Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

NASA of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover, which is being sent to Mars. The current plan is to launch via a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center. The timing is still being worked out, but the space agency says this won’t happen until at least 2028.

This is a partnership between NASA and the ESA, with the European agency providing the rover, the spacecraft and the lander. The US will provide braking engines for the lander, heater units for the rover’s internal systems and, of course, assistance with the actual launch.

The rover will be outfitted with scientific instruments to look for signs of ancient life on the red planet. These include a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer and an organic molecule analyzer, which will come in handy as the vehicle collects samples at the Oxia Planum landing site.

This is a mission that has suffered years of delays for all kinds of wild reasons. It was actually first conceived . The rover mission was originally scheduled for 2009, after NASA came on board. Budget constraints forced NASA to drop out in 2012, so Russia signed on as the ESA’s launch partner.

During this period, the mission which . The ESA in 2022 after the country invaded Ukraine. This left the mission in doubt until 2024, when NASA .

However, the setbacks didn’t even end there. The Trump administration has repeatedly tried to end NASA’s involvement with the project, and many others, . The current proposal was made while the around the Moon, . Here’s hoping the launch actually happens in 2028.

Uber has launched a service that sends a gig worker to your door to collect items you want to return to a retailer, for $5 a pickup. The feature, called Return a Package, is available in the Uber Eats app across nearly 5,000 US cities and works with nine retail partners including Target, Best Buy, and Dick’s Sporting Goods. A courier arrives, takes the item, and delivers it back to the store. Uber One members pay $3.

The service is limited in ways that matter. Items must have been purchased through Uber Eats, must be worth more than $20, cannot exceed $100 in value or 30 pounds in weight, and must comply with the individual retailer’s return policy. Customers can send up to five packages per request. These constraints mean Return a Package is not a replacement for driving to a UPS Store or printing a shipping label. It is a convenience layer for a specific subset of purchases made through Uber’s own marketplace.

The returns problem

US retail returns totalled $850 billion in 2025, according to the National Retail Federation, with online purchases returned at roughly twice the rate of items bought in physical stores. Processing a single return costs retailers between $10 and $65 when accounting for shipping, labour, inspection, and restocking. Return fraud added another $103 billion in losses. For retailers, reverse logistics is an operational burden that scales with e-commerce growth and shows no sign of shrinking.

Uber’s pitch is that its existing courier network, the same fleet that delivers takeaway food and groceries, can handle returns as a natural extension of its logistics infrastructure. The marginal cost of adding a return pickup to a courier’s route is low if the courier is already in the area. The $5 fee covers Uber’s cut and the driver’s compensation for what is typically a short trip. For the customer, it eliminates the friction of packaging an item, finding a label, and visiting a drop-off point during business hours.

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The competitive landscape is crowded. UPS acquired Happy Returns from PayPal and is transitioning the service from FedEx Office locations to The UPS Store network, offering box-free, label-free returns at thousands of physical locations. Amazon handles its own returns through Whole Foods, Kohl’s partnerships, and its own locker network. FedEx and USPS maintain their own drop-off infrastructure. What Uber adds is the on-demand pickup element: no driving, no queuing, no leaving the house.

Uber’s logistics expansion

Return a Package builds on Uber Connect, a peer-to-peer package delivery service launched in 2023 that already lets customers send items to USPS, UPS, or FedEx locations via a courier. The new service adds the reverse direction: instead of dropping off a pre-labelled parcel, the courier collects an item and returns it directly to the retailer on the customer’s behalf.

This sits within a broader strategic push. Uber has been systematically expanding beyond ride-hailing and food delivery into logistics, autonomous vehicles, and fleet services. In the past year alone, the company has signed a $1.25 billion robotaxi deal with Rivian, begun robotaxi pilots with Wayve and Nissan in Tokyo, started testing autonomous ID. Buzz minibuses with Volkswagen’s MOIA in Los Angeles, and relaunched Motional robotaxis in Las Vegas. The returns service is less dramatic than any of those initiatives, but it serves the same strategic logic: every package that moves through Uber’s network strengthens the case for its courier infrastructure as a general-purpose logistics platform.

The financial case for expansion is strong. Uber’s delivery revenue hit $4.9 billion in Q4 2025, a 30% year-over-year increase, within total annual revenue of $52 billion and gross bookings of $193 billion. The company generated $10 billion in free cash flow for the full year. Uber does not need returns to be a major revenue line; it needs them to increase the frequency with which customers open the app and the number of tasks its courier fleet can fulfil per hour. Both metrics drive the unit economics that make its delivery business profitable.

