty replacement stock, parts for refurbished consoles, or even a planned bundle that never made it to retailers. Whatever the reason, the games never made it to retail stores. They left Japan, traveled to Nintendo of America, and were eventually designated for gold recovery. Braun had planned to sell each one for ten or fifteen dollars. Collectors are now willing to spend four-figure sums for perfect tens, with flawless tens expected to rise even higher. Goldin Auctions will host an auction beginning August 12 to determine the value of a sealed, never-before-seen variant of Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt.
[Source]

Photo credit: MVRDV
Visitors to the Netherlands approaching the south bank of Rotterdam’s river Maas will soon meet a structure that looks more like a geological formation than anything built by human hands. Seven massive, rounded forms pile one on top of another, their surfaces broken by deep pockets, ledges, and irregular openings. Greenery will spill from those openings. Water will collect in them. Birds and insects will find shelter there. The whole arrangement rises from the edge of a new tidal park in the Waterkant district, right where a future third city bridge is planned to touch down.

MVRDV won an international competition hosted by the social organization Shift to design this €240 million Rotterdam monument, formally known as Rotterdam Rocks. Shift’s first Shift Embassy, and rather than an abstract concept, it will be a physical location where people can hang out. No less than 80 teams applied for the initial stage, with just five making the final shortlist: Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, Ecosistema Urbano, and Office for Political Innovation. The judges decided MVRDV’s daring proposal was a winner since it is more than just something green; it allows people to experience sustainability firsthand.

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This structure is huge to say the least, ranging from 25,000 to 30,000 square meters and including a variety of areas joined by two massive vertical blocks. Then MVRDV’s architects used a chainsaw to cut them into seven large rock-like formations, creating holes and voids that allow lighting and air to penetrate the building’s depths. They’ve managed to fit a lot of floor space into the building while keeping it fairly compact.

Each of the rock forms contains its own core cavern. Stairs, ramps, lifts, galleries, and terraces thread through various rooms, forming a continuous trail that allows visitors to traverse between enclosed and open platforms. There are numerous paths for different purposes, such as one that concentrates solely on the exhibitions, another on the hotel, and a third that goes along the outside of the building via the plant-covered terraces. At the top, there is a public viewing platform and a larger view of the main exhibition.

The Elysium exhibition, which spans 5,000 square metres, is a departure from the norm for museums. Instead of rows of panels and artifacts, they’re utilizing immersive art, storytelling, and interactive installations to show what the world might look like in the future if we all do our part to save the planet, or what happens if we don’t. The whole point is to leave visitors with some practical ideas they can apply in their daily lives, and to keep the place buzzing long after the exhibitions have closed, the Shift crew has added hotel rooms with plant-filled views, restaurants and food courts that serve both locals and visitors, and conference rooms that bring businesses and community groups together.

When it comes to environmental sustainability, the building’s exterior does the majority of the work. The surface is covered in pockmarks, nooks and crannies, channels, and ledges that are perfectly sized for soil, water retention, plant roots, and animal safety. Different corners and locations expose the building to varying levels of sunlight, shade, wind, and warmth. The designers meticulously planned these small microclimates so that appropriate plants and nesting sites might thrive in each region. Flat surfaces are ideal for sustaining larger shrubs, while vertical sides benefit from pocket plantings, and overhangs are ideal for draping plants or providing a roost for birds and bats. By doing so, the building becomes a vertical extension of the tidal park below, introducing new habitats while controlling the local temperature and managing the water.

When the building is completed, it will be put to the test in terms of construction. They plan to try these ultra low-carbon construction approaches on a large scale. That means, on the one side, they’re employing a lot of recycled steel, low-carbon concrete, and various bio-based products. On the other hand, they’re conducting all kinds of research into robotic fabrication and large-scale 3D printing, really pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Not to mention, the components are designed in such a way that if they ever need to be disassembled, they can be reused in future projects because they’re all properly documented.

To keep things running smoothly, a central monitoring system will display real-time data on power and water consumption, the number of species present, temperatures, and the performance of the materials. That way, visitors can get a great joy out of seeing all of the systems in operation, and the building is continually evolving, putting all of these abstract eco-goals into actual figures and visible, living surfaces.
[Source]

A quick, reliable guide for diagnosing the most common CarPlay connection failures.

Start with simple CarPlay troubleshooting steps

RSL_89/Shutterstock

Allow CarPlay while your phone is locked

DenPhotos/Shutterstock

Troubleshoot the cable or wireless connection

Best Auto Photo/Shutterstock

Confirm CarPlay isn’t disabled

Tada Images/Shutterstock

Re-pair your car and phone

Smith Collection/gado/Getty Images

After a three-year wait, Ted Lasso is finally returning to Apple TV+, but season four isn’t simply picking up where the last season ended. Instead, Apple is relaunching one of its biggest original series with a fresh premise, a revamped cast, and notable behind-the-scenes changes that could determine whether the Emmy-winning comedy can rediscover the charm that made it a global phenomenon.

The new season premieres on August 4, with Jason Sudeikis returning as Ted Lasso. However, this time he won’t be leading AFC Richmond’s men’s team. Instead, Ted takes charge of the Lady Greyhounds, shifting the show’s focus to women’s football while introducing several new faces to the franchise. It’s easily the biggest narrative shake-up since the series debuted in 2020.

For Apple, the stakes are higher than they appear. Ted Lasso remains one of Apple TV+’s defining originals, and a successful fourth season would reinforce the company’s ability to extend its flagship franchises without losing what made them successful in the first place.

The Lady Greyhounds become the story

Season four retains familiar characters including Ted, Rebecca, Keeley, Roy Kent and Coach Beard, but several regulars from AFC Richmond’s men’s squad are no longer part of the main cast. According to 9to5Mac, Jamie Tartt, Dani Rojas, Sam Obisanya, Isaac McAdoo and Colin Hughes will not return as series regulars, although some may make cameo appearances. The future of Nick Mohammed’s Nate Shelley also remains uncertain, with reports suggesting he could appear in some capacity.

The new women’s team brings a fresh lineup of characters, including Tanya Reynolds as assistant coach Alice Chilton, alongside players Gemma, Boots, Lizzie, Niamh and Siobhan. Rather than simply continuing AFC Richmond’s story, Apple appears to be using the new team to reset the series while keeping its familiar emotional core intact.

It’s a sensible move. Extending a beloved series without changing anything often leads to diminishing returns, particularly after a divisive third season. By introducing a new squad instead of recycling old storylines, Ted Lasso has a chance to evolve while remaining recognizably itself.

Apple has also changed what happens behind the camera

The creative overhaul extends beyond the cast. During the first two seasons, Bill Lawrence played a central role in shaping Ted Lasso alongside Jason Sudeikis. His involvement was significantly reduced during season three, a change many critics and fans linked to the show’s uneven storytelling.

For season four, Apple has brought in veteran television producer Jack Burditt, whose credits include 30 Rock and Modern Family, to work alongside Sudeikis. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Burditt helped oversee production and the writers’ room while Sudeikis continued leading the show’s creative vision. Early reactions suggest the partnership may have restored some of the focus that viewers felt was missing in the previous season.

Ultimately, Ted Lasso doesn’t need to reinvent television. It simply needs to remind audiences why they fell in love with its optimism, humor, and emotional storytelling in the first place. Apple has changed both the players on the pitch and some of the people calling the shots behind the scenes. Whether those changes deliver another championship-worthy season will become clear when the series returns next week.