The limits of convenience

The restriction to Uber Eats purchases is the most significant constraint. It means Return a Package does not help with the vast majority of online returns, those from Amazon, direct-to-consumer brands, or any retailer outside Uber’s marketplace. A customer who buys a blender from Target through Uber Eats can have it picked up; the same customer who buys the same blender from Target.com cannot. This limits the service’s utility and reinforces its role as a retention tool for Uber Eats rather than a standalone logistics product.

The $100 value cap and 30-pound weight limit further narrow the use case. High-value electronics, furniture, and appliances, categories with significant return rates, are excluded. The nine launch retailers cover a reasonable range of categories, from home goods to sporting equipment to pet supplies, but the absence of clothing retailers is notable given that apparel has the highest return rate of any e-commerce category.

Uber could expand both the retailer list and the eligibility criteria over time. The company’s track record with Uber Eats suggests it will. The grocery delivery service started with a handful of partners and now operates with tens of thousands of merchants. But for now, Return a Package is a feature, not a platform. It solves a real irritation for a narrow set of transactions and signals where Uber wants to go without yet delivering the broad platform capability that would make it a genuine threat to established reverse logistics providers.

The $5 price point is the most interesting element. It is low enough to be an impulse decision for most consumers, cheaper than the fuel and parking costs of driving to a store, and comparable to the cost of printing a label and scheduling a carrier pickup. If Uber can expand the service beyond its own marketplace and remove the value cap, it would have a legitimate consumer proposition in a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that no one has made convenient yet. The infrastructure is already there. The question is whether the restrictions come off before a competitor, most likely Amazon, gets there first.

Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency turned identity verification startup Tools for Humanity is offering a new set of perks to people who scan their eyes at one of the company’s orbs. Among them, is a new tool called Concert Kit that could help bands and artists fight back against ticket scalping bots.

The new feature relies on the revamped World ID, the orb-based verification system that scans users eyeballs and faces to create a “proof of human” signature that lives on users’ mobile devices. “It’s basically like a little human passport for the internet that lets you prove on apps and websites that you are a real and unique human without revealing anything about yourself,” Tools for Humanity Chief Product Officer Tiago Sada tells Engadget.

Now, as more apps and services are starting to support World ID, that “human passport” can unlock some new abilities. Coupled with Concert Kit, it allows artists to designate a specific pool of tickets for “verified” humans only. The concept is a bit like how pre-sales currently work, with artists (or their teams) setting aside a specific number of tickets for people who have set up a World ID. Those folks can then use their World ID to get ticket codes for Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, AXS or other major ticketing platforms.

Because World ID is limited to actual, “verified,” humans the system won’t be susceptible to the same tactics that have enabled bots to ruin the ticket-buying process for so many, Tools for Humanity says. Artists are also in control of what level of verification they want to require from their fans. (The new World ID app will also allow people to set up an account with a selfie check if they don’t have ready access to an orb.)

Just how much of a dent Concert Kit will be able to make in the massive scalping bot problem that plagues the concert industry is less clear. So far, Bruno Mars is slated to use the solution on his upcoming world tour — no word on just how many of his tickets will be reserved for World ID-verified humans, though — and Concert Kit is available to other artists starting today.

Concert Kit is one of several new integrations and updates to World ID that Tools for Humanity announced at an event in San Francisco Friday. Tinder, which earlier this year started testing World ID as an age verification solution in Japan, will be rolling out support worldwide. In the US, Tinder’s integration won’t be for age verification, though. Instead, it will indicate whether there is an actual “verified” human behind a given profile.

On the enterprise side, Zoom and DocuSign are also adding support for World ID to help businesses verify that there is an actual person (and not a deepfake or bot) joining their video calls or signing important documents. Tools for Humanity is also introducing a standalone app for World ID that separates its identity verification tools from its existing crypto wallet app.

The updates are Tools for Humanity’s latest attempt to make their orb-based verification system, which has been widely mocked, more mainstream and perhaps a little less dystopian. (Elsewhere, orbs have begun appearing in some new places like a San Francisco Gap.)

On their part, Tools for Humanity seems aware that a lot of people aren’t ready to scan their faces at a bunch of orbs controlled by Altman just to “prove” they are humans. I asked Sada, Tools for Humanity’s Chief Product Officer, what he would say to people who think that the company is solving for the wrong problem: that really it should be up to ticketing platforms and dating apps and other services to strengthen their security and bot-fighting tools, rather than rely on their users to “prove” their humanness.

He said it was a “completely understandable question” and compared it to some people’s initial discomfort with things like Apple’s TouchID or FaceID. “Not everyone has to do it upfront, and that’s important,” he said. “It’s optional. If you want to have a World ID, you get access to that enhanced experience.